Date of Award

Fall 10-30-2017

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Education in Teacher Leadership (Ed.D)

Department

Educational Leadership

Committee Chair

Dr. Arvin Johnson

First Committee Member

Dr. Nicholas Clegorne

Second Committee Member

Dr. Jionel Pierre

Abstract

The purposes of this study was to examine the perceptions of parents and teachers regarding their awareness and responsiveness concerning parental involvement and search for ways to improve the home-school relationship through effective parental involvement. Additionally, the study strived to identify efficient yet useful ways that families and schools can build strong partnerships and to discover the role of the school in at home parenting and learning through a collaborative partnership based on Epstein’s six typologies of parental involvement.

Conversely, this study focused on two uncommon involvement typologies in Epstein’s framework. Those two are parenting and learning at home. This inquiry was conducted using a qualitative approach with a narrative implication. The research analyzed the participant’s stories, commonalities of participant’s stories, and non-commonalities of participant’s stories linked to the themes. This inquiry includes information on parent and teacher perceptions of the impact of parental involvement on student success. The participants consisted of three parents of 5th grade students, three 5th grade students, and two teachers of the 5th grade students.

The results were categorized by the three themes that emerged during the interviews. Each of the findings justified the importance of parenting, learning at home, and communication in student success while building a stronger home-school partnership.

This research provided insight on parent and teacher perspectives of school and family involvement, how to improve school and parent partnerships, and developing effective and strategic communication.

The results may inform the practice in several ways. School administrators and stakeholders could use the results to help organize parent programs to better support students at home. Administrators could use the communication strategies from the research to increase parental support, which could increase involvement. Furthermore, school leaders may find this research informative because of the logical results in the study. This research provides parents and teachers collaborative strategies that represent best practices for developing the whole child. School administrators can also use the findings in this research to inform parental involvement improvement efforts at the school level.

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