Prompt 5 and Dewey

In my classroom parent involvement would seem to be essential, with the number of special needs children, the few English Language Learners and attention to the rest of the 3rd grade class. I know that each student has a paper in their homework folder that their parents sign every night. I asked one of the teachers in my classroom if they meet periodically with the special need student’s parents, her answer was no, but that she has journals passed back and forth between the teacher and parent and that one of the parents does very well with it, writing, commenting , warning sometimes if the student had a bad weekend, but with the other student the teacher said she hasn’t seen the journal in two weeks, and when it does arrive there will be just an “ok” written across it. Parent involvement is requested by teachers but not always taken by the parents. Not to say the parents are to blame though, there may be many reasons a parent would not respond. This is one of the many difficulties a teacher would face, not only uninvolved students but parents who don’t speak English fluently and may be embarrassed or parents who feel their lack of education means that they cannot help their children in their learning. It would be a teacher’s responsibility to make the parents feel welcomed and needed. The other involvement with parents I see in the classroom is as a punishment. One girl Taya who week depending will be a sweetheart or a drama queen, is constantly threaten to have her mom called when she acts out, not to say this isn’t an appropriate action, I believe it is, just as another example of parent involvement. A positive interaction I see within the school and the community is the basketball program at the school, on the last day I was there; all the students in the school along with any parents and volunteers were invited to watch quick games between all the teams made from the school. My school also has many fundraisers not only for the school benefit, but they had a “Pennies for Patients” drive and a fundraiser for relief after the Haiti earthquake. Showing a sense of community that expands out into the world and is featured in the school.



John Dewey’s article focuses on the relationships between social groups. Social groups are made of people with common interest and common ideals. The students in my classroom are a social group, caring about their own lives and interacting with others, like the group for Pennies for Patients. Schooling as a whole is a process of “extract(ing) the, desirable traits of forms of community life, and employ them to criticize undesirable traits and suggest improvement” meaning that in a classroom each students bring different traits from their home community and incorporate and change them to traits illustrated in the classroom . For communities to interact they need to do just that, communicate, connect between each other. It is a teacher’s job to start this communication between his or herself and between the students. Such a activity could be the class drawing up the classroom rules. With this example students can see what other students have experienced before, and from it learn and grow from the experience, what Dewey says “bring(s) peoples and classes into closer and more perceptible connections with one another” going back to the teachers role, a teacher can also bring parents into the classroom and find similarities with them to make connections and strengthen the school community.