Something crucial was missing from classrooms last school year: millions of students who were part of the chronic absenteeism crisis that hit districts large and small.
Could better communication between schools and parents alleviate the problem?
That's the theory that a nonprofit organization has. It partnered with Google to conduct a massive ai-powered analysis of 40 million messages in its app to discover how parents and teachers exchange information.
The organization, called TalkingPoints, is betting that helping parents, especially those who are immigrants or low-income, feel engaged in schools will increase both students' attendance and academic performance.
Through its new analysis, TalkingPoints set out to discover what educators and parents were most commonly talking about through messages and the tone of those conversations. The messages analyzed were sent through the TalkingPoints app by administrators, teachers and parents over 15 months.
The results found that 44 percent of the messages had to do with logistics, things like school closings on snow days, says Heejae Lim, founder and CEO of TalkingPoints. The next largest class of messages were what the report calls standard responses (responses like “thank you” or “have a nice day”), at 34 percent.
Only 8 percent of the messages were about academic topics, followed by homework at 5 percent.
For Lim, that means there is a lot of room for improvement in the way educators and parents communicate. In an ideal world, she explains, most of those electronic conversations would focus on learning.
“We know that research shows there needs to be more conversations about student learning, behaviors and engagement,” Lim says. “All the other higher-quality conversation topics that we think should happen go back to: There can be a lot of conversations. But are they quality conversations? Not necessarily.”
Part of the reason Lim wants to change the way educators and parents talk to each other is because TalkingPoints is focusing its attention on how communication can potentially reduce chronic absenteeism. Use of the app for this purpose is being tested in 29 districts with a total of 89,000 students.
The hope is that this will create a digital trail of an absent student so the principal or other specialists can discover them. the principal cause why they are missing.
“We meet at this really critical time, where educational inequalities are increasing,” says Laila Brenner, director of philanthropy at TalkingPoints. “We have chronic absenteeism, decades of learning loss, and then we have this wave of advances in technology and artificial intelligence that are giving us the potential to really scale, personalize, and personalize communications in a way that was never possible before. So how do we put these two things together and really make the impact?
Past investigation The fact that TalkingPoints has undertaken use of its app in a large urban school suggests the approach may work, Lim says.
And other research has pointed out the importance of improving communication between parents and teachers. For example, a report of Carnegie Corporation called interaction with immigrant families essential to students' academic success.
“Given that students spend much more time at home and in the community than at school, building strong connections between families and diverse educators is essential to supporting student learning, especially since immigrants and children of immigrants are some of the fastest growing populations. in the country,” the report says.
What does “best practices” mean?
One of TalkingPoints' guiding principles is that opening the lines of communication with parents (and what Lim calls “high-quality” communication that focuses on academics) ultimately benefits students. Those conversations should focus on learning, generally maintain a positive tone, and start early in the year.
According to the analysis, only 31 percent of messages sent by educators and parents of high school students met those guidelines. At the primary level, it was 19 percent.
The nonprofit's roots were planted when Lim was growing up in a London suburb, where her Korean immigrant mother worked hard to overcome the language barrier and ask teachers what she could do to support her daughter's education. Other Korean parents who were also eager to help their children do well in class flocked to Lim's mother to ask what the teachers had said.
“My mother became a parent spokesperson, an interpreter, a kind of communications person for the Korean parents at the school, and I think that really impacted my academic career path and that of my sisters at that time,” he says. Lim.
It left Lim with an impression of how those parents separated from school by language were still looking for ways to participate.
“Later, I discovered that family involvement really has a lot of potential to drive and impact student outcomes; lots of academic research That shows it,” explains Lim. “But the blueprint for how to do it right, in terms of best practices, doesn't quite exist, and families and schools face many barriers to engaging and building relationships with each other in ways that can truly support the student.”
In some cases, teachers may feel nervous or avoid interactions with parents, worried that it may take too long or be contentious, Crystal Frommert, a high school math teacher who wrote a book on the topic, told EdSurge in an interview. podcast earlier this year. year.
