GETTING PRACTICAL

MAPPING LITERACIES

• Map the different ways that you communicate with families and your wider community. Review your map and consider:-
• Do you have a communication policy that outlines vision, values and principles for home/school communication? How might a policy be helpful?
• What different modes and channels do you use (letters home, text messaging, websites, social media, face to face activities, workshops etc etc) What’s the purpose of each?
• What different roles do parents and teachers take up in each type of communication? Which are teacher led? Which are parent led i.e. where the parent is in ‘expert mode’? What’s the balance between these? Are you happy with the balance? Would you like to see any shift in the balance?
• Which specific area of communication would you like to prioritise for development and why?

REFLECTING ON LITERACY PRACTICES

You may like to track and explore your own literacy lives for a week by keeping a ‘literacy log’ and thinking about where you have strengths and where and how you would like to develop their repertoire.

DIGGING DEEPER

Developing Digital Literacies

• How confident are school staff in using digital technology, particularly social media, in a) their social lives? b) their professional lives?
• What do you know about working with social media platforms? Thinking about school/parent engagement: What are the potential benefits and affordances? What are the potential draw-backs?
• What steps could you take to exploit the benefits but avoid the draw-backs?
• If you have no ‘in-house experts’ how could you use your wider school community to help build knowledge and understanding of social media digital communication? How might ‘digital champions’ in your community help you to develop your communication work?
• In what ways could you use social media to support home/school interaction? Where would it be useful? Where would it not be useful? Who do you need to talk to find out?
• What training or development work will you need to do with school staff and parents to support development in this areas?

Opportunities for literacy development

Parents

What opportunities are on offer in school or in the wider community for parents to develop their skills and experience as readers and writers? This might include reading groups, CV building and application writing, awareness of e-safety and online fraud, letter writing as well as any volunteering opportunities that may be available in the school or community to support development of clerical or administrative skills.

Teachers

What opportunities do teachers have to examine their own language and literacy repertoires and the strengths and weaknesses of the communication strategies they currently use to interact with parents? What areas or ideas for individual development do teachers want to take forward?

What do teachers know about the literacy lives of the parents they work with? How would parents prefer to communicate with them about their child? What communication strategies will best facilitate an equal partnership?

Supporting Special Educational Needs

What knowledge and understanding do teachers have of SEN and how it might be understood differently in different country contexts? What resources, either in school or in the wider community, do teachers need to draw on to support dialogue with parents of children who may have SEN needs?