Cooperation With Parents - Mission Impossible?

Cooperation with parents is nowadays key to successful learning and education. It is very important to maintain partnership based on trust and respect. Only with coordinated steps we will achieve a common goal. Co-creation between school and family is legal, expected and useful and it takes effort and we can´t take it for granted. If we look carefully we can acknowledge there is some dissatisfaction about cooperation between school and parents; each of them expects other to do more work. We are aware that partnership we talk about brings benefits for all; pupils achieve better school performance, they are motivated for school work, they have better self-esteem, better grades and they feel better at school. Parents on the other side encourage their children for schoolwork, they feel they belong to school, they are more active and motivated. Teachers communicate more with parents and pupils, are motivated, they perform better in the classrooms and their self-esteem rises too. One of the options for cooperation with parents is presented in my presentation. In primary school OŠ Leskovec pri Krškem we focus on this topic by setting a team of teachers to evaluate previous work, to emphasize it and perhaps apply to other areas. We put out a questionnaire for parents to see how they evaluate our work (management, teachers, office staff etc.) and we interviewed teachers. The reason for all this was for us to carry out some activities for better cooperation with each other. We also want teachers to represent their expectations towards parents in some new way. We want to share knowledge, ideas, experience and all for building trust. This process is to show that we care and understand the importance of cooperation with parents.