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Empowering leadership behavior includes encouraging of self-reward systems, self-leadership, opportunity awareness, participation in goal setting, and independent behavior by followers and group members. In other words, it’s all about helping followers take ownership of their positions, toward the greater good of the organization. And, as studies have shown, the effects are often positive and far-reaching.

Empowering leaders, through positive emotional support and encouragement, increases motivation and confidence among subordinates as they set out to accomplish their individual and organizational goals. Therefore, empowering leadership can be quite useful, particularly as a behavioral tactic for entrepreneurs, who must gain commitment from those they work with in order to compete against bigger, more established, and resource-rich enterprises.

Additionally, empowering leadership behavior in entrepreneurs is crucial in dynamic environments. Entrepreneurs attempting to lead their ventures toward higher growth while operating in ever-changing conditions can benefit from adopting an empowering leadership style. It is an effective way to distribute leadership throughout the management team. This enhances the shaping of emerging strategy, which harnesses the individual talents of each team member that are most relevant to the current situation.

However, there are some negative effects that come with empowering leadership, which are often left out of leadership literature. One of the disadvantages of empowering diverse teams is that it can be counterproductive. Empowering leadership can cause incompatibility among certain innovative enterprises.

In addition, empowered management teams tend to seek out too much information before making decisions. They may also attempt to follow too many opportunities, without refining a single business concept to establish a solid basis in the market. These challenges more often occur in experienced firms with diverse top management teams.

Diverse teams can be quite effective at considering multiple alternatives and making sense of challenging situations, but they are much slower to reach agreement on decisions. Different perspectives within top management teams can produce conflict, slowing the decision-making process.

We can conclude that empowering management teams can provide greater opportunity for conflicts to emerge. Conflicts among team members are likely to be particularly damaging to ventures operating in dynamic environments, where decision-making must be speedy in order to take advantage of the brief windows of opportunity . Entrepreneurs should be cautious about when and where to empower their management teams.

In fast-changing environments, empowerment reduces the new enterprise’s performance, causing the relationship between the management team’s diversity and the new venture’s performance to become increasingly negative. In more stable industry environments, this kind of empowerment leadership behavior is more likely to have a positive effect on the performance of new ventures with non-uniform top management teams . This is because the information available is clearer and there is more time available for planning.

Stable environments allow the empowered top management teams to spend more time considering what alternative strategies are available, and exploring the potential for various innovative activities, since total agreement is not urgent. As a result, there is generally less conflict within empowered diverse teams operating in stable environments.

School leaders seeking effectiveness should learn from entrepreneurs, and particularly those from start-ups in fast-moving industries, which tend to be highly creative. They should strive to create environments in which positive ideas are encouraged, and in which there is ample opportunity for those ideas to be put in place.

The U.S. education system is becoming increasingly modernized. Efforts in the business world to improve leadership were ignored by school administrators for a long time, but this is beginning to change.. Researchers are scrambling to propose models that would steer the education sector to new heights. Most of the efforts to improve leadership have sprung from the fact that now, more than ever, there is increasing pressure on school leaders from the government, communities, and various highly placed observers, all of whom are concerned about the state of education in America. This is especially true in light of reports that have found American education lacking when compared with other developed countries.

One of the new ventures being considered as a leadership solution is entrepreneurial leadership. One aspect of entrepreneurs that stands out is their positive influence on creativity and economic growth, both of which are commodities in high demand globally. School leaders can draw valuable lessons from entrepreneurs when it comes to being innovative, motivated, and goal-oriented.

Many studies have been dedicated to entrepreneurial leadership in the business sense, especially for small enterprises, but few have linked it to school leadership. Perhaps this is due to the fact that school leadership has traditionally been seen as separate, likely because the success of a school is not measured in dollars. However, among many other similarities, schools and businesses share an emphasis on obvious, measurable results.

The entrepreneur’s drive has been the main focus of many research studies. Schumpeter describes this drive as “the will to conquer,” “the dream and the will to found a private kingdom,” and “the joy of creating and of getting things done.” While these developments accurately describe an entrepreneur’s desire to succeed, they do not explain where the so-called “Schumpeterian entrepreneurial endowments” come from. This will be the basis for our focus on entrepreneurial leadership.

Recently, researchers have recognized that entrepreneurs do not successfully build new ventures without possessing effective leadership behavior traits. A good example of this is the requirement that business founders create a vision for their firm, and inspire or influence others to see and understand their dreams. This is a good trait for attracting employees and acquiring the necessary resources for growing their ventures.

Entrepreneurs have to set the initial goals in a way that rewards workers. They need to show leadership because they are founders of their ventures; there are no established standard operating procedures or tried and true strategies that they can fall back on when starting from scratch. This is the main difference between entrepreneurs and corporate managers, since the latter often have more well-defined goals, objectives, structures, and work procedures to guide them. This may be an advantage to entrepreneurs, since the problem of substitutes and/or blockers of leadership that are usually associated with the larger and more established organizations are less of an issue.

Though the importance of leadership in entrepreneurship has been established, there has been a lack of research on the forms of leadership behavior that are required, and which prove most effective. Additionally, much of the entrepreneurship literature on this kind of leadership has been one-sided, focusing mainly on empowering leadership behaviors. The failure to include the conditions caused by other behaviors, such as directive leadership, may be harmful to any entrepreneur. More specific research is needed to explore the benefits of entrepreneurial leadership for schools; after all, an educational breakthrough could be just around the corner.

The entrepreneur must be highly professional and competent in handling a business, in order to accomplish their goals. Discovery and development of new products and production processes, and handling risk require some level of professional qualifications, which can be developed through further business related education. One major area that calls for leadership from entrepreneurs is developing human resources to gain a competitive advantage.

The importance of employees in service delivery cannot be overemphasized. The entrepreneur has to show leadership to increase efficiency in the role of human resource management, and also work to ensure employee satisfaction if they are to gain a competitive advantage over rival businesses in the same industry. The role of the leader in human resource management includes the recruitment, development, and motivation of employees. Let’s examine the traits applicable to school leadership.

Employee Recruitment and Development

Entrepreneurs need to observe and interpret labor market changes to position their enterprises as players in the market. For smaller enterprises, certain problems may arise. First, entrepreneurs have to assess the qualification needs, then set clear standards for qualification, to maintain and develop a unique market position. Second, before employees are hired, job design and cautious decision-making in the business have to be determined.

Communication, Motivation, and Control of Human Resources

Information and communication strategies within the business firm are important determining factors of service quality and the company culture. Small business leaders have to carefully create and implement practical channels of communication to achieve meaningful results. Again, the small market enterprises (SME’s) periodically face problems associated with favoritism and information/communication imbalances .

Employee Development and Empowerment

Research shows that, in the business world, employee satisfaction leads to increased customer satisfaction. This is why leadership tasks should include workplace design, and carrying out of a reward and incentive scheme that is geared toward improving employees’ service. Entrepreneurial leaders can choose the best basis for designing the service delivery process, according to the customer/employees’ needs, or employee judgment.

Many employees in SME’s have left their jobs for various reasons, including bad manners in the company, not being appreciated, noncompliance with agreements, harassment by superiors, or an unproductive working atmosphere. Job satisfaction is strongly influenced by the level of freedom in the job, as well as satisfaction with the leadership style in the enterprise.

So, we can assume that there are certain basic requirements that must be achieved for successful entrepreneurship. These include an appropriate wage system, team building, and a satisfactory internal communication system. Interestingly, the issue of wages can a factor of satisfaction, but not necessarily of motivation. Fair wages may not always be expected, thus an increase in employee earnings does not always lead to higher job satisfaction.

Most, if not all of personal motivators are basically highly important performance factors. Entrepreneurs in SME’s should realize the importance of long-term human resource tools such as career planning, training, education, and job diversification. They should also communicate to their employees to show that they are concerned about these issues.

In addition, the entrepreneur has a huge influence over the motivation of employees through the practice of fairness, freedom, and employee empowerment. Entrepreneurs can be divided into two groups: those considered “employee friendly” and those considered “employee distant’ by their employees. The former are seen as more creative in designing the right motivational and communication structure in the business. They offer empathy and fairness, providing higher motivation and job satisfaction for employees than the “employee distant” leader.

There is little evidence that an authoritarian leadership style and low educational achievement by entrepreneurs has a damaging effect on employee motivation. We can assume that higher fluctuation rates may be caused by inefficient human resource management, and the actions of leaders. There is no single effective leadership style: it all depends on the decision-making structures or cultural settings involved. Entrepreneurs should be aware that employees are motivated by a leader’s high sense of fairness and empathy, and should act accordingly to achieve success.

The main challenge to educational reform is not to retreat to the past. Instead, we should build an intelligent relationship that acknowledges its existence, understands its meaning, and learns from it. An organization may choose to forget elements of the past. De Holan and Phillips introduced four kinds of “organizational forgetting.” They categorized them based on whether they were intentional or unintentional, or whether they applied to established or recently acquired knowledge.

Dissipation

Dissipation occurs when new knowledge is brought into the organization, but without goodwill or ability to make it stick in people’s memory toward the goal of organizational effectiveness. Dissipation is easily prevented by passing on the new knowledge to others. Most charismatic leaders find this difficult, refusing to face that they will be replaced, or the ultimate end to their position .

De Holan and Phillips suggest that new knowledge is passed not only through mentoring or succession; it can also be transmitted when leaders explicitly connect it to what people already know.

Degradation

Degradation occurs when well-established knowledge is lost accidentally. It commonly occurs when there is high turnover of critical personnel, who are unable or unwilling to create collective knowledge that would enable a successful joint action without their presence.
High turnover in teaching staff causes noticeable difficulties, mostly in innovative schools, where distinctive goals, practices, and structures are renewed as teachers come and go. The sudden downsizing in middle-level management can also cause degradation, since management losses and budget cuts reduce middle-level managers ability to support the principals in their running of schools.

Suspension

While organizational forgetting is usually accidental, some of it is deliberate, as part of a strategy for change and improvement. Collins and Porras found that one of the factors that leads to long-standing success in business is companies’ abilities to engage in diverse research, knowing when to keep successful innovations, and when to “forget” the rest.

Suspension is needed in educational policy in the U.S. This can be achieved by cutting back on the curriculum, exempting schools that succeed using other designs, reducing external accountability, putting less emphasis external testing, giving other personnel the administrative tasks that burden teachers, and improving school infrastructure in poor communities, making them better suited for student learning (Teachernet, 2005). While it is easy to abandon tasks and practices that one never wanted in the first place, it is harder to let go of those practices that they found comfortable. Hargreaves (2007) suggests that, to achieve this, a much more organized, and focused process is required to make suspension practical, deliberate, and desirable.

Purging

Purging is forgetting some of our poor practices, bad habits, and outdated ways of doing things that do not meet the needs of changing cultures and times. However, unlearning practices we feel are effective and exchanging them for new, unfamiliar ones can be uncomfortable. The temptation to cling to the past is normal and understandable.

According to Hargreaves, when purging involves teaching literacy, testing processes and attitudes, communication with parents, or school administration, there are two core issues that must be considered. First, we have to ask if the areas for unlearning have been diagnosed correctly, and whether this unlearning is for educational or political reasons. Second, we need to find out whether the knowledge transition is being managed in a supportive or a traumatic manner.

The emphasis of reform should be for the experienced teachers to improve their practices. Purging and other acts of forced forgetting lead to the wasting of the teachers’ wisdom as professional elders, and makes them discouraged and upset.

Renewing the Past

In the words of the great English romantic poet William Wordsworth, “let us learn from the past, to profit the present, and from the present to live better in the future.” Sustainable leadership therefore needs both a rear-view mirror and a windshield.

Leaders must sustain themselves and those around them to promote and support learning, persist with their vision. The must lead the charge in avoiding burnout, and ensure that the improvements they bring continue after their departure. Leaders should also consider the impact their leadership has on neighboring schools, how they encourage diverse teaching and learning in their schools, and their how the interact with their community.

Most school leaders want to do things that matter, inspire others to join them in their vision, and leave a lasting legacy. Often, leaders don’t let their schools down, but the systems through which they lead do. Sustainable leadership requires a collective effort from all stakeholders in the school. If change is to matter, spread, or last, sustainable leadership must be a central priority of education systems.

Direct indicators of student performance and achievement should be the focus, in order to better understand the link between student achievement and district central offices. For example, “teacher qualifications” such as expertise, certification, and experience are shown to have a large impact on student achievement, after home and family factors are considered.

Those seeking to reduce or eliminate the role of district central offices in school reform efforts often cite individual schools (such as charter schools) that move forward on reform efforts without help from a district office. Still, there are cases where central office logistical support is needed for ongoing success. Most schools, especially those with low-income populations, require outside help to improve instruction and achievement. This help can come from an external partner or the district office.

A Vision for Schools

The district (the school board, the superintendent, key staff, and influential stakeholders in the community) must be able to develop and articulate a vision and a set of practices that send a clear message of the mission of its schools . This message should be for educators, and also the community-at-large, and should create public understanding of the school system’s goals.

A clear vision provides the context for principals to make decisions supported by parents and the larger community. Parents and the larger community must also be included in the process. To support high schools in creating greater motivation of students through positive learning experiences, awareness must be developed among parents, businesses, and community leaders.

The school and the community should work together to help students see a connection between their studies and their future. Once schools understand why students are failing, districts may assist schools in defining how to address the problems using proven practices.

Ongoing Professional Development

Effective districts invest in learning of students, teachers, principals, district staff, superintendents, and school board members. Because many students enrolled in low-performing schools have trouble reading, these schools must first make literacy the centerpiece of professional development.

Districts should invest in preparing future school leaders, by identifying (early in their careers) talented teachers who have the potential to become principals. The district should develop a collaboration with a university or approved outside entity to provide these potential leaders with learning experiences.

Principals and leaders of low-performing schools need flexible resources and the ability to redirect resources toward school improvement design aligned with the districts’ strategic vision. Flexibility can help them improve the school’s climate, organization, and practices. Too many low-performing districts try to solve their problems by bringing in new superintendents every two to four years and removing principals from schools that do not meet goals. Without new policies, practices, resources, and additional operational flexibility these districts are unlikely to improve.

Cooperative and Collaborative Relationships

Districts must define schools’ core values for achieving identified goals. The cross-section of the community creating this educational vision must include views from less-educated and less-affluent residents, whose children make up a growing proportion of students. Also, developing cooperation with principals and school leadership teams helps create school environments that improve student outcomes.

States must assist every district in shaping a bold vision for improving schools. States can provide external consultants to work with districts in developing their district plan and involving the community in that process.

States should also ensure that principals have freedom to select their faculty, choices in allocating resources for school improvement, and authority to select professional development aligned with their school improvement plans. A system of incentives should be put in place to reward success.

Resources to Support Reform Efforts

Districts often have limited resources available for unrestricted use in supporting improved learning. Consequently, schools and principals have limited resources to help them raise student achievement.

Some schools receive revenues from parking passes, athletics ticket sales, vending machines, or other sources. In most cases schools lack the resources needed for significant changes. Generally, principals control about six percent of their school’s budget. Decentralized districts such as Chicago and New York City, have given principals discretion over 85 percent of their school’s budget. Schools under decentralized management were more likely to make decisions leading to improved learning outcomes.

Principals should be given a voice in budget decisions. A truly collaborative budget enables each principal to clearly explain his or her school’s unique needs, within the context of the district strategic plan. An environment of mutual understanding, respect, and ownership is created when principals and district leaders work together in this way.

Transformational leadership is a widespread, influential style of leadership that creates a high level of effectiveness in most organizations. This success can credited to certain leader behaviors that influence logic and motivation in their followers. Transformational leaders tap into the values, beliefs, and ideals of followers toward a higher vision. This is the most crucial part of leadership in fostering effectiveness.

Their inspiration helps followers discover new means of problem-solving. Much research has been carried out on followers’ reactions toward transformational leadership. It is common to find such tenets as trust, personal confidence, job satisfaction, identification, a feeling of belonging, and fairness being emphasized as indicators of the success of a transformational leader.

Another approach to transformational leadership has been the examination of followers’ feelings about themselves, based on input to their assigned jobs or groups. It makes sense to gauge the success of leadership by its effects on the behavior of targeted followers. In the school setting, it is crucial that students, parents, staff, and other interested groups feel that their leadership values their input, and that they are responsible for the success of the school in their individual capacities.

Perhaps the most important mechanism for gauging the benefits of transformational leadership is a critical examination of individual performance, rather than finding out their feelings toward leadership. In contrast to other styles, the rationale for transformational leadership is results-based.

A transformational leader should be able to bring out these characteristics in their followers:

• Identity: followers should be able to complete whole tasks while still adding value to them.
• Variety: a transformational leader should evoke an array of results by encouraging the use of different skills by followers.
• Autonomy: the leader allows for personal growth and freedom at work.
• Feedback: the tools of analysis by which the leader assesses the performance of the entire establishment, and helps to decide what needs to be corrected.

In a school, it is important that all students and staff, being the direct followers of school leadership, acquire these characteristics from the transformational leader.Though these characteristics may involve the feelings of followers, their intended purpose is to bring about a higher level of cooperative performance. Using the above characteristics, researchers are able to analyze the influence of transformational leadership on performance and behavior. The integration of all these aspects brings out the total synergy created by transformational leadership and a motivated following.

Transformational leaders enable followers to see organizational goals as being similar to their own goals and interests. this introduces a higher level of responsibility in followers, resulting in better performance. The use of intellectual stimulation through new styles of problem solving and a higher tolerance for individual freedom instills autonomy and variety, which are often characteristics of good performance. Through inspirational motivation and charismatic influence, followers are more likely to feel that their roles in the organizational setting are significant.

In a school setting, commitment to the school motto by students and staff can have a direct influence to their overall performance, be it academically or in extra-curricular activities. For example, if a school’s motto states “excellence through discipline,” anyone who takes this line to heart would try to succeed while maintaining a disciplined order. The link between commitment to the motto and success is obvious.

At Excellence Elementary School in Smalltown, USA, the students and staff recite an affirmation every morning at breakfast. “I am Somebody. I am capable and lovable . . . I can do anything when I try,” they chant. This emphasis on individual accountability and performance has had a dramatic effect on the school, which had been struggling.

The affirmation served as a foundation stone for the changes the school was starting to implement under new leadership. Teachers based art, music, and writing assignments on the new affirmation. Suddenly, children and teachers alike felt responsible for their actions, and were assured of their important role in the school. This is transformational leadership at its best: the leader sets off a process that allows staff and students to take ownership of the school.

References

Transformational leadership is a theory of leadership that was developed by James Burns (1978), and has been written about by many other scholars since then. To read more of James Burns’ work on transformational leadership and other topics, click here to visit his Amazon.com page.

According to research, schools that make a positive difference in the learning levels are led by principals who make a positive contribution to staff effectiveness and students under their charge. In the 1980s, instructional leadership was often depicted as “hands-on” leadership in classroom matters. The majority of recent studies report that the involvement of principals in classroom instruction are indirect, and carried out through building a school culture and leading by example.

However, most scholars now find that a principal’s impact on student learning is small, but has an important place in statistical data. Even marginal impact is vital to acheiving desired outcomes, because policy makers still use these findings to justify their emphasis on the selection and training of school leaders as a strategy for school improvement. The role of the principal in shaping the school’s vision and mission is described as the most influential “avenue of effects.”

School context has been found to have a significant effect on the success of a principal’s instructional leadership. Instructional leadership effectiveness should be viewed as an independent effort, but also as dependent on the learning environment.

Successful instructional leaders work with other stakeholders to shape the school to fit its mission. Instructional leaders directly influence the quality of school outcomes by aligning the school’s academic standards, timetables, and curriculum, with the school’s mission. Leaders are more effective when they are clear about missions, and manage activities that fall in line with practices needed for effectiveness.

The lack of clarity of the role of the principal in instructional leadership has been a problem. Instructional leadership has rarely defined practices and behaviors that the principal should model, making it hard to determine what needs to be considered for effective instructional leadership. Assigning clear duties to principals will help to ensure instructional leadership is carried out properly. Once principals and school leaders understand their roles, they can begin the task of leading their schools toward higher success.

It seems that there is nothing that cannot be done online anymore. On a personal level, we do everything from paying bills to scheduling entire vacations in a matter of minutes because of online access. Think about it for a moment: What daily online activities do you do today that were not an option 10 years ago? Five years ago? Last year?

Now consider classroom technology and how it is also evolving rapidly. Implementation of technology in the classroom goes beyond Google searches and reading apps. It stretches into every area of learning, including the sciences. Virtual laboratories are popping up in school districts and online learning curriculum across the country and making it easier and less expensive for students to do experiments remotely. Here are some of the benefits of virtual labs:

Flexible access. Perhaps the most often cited benefit of any online learning is that it can be done at the student’s convenience and when he or she learns best. The same is true of virtual laboratories if the experiments are on the student’s own time. In some cases, a virtual lab may be used during regular class time which narrows this benefit but still allows flexibility for the teacher who is not limited by using resources within a strict timeframe.

Instant feedback. Students can redo experiments on the spot while they are still in a critical thinking mode. All the results are recorded, making communication between teachers and students more efficient too. Experiments no longer have a “one chance” option and students can analyze what went wrong immediately and give it another shot.

Top-notch equipment. Schools and students that use virtual labs have access to cutting-edge technology when it comes to experimentation. Companies that build and maintain virtual labs must compete with each other to stay ahead of technology progression and that raises the quality of options for students. With a virtual lab, students do not have to settle on outdated, yet expensive, equipment because a school cannot afford to replace it consistently.

Lower costs. There is a fee associated with using virtual labs but the capital and maintenance costs are drastically reduced. Instead of one school footing the bill for resources, the cost is split among the clients of the particular virtual lab. This allows school to provide a better learning experience for students at a fraction of the cost.

Higher efficiency, lower costs, better equipment – is there a downside to virtual labs? I’d say it is too early to really see the effects, positive or negative, of science through virtual experimentation, but a few red flags pop into my own mind. I remember many of my in-class science experiments vividly. The sights, smells and sounds of biology and chemistry reactions at my own hand cemented the lessons into memory. It was real for me because it was right in front of my face and I was the one controlling the outcomes (or so I thought).

I wonder how much of that wonder is lost in a digital format? I can’t imagine the next generation of scientists will fall in love with their fields from watching experiments on a computer screen but I could be wrong. Even with the in-person science experimentation I did in school, I had no desire to enter those fields. So perhaps those with a predisposition for the true sciences will not be deterred by virtual experimentation. Perhaps even more students will find a love for those fields because digital lessons allow for more repetition and instant feedback.

Like all classroom technology, virtual labs need to be scrutinized to ensure that behind the flashy capabilities, their true purpose is being met. That will take some time and testing, of course, but I think it is possible with the right combination of in-person and remote lessons.

Do you use a virtual lab in your classroom? What do you think about its potential for learning?

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Digital technology has taken the world by storm – particularly in the past decade. It makes sense that this trend would have an impact on K-12 learning because there is nothing in modern American society that digital technology has not touched. While the names of the mobile applications and computer programs may change, there are some foundational ways that technology has already changed the face of education forever. Take a look:

Collaboration: Students can now work together on basic assignments and larger projects without having to meet at the library after school. Email and Cloud applications make it simple for students to collaborate with each other remotely. Even in person, the information the students find can instantly be saved to a shared location and then accessed later on without waiting on each other to move forward. The digital collaboration that is going on in K-12 classrooms is indicative of the way the workplace is shifting to more remote access of information – and global working relationships that operate with ease.

Information gathering: Along with easy sharing of information, K-12 students today can access research in ways that were unheard of when their parents were in school. Electronic academic databases provide all of the information a student needs to research an assignment or write a term paper, but with much less of the manpower needed. The way that information is obtained is certainly different today than in past K-12 generations, but the need to vet that data still exists – if not more so. With so much information at their fingertips, sorting through it to find the right, best answers becomes a lesson in itself. Educators must teach students how to research to cut through to the most accurate information. When all else fails, students should still have a grasp of “old fashioned” research that entails physically searching for, obtaining and reading material from a library shelf.

Remote learning: Due to access to online learning programs, 2012 was the first year that one-third of the nation’s 25 to 29 year olds had earned at least a bachelor’s degree. The prevalence of online learning trickles down to K-12 settings too. In the 2011 – 2012 school year, there were 275,000 full-time online K-12 students, and a total of 1.8 million distance education enrollments. Remote learning is no longer an all-or-nothing option for K-12 students. Many can choose just a few online courses, particularly in subject areas that interest them but may not receive enough coverage at their physical schools. States like Florida require that all high school students take at least one virtual class before graduation in order to prepare them for the “real world” of college learning, and the workplace after that. Online learning is also viewed as less of a threat to traditional classroom settings than when it first hit the K-12 scene. Educators now see the benefits of the two learning styles operating together to build well-rounded learners.

Teacher prep: The ways that educators get ready for lessons, and are being taught to get ready for future lessons, have changed along with the technology times. Nearly 73 percent of teachers use mobile applications for classroom activities and many reach out to their peers all over the world through social media sites. Online places like Pinterest are full of ideas for everything from Kindergarten holiday crafts to science experiments. Like students, teachers have access to a world of ideas, lessons and information at their fingertips – and like students, teachers must sort through the bulk of the data to find the best options for their classroom activities.

What other ways do you think that technology has changed the face of learning?

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As educators, we talk a lot about the role of teachers in the lives of students and debate the best ways to strengthen the classroom experience for students from all backgrounds. There is only so much a teacher can do, though, particularly with large class sizes and limited resources. Even teachers in the best of circumstances are limited when it comes to hours in the day and the amount of material that must be covered. As K-12 academic standards become more rigorous, parents are becoming an even more integral piece of a student’s success.

The timing couldn’t be worse though, from a cultural standpoint. A report released in February by Stanford University that found that the number of U.S. households with two working parents nearly doubled from 25 percent in 1968 to 48 percent in 2008, and that doesn’t even factor in parents who have part-time jobs, health issues or other children that vie for their time. Sending children off to school is a relief for many parents who need a place for their children to go and put their faith in the school to make those hours productive ones.

Asking parents to pick up some of the “slack” for teachers is often perceived as a burden and not as the legitimate parental duty it actually is. If you look at students living in poverty, whose own parents may not have played an active role in their own K-12 learning, the chance of parental involvement in the education process is even slimmer. No teacher would argue the fact that parents ARE needed to maximize student success – so how can educators, and society as a whole, make it so?

The parental difference

The most obvious benefit of parental involvement is more time spent on academic learning, with direct results in student performance. There are other benefits too, though, like:

• Parents being aware of what is taking place at the school and getting involved.
• Parents better understanding where their children may struggle, and not just hearing it secondhand at a teacher conference.
• Better attendance and participation for kids who follow the enthusiasm and good example of their parents.
• Parent-child bonding over a common goal (and what better one than education?).

Schools doing it right

Teachers reading this are likely shaking their heads as their frustration builds. Yes, parents are needed! Yes, students perform better if their parents are involved in their academics! But HOW do we get the message across to parents?

Every school district and community will have a difference approach but here are a few places that have figured out some great ways to trigger parental interest in what happens at school:

Sunnyside Schools, Washington: This school district has designed a pilot program that will engage parents and investigate what methods best keep parents involvement in education of children the highest. Regular, informal meetings are part of the plan and a family advocacy group is working with the school district to find the best solutions.

Chicago Public Schools: In June 2013 Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett unveiled a five-year action plan to help kids get ready for their college, career and life. In that plan, she discussed the importance of holding adults accountable as indispensable allies and says they must enforce homework, turn off the television and make education a priority. To help parents keep children on track, her action plan promises to launch city-wide “Parent Universities” that help parents learn more about appropriate expectations of their children, how to build academic skills and ways to support their college plans. Parents can also learn more to help better their own lives.

Getting parents to the right level of participation will take at least a generation of K-12 students but it is a must for future academic and life success.

How have you been successful at getting parents more involved in their children’s schooling?