School-family communication activities in elemantary education: Teacher and family's opinions

Education is a process, which starts in the family with the birth and continues throughout life. The transfer of necessary social and moral values for the integration of individuals to the society starts in the family. Families undertake the responsibilty of socialization of their child besides feeding and growing him/her.But education inside the family is no more suffiecient with the developments in science and technology. societies needed to develop themselves sociologically and with this neccesity schools arose as responsible for the education of individuals.Today the education of individuals are mostly realized by the educational institutes.Nevertheless, it is not possible to claim that the role of families in the education of the child is completely transferred to the school. This situation resulted with the families taking new responsiblities instead. In other words, both school and family are responsible for the education of the child. For this reason, the cooperation of families and school is unavoidable. Establishment of the school familiy cooperation and giving responsiblity to the families on the course of education is realised by involvement of the family. For the school to achieve its goals and for the students to be able to develop their behaviours positively, involvement of families is needed at all stages of education, Family involvement activities can be realised in different ways; by family involvement in the program, by family education activities, by visits to homes of students and by activities performed there, by involvement of the family in the management and decision process, and by family communication activities.Family communication activities are important to achieve consistency between school and home, to realise common purposes and for continuity of mutual concious efforts. Family communication activities are important to create a supportive environment for the families, to inform them about the activities taking place at school and in the class, to introduce school politics and programs to families, and when families and teachers need to inform each other about the child. In order to realize a better school-family communication and therefore a better family involvement in primary school education, it is important to know what school and family understand from the family involvement notion/concept; which ways they use for school-family communication and how; what sort of problems they experience. For this aim in this research, school-family communication activities, as one of the family involvement means, are explored to be identified based on parent and teacher opinions. This research is realized with qualitative method in scanning model. İnterview method is used to collect the data; interviews were done with 11 teachers working in schools belonging to different socio-economic levels and 31 families whose children are being educated in the corresponding schools in Manisa province, Soma district Research data is analyzed figuratively.According to the research results, teachers defined family contribution as fammily support in child's education, help of family to the teacher and the child, information exchange about the child, sufficient care of family about child on every subject, reinforcement of knowledge gained at the school by the family at home. On the other hand families defined family involvement as one-to-one taking care of the child, teacher and family communication, activities made to support the child, helping the teacher, one-to-one contribution of family in child's education. Teachers defined family communication as solving educational problems with the teacher-family collaboration, continuous dialog of family with the school, family's interest in child, information sharing about the child.Whereas families defined as communication about the child, being close to the teacher, dialog on every subject, continuous relation between school and family, information sharing about the child, one-to-one teacher-family conversation. Families and teachers stated; activities that families will attend, parent meetings, and one-to-one conversations are done to realize school-family communication in their schools. İt is observed that, teachers are organizing meetings, talking one-to-one, making phone calls, sending notes to home, and visiting homes to communicate with the parents. teachers communicate with the parents mostly due to child's negative behaviours, succes status, problems, and educational needs and to inform parents how they can support their child at home. On the other hand families mostly communicate about child's educational status, special problems, behaviours, and relations with other children, how the child can be guided, and child's interests. Teachers and families are agree that school-family communication increases child's succes and self confidence, improves child's misbehaviors, and prevents child's lack of discipline. Teachers stated that, they experienced problems in communication, since the parents behave very protectionist for their children, they are disinterested and insensitive, they do not attend regularly to the meetings, claim untimely meetings, and they are succes oriented; whereas families stated they do not experienced any problem. According to the teachers and the families communication problems can be solved by families' becoming conscious, by both parties acting mutually respectful and tolerant in communication, and by open sharing of the problems.Keywords: Family participation, school-family communication