The Power of Parents and Teachers as Partners
Maureen McDermid, GCABC Board of Directors
When we send our children to school, we often don’t think of the relationship between the school and ourselves as a partnership. As both an educator and a parent, I cannot recall a more positive and helpful relationship, focused on the experience of schooling and learning for students, than that of teachers and parents as partners.
Think about it! As a parent, you send your child to school, where they become part of a classroom and spend a year with a classroom teacher, or in a secondary setting, where they will attend a class for a semester or a term. In both cases, teacher and student develop a relationship. However, in the best of all worlds, this relationship will extend to developing a partnership with parents.
Why is this a ‘best of all worlds’ experience?
As a parent, you have had a much longer relationship with your child than a teacher ever will. You see them and interact with them in settings teachers have no access to. This provides you with information about your child that is valuable to their teacher.
Equally, when a partnership is formed, parents also gain important insight into their child in the school setting. Teachers have valuable information about their development, their personality and relationships, their likes and dislikes, their interests, their challenges and their successes.
Imagine if we each shared our insights, our different or similar perspectives about our children, openly and equally as partners!
Parents as Partners Educational Series
For the last couple of years, the Gifted Children’s Association of British Columbia (GCABC) and the Lower Mainland Gifted Consultants (LMGC) have explored and highlighted the importance of the relationship between parents and teachers during a series of educational events, named Parents as Partners.
The GCABC represents parents and the LMGC represents specialised teachers in gifted education. Both organisations believe that gifted children have much to gain by understanding the benefits of working together and finding ways of supporting gifted students, ultimately helping them to flourish and develop.
The Parents as Partners events in the Lower Mainland are designed to support the development of partnerships between parents and teachers. We share information, provide time to network, and learn together.
Please join us for one of this year’s events in your locality and find out how GCABC supports families and how the LMGC supports teachers and parents of children with high potential, so each can work together to educate, enhance and support positive relationships between families and schools.
We believe in the power of partnerships, the sharing of information, and invite you to join us in creating and strengthening partnerships to support our learners by attending a Parents as Partners event in February 2020.
Find out more about this year’s Parents as Partners event.
Register now for “Supporting the Emotional Needs of Your Gifted ‘Super-Feeler'” on February 24, 2020 at Thomas Haney Secondary School in Maple Ridge or on February 26, 2020 at Choice School in Richmond.
