Collaborating with parents can enrich the dialogue around educational challenges and seed ideas that can lead to innovation. Yet engaging with parents to learn their values, perspectives, and experiences (Practices M1, C1, and C2) can also be challenging—for multiple reasons. This article on Understood.org identifies six common barriers that can make it difficult for parents to be active collaborators and lays out potential solutions for navigating around those barriers.
Toolkit Library/
How to break down communication barriers between teachers and families
Making connections:
Principled Innovation asks us to work with others and recognize the limits of our own knowledge so that we can better understand and tackle the complex issues our communities face.
To understand your students, use “compassionate curiosity.”
Article
15 minutes
By: Education Week, Kyle Redford
What makes a successful, innovative team?
Article
12 minutes
By: Cyril Bouquet, Institute for Management Development
Taking multiple perspectives
Video
3 minutes
By: Cultivating Leadership
Developing a systems thinking capacity in learners of all ages
Article
15 minutes
By: Tracey Benson, Waters Center for Systems Thinking
Empathy in designing solutions
Video
2 minutes
By: IDEO