Involving parents as partners in learning and assessment

By Barbara Allan, Director Strategic Capability, NZCA
Published in Iti Rearea on July 2006

Racking your brains for ways to get parents more interested in your assessment and planning for their children? Wondering why the buzz of an informal conversation about a child’s progress doesn’t make it into written assessments? Implementing Kei Tua o te Pae has helped many centres to truly involve parents as partners in learning and assessment.

Previously, many centres have struggled to find meaningful ways to express their understanding of what children are learning and how the centre community itself is supporting the learning. Kei Tua o te Pae has shown teachers the power of narrative, as story-telling, for engaging the attention of parents, children, and others about how learning is supported in the centre.

Teachers have learnt that engaging stories include all participants in the event, including teachers themselves, and link the present action to past shared knowledge and give tantalizing hints of future possibilities.

Families and children are also invited to contribute their own insights and thoughts about how the learning relates to other parts of the child’s life. This increases the opportunities for complexity and continuity both children’s learning and centre community relationships.

What is it about?

Kei Tua o te Pae emphasizes that assessment as a process should focus on discussion about what children are currently learning and how this might be built on, and often, how it links to past family or centre experiences. It recognizes that much of what we use, and therefore value, in our daily interaction with children involves assessment that we have not written down.

How often have you greeted a parent/caregiver arriving at the end of the day with something like “Guess what happened today! Or “remember how you told me …” and then regaled the parent with a tale from today’s escapades. Parents and other family members respond enthusiastically to these verbal stories and even more so when these stories appear in their child’s portfolios, especially when space – a page or more – is left blank with an invitation to add their own story. When teachers include parents’ comments in a story, they show they value parents’ aspirations for and knowledge of their own child. When those comments influence the programme for the child, teachers are demonstrating the principles of Te Whaariki, which are also the principles for assessment that form the framework of Kei Tua o te Pae. 

Assessment is described as “noticing, recognizing, and responding” (Ministry of Education, 2004, book 1, p.6), sometimes leading to documentation – the part that makes learning visible. Through working with Kei Tua o te Pae, centres are finding how to make visible the learning that is valued in their community and with their children and families.

In contrast older ways of documenting learning tended to focus only on some of this; in particular what could be objectively observed and measured such as physical and social skills acquisition and factual knowledge. Often it was difficult to demonstrate to parents and others through documentation the value early childhood places on other forms of learning such as children’s working theories and dispositions.

How is it working?

Kei Tua o te Pae has prompted many centres to make children’s portfolios accessible in the centre for the children to freely review or share with others during the day, reinforcing the valuing of the growing competence of children.

For example, a child was “reading” to a teacher one of the stories from a couple of weeks ago in his portfolio, about how he had made the playdough model of a duck, a creature that continued to hold a lot of interest for him. He noticed from the photos that at the time he had omitted to put eyes on the model. Instantly he took his portfolio over to the playdough table, and using the portfolio photos for reference, he carefully reproduced his original duck, finishing by putting eyes in place triumphantly! He instructed the teacher to photograph this improved model and the process of this self-review was recorded and illustrated to sit alongside the previous story in his book.

Children being active in this way in the assessment of their own learning increases the authenticity of the documentation, and demonstrates the realization of the aspiration of Te Whaariki that they are “competent and confident learners and communicators healthy in mind, body and spirit, secure in their sense of belonging and in the knowledge that they make a valued contribution” (Ministry of Education, 1996, p. 9).  

References

Ministry of Education (1996). Te Whaariki: He Whaariki Maatauranga moo ngaa Mokopuna o Aotearoa/Early Childhood Curriculum. Wellington: Learning Media.

Ministry of Education (2004). Kei Tua o te Pae/Assessment for Learning: Early Childhood Exemplars. Wellington: Learning Media.