Empowering parent - teacher associations

The minister sees this as an extension of two of the challenges in Wawasan 2020 viz:

• Negara yang bersatu (nation that is united) • Masyarakat penyayang (caring society)

While mutual respect has always been a key ingredient in the country’s bid to maintain and promote national cohesion and unity at all levels, love and happiness have not been directly stated as the responsibility of schools, nor that of teachers and educators who provide students with learning experiences.

While the minister is right in arguing that if you inculcate a love for learning in children, they will be happy in the school environment and respond favourably to the teacher’s efforts to impart knowledge, there are still the family and home influences to consider.

A happy and loving child is the product of a safe, secure and loving family environment with parents who encourage him or her at every turn.

On the other hand, children who are unhappy at home often bring their problems to school with negative manifestations such as anti-social behaviour or learning difficulties.

A happy child can also be a spoilt and undisciplined child whose parents pander to his or her every demand. Will such a child be happy in the school environment with rules and regulations to not only control conduct and behavior but to ensure receptive learning?

Generally, one can assume that both parents and teachers want the best for the children under their charge, the corollary being that generally, no parents or teachers would wish the children harm. While giving love is assumed to be a sacred duty of parents to their children, showing kindness, care and concern should be an important ingredient teachers in school use to bring out the best learning.

One can therefore conclude that no one knows a child better that his or her parents at home and his or her teachers in school.

Parents and teachers should therefore collaborate and work as a team in helping children to be successful in school.

As parents and teachers learn the value of this collaboration, they can create an environment that supports the ability for all students to succeed through a three-way partnership – children, parents, teachers - with each party respecting and valuing what the other two can bring to the table. This is mutual respect at its best.

School Parent-Teacher Associations (PTAs) or PIBGs must be revived and empowered to play a leading role in the new development announced by YB Maszlee Malik.

Not only must their role and function be redefined, they must be better structured to facilitate ease of communication.

It must be stressed by the Director General of Education and his state and district working teams that PTAs are established for the benefit of school children, not for their parents to run a business and earn an extra RM.

A dynamic leadership comprising the school head at the helm, a senior teacher and a parent elected as the PTA Chairperson with other members in the committee will ensure its efficiency and effectiveness.

For a start school heads and teacher-counsellors must undergo refresher training to improve their people skills especially that of handling parents, delinquent and reluctant students.

Bearing in mind the more troubled modern environment we live in with its numerous challenges and negative peer and societal influences, all teachers need to be specially exposed and trained by professionals who handle these issues in the public arena.

With proper training in teaching methodologies, a good knowledge of child psychology and good classroom management skills, teachers should be able well-equipped to handle the most difficult students and take them through the curriculum with varying degrees of academic success.

However unlike teachers who undergo teacher training programmes such as the certificate or diploma in education at nursery, primary and/or secondary levels before they are qualified to teach, parents would have had no formal training.

Most handle their children’s upbringing through custom and tradition or instinctively. What PTAs can helpfully do is to organize parenting workshops which provide skills, knowledge and information on ways of handling different aspects of children’s upbringing, especially the more challenging emotional ones that affect learning.

Most parents have the same goal as teachers to make sure their child succeeds. Keep parents informed of what is going on in their child’s life at school by producing a weekly newsletter or creating a classroom website. Let parents know how they can reinforce at home what their child is learning at school.

Contact parents regularly for good news, as well as bad and inform them regularly of their children’s progress. Face to face meetings can be held once a term or whenever necessary.

The big question to ask in addressing the Minister of Education’s concerns is: Will teachers and parents be able to instill in students the love for learning if the children themselves are difficult and resist it or at best, perform their learning tasks grudgingly?

Workshops can be run by PTAs where parents and teachers are exposed to teaching methods and tips on how to cultivate a love of learning through providing hands-on experiences, making learning fun, helping children discover their interests and passions, demonstrating their own passions, finding and appealing to the children’s different learning styles, asking and answering questions and most of all being supportive of effort and the process, not just successful outcomes.

If your child’s love of learning has faded, teachers and parents can help to revive it by providing room for error and experimentation and make learning an interactive conversation instead of a one-way lecture.

By providing opportunities for hands-on, personalised and creative education there will be an opening up of skills and talents that could not surface in the old, stifling environment of talking down to children.

Through a dynamic and caring PTA, the school will create an effective capacity building mechanism and more mutually beneficial family-school partnerships supporting students’ achievement and success which inevitably brings them happiness.

It is only through this collaborative endeavour which squarely confronts issues and challenges can we have ownership of the educational success of our youth and communities in order to create this positive, lasting change and equity in Malaysian education.