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Communicating about goal progress

Following session 4, we are starting an innovative and exciting project: learning about communicating about goal progress!

Whilst educators are working hard to assemble educational plans that students and parents will collaborate about, the question remains: what is the best way for educators and parents to communicate about goal progress?

This page is designed to share new knowledge as we collate it, to accelerate working on and achieving goals.

How can we improve communication between teachers and parents about goal progress?

Audit your current communication system: is your communication book giving enough information about goal progress so that parents feel engaged enough to respond and help students work on their personalised goals at home?
Use technology where possible to add to or boost communication opportunities - Class Dojo and SeeSaw are electronic platforms designed for engagement. Research shows that they can empower teachers to better support students of all learning styles, skill levels, and special needs as well as engage parents.

Co-design sessions with school coordinators: Agendas and Minutes

28 July: Orientation meeting to discuss how the project could run (with PPS and BSIS) Agenda drafted with PPS

- Stage 1: School coordinators will champion the project. They will first test new strategies to engage with parents so that their success stories can be shared with their team when explaining the spirit of the project to other educators.
- Stage 2: Educators meet for a Professional Development day to collaboratively:
  - Fill in information about goals/Signature Strengths/Well Being which amplifies student voice and is needed on the Working Together document
  - Discuss strategies to re-engage with parents about core knowledge on their children’s progress on their goals
  - Agree on how these strategies will be tested, evaluated and developed
- Stage 3: Educators and Student Voice facilitators will:
  - Follow up on parents engagement with their children’s goal progress
  - Evaluate the various (re)engagement stages
  - Summarise the learning from the teacher-led project

3 August: First co-design meeting with the 3 coordinators

Discussion topics:

When do parents step in and act to achieve goals?
The importance of finding out what is important enough to parents to encourage them to partner with educators
Using opportunities or create 'communication moments' from observations at school. When an educator harnesses a particular opportunity (i.e. child making progress on goals) they can use it to share this with parents. Communication moments are to educator-parent pair what 'teachable moments' are for educator-student pair.
Working Together Agreement (WTA) principles and using different communication platforms to share goal progress with parents
The role of Teacher Dashboards in monitoring goal progress
Next steps: building a decision tool for teachers to trial and monitor engagement stages. Because this engagement is specific to the communication styles of each parent-educator pair, we suggest to draft a general map with alternative decision points to adapt to circumstances.

Note: The Educators' Student Voice page: https://sites.google.com/view/studentvoice2020/teachers-project-plan includes a Teacher Dashboard Professional Learning section with a clip recorded by Sophie, PPS. As per Chalmers Road school coordinator's request, we are creating a set of PL resources for educators to learn from in their own time. One educator explained how she uses her Teacher Dashboard to record and monitor a child's progress on goals. One week into the term, there is already learning to implement.

This clip was recorded to be shared with teachers as a quick "how to" in order to speed up the tool adoption. At Punchbowl Public School and Bankstown South Infant School, teachers have adopted the Teacher Dashboard as the one PLSP/IEP tool they are working with - both recording and monitoring progress and great to share with parents, SLSOs and relief teachers - at a glance, everyone knows where the child is at with their progress and everyone can contribute towards the next stage!

5 August: Second co-design meeting

Discussion topics:

Barriers to family engagement and overcoming them... for instance the mindsets that 'goals are school business' and to be worked on at school because 'teachers are the experts'.
Schools workload is heavily weighed on goal planning, however educators have no specific training about engaging parents and their success with engaging parents is subject to large variability [hence educator PL is needed]
The importance of building a relationship with parents that will support ongoing communication about goals. Judy shared her experience in building relationships with parents using 'communication moments'

Agreed Action points: in the next 2 weeks, each coordinator will pilot new ways to engage with parents based on student progress with their goals. This is different from their usual information sharing. This involves harnessing 'communication moments' (see above) to share with parents. Coordinators need to build leadership in this domain so that they can share back with their team the result of the co-created innovation. Coordinators' stories about their experience and them advocating to their team will form the basis of PL materials.

Punchbowl Public School and Bankstown South Infant School will build on the knowledge gained about communicating with parents via their online platform
Because Chalmers Rd does not have a virtual platform, the school coordinator suggested to test a novel idea about piloting new engagement with parents, without adding to teacher workload: she will create and pilot a template for educators to easily communicate with parents specifically about goal progress. As many of their PLSP goals are curriculum based, it will be important to carefully choose child communication or personal hygiene goals so that parents can collaborate on these goals at home.

Next co-design meeting planned for Tuesday 18 August, 1-2pm

18 August: Third co-design meeting

Attended by the 2 schools who work with an electronic platform the meeting focused on the trial protocol to engage with parents (above on this page)

1. Communicating about goal progress using communication books

One project school has made the strategic choice to use communication books rather than technology.

The school coordinator is exploring ways to alter the way information is shared to test how this will affect parent engagement.

First pilot trial: design a template to specifically communicate about goal progress.

This trial was launched August 5. Teacher sent this template to 2 families - and reported that the families did not respond.

At the next catch up with school coordinators, it was agreed that if parents do not engage at this stage, teachers are to no longer wait for parents' responses and start working with the student voice framework as was shared during the program's sessions.

Go ahead and add in their dashboards the signature strengths and wellbeing factors that they (teachers) observed in class
Start supporting the students to achieve their goals, and then share information about goal progress with parents.

The Student Voice framework plans for student voice to first be captured in both goal crafting and goal getting as below:

Goal crafting: Student voice is amplified as parents, educators and students take into account the student's signature strengths as they formulate goals
Goal getting: Educators support students to achieve their goals using the wellbeing elements identified for each student

2. Communicating about goal progress using technology

Class Dojo

Conversations with students are so much more meaningful with ClassDojo! I can now pull up a student's behaviour report and discuss moments where he/she was being collaborative or persevering. Students thus begin to become intrinsically motivated to achieve their best

Breaking a big challenge (goal) into short, achievable ones

Taking small steps activity (with a video story).

Class discussion guide - to share with parents.

A teacher reports: "Every teacher at my school has the same 4 behaviors in ClassDojo: Respect, Responsibility, Perseverance, and Collaboration. As students travel from class to class, each teacher consistently reinforces these positive character traits through ClassDojo. As the Special Education teacher, I add a few behaviors that students are working on based on their IEP (Individualized Education Plan) goals! An example is "smooth transitions" - a number of my students are focusing on improving their ability to smoothly transition between tasks. The general education teachers and myself are able to document if students are improving their transitions through ClassDojo, giving us concrete data to better inform our discussions and accommodation decisions at IEP meetings".

From: https://classdojo.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/202258489-PBIS-IEPs-and-Special-Education

Seesaw

Follow along as Jen, one of The Autism Helper Bloggers, uses SeeSaw to help share IEP goal progress and how she stays organised using folders within the app. All year long, Jen collects artefacts to monitor her students' progress: these can be used to communicate about goal progress with parents in real time... and automatically collate into reports/portfolios that can be shared or printed for planning meetings - thus saving time and increasing efficiency.

2.a Protocol for initiating collaboration with parents through electronic platforms

This project started Tuesday 18 August.

Objective 1: Facilitate parents' understanding of how they can progress their child's goals and communicate with educators to achieve goals.
Objective 2: Accelerate goal achievement through the exchange of information about student signature strengths and wellbeing factors.

Process

Explain to parents how we propose to assist them progress their children's goals
Start with one clear goal from their planning meeting
Use the school's electronic platform to communicate about goal progress

The Student Voice team has offered to help start this cycle by having the initial conversation (#1 above) with parents.

28 August follow up: 3 trial parents are engaged

Class Dojo Mum engaged with team (comments) last week. This week she posted a video of her guiding her son to build a block tower independently
Seesaw Mum registered 2 'First steps' achievements [Short term goals] achieved and formulated the next steps she is working on. Next: Mum and teachers to communicate through SeeSaw. Another SeeSaw Mum engaged - teachers have posted updates about the student achieving her first goal!
Our contact with teachers and parents:
- - Acknowledging parent engagement through comments and images
  - Reiterating next steps to focus on all 3 goals and post images with context explaining what progress the child is making on which goal
  - Sharing rationale "This is because, as we know, sometimes making progress involves a series of small trial-and-errors. If we share these small steps, both family and school can use the new shared knowledge about the progress that children make in their respective settings!"
  - Explaining the contribution that our team is making by posting on these platforms as well as on the groups' Facebook

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