Zak's Weekly Musings (February 6, 2022)

Our Mission, Vision, Core Values, and divisional expectations standardize the learning culture for students while they are in the building; however, bringing our learning culture to life goes beyond what we do in the building. Over a lifetime, students spend roughly 15,000 hours in school compared to the 29,000 hours they spend at home during their schooling years and 26,000 hours they spend in the care of parents before they start formal schooling. While parents are not physically present during the school day, they wield an invisible and powerful influence. In fact, Hattie found that parental involvement has a relatively large .51 effect size. 

To refresh our memories, Hattie’s findings stem from the synthesis of more than 1,700 meta-analyses comprising more than 100,000 studies involving 300 million students from around the world. I don’t know how many of those 300 million students were learning in educational environments as small and personalized as ours, but I have a good sense that it’s probably very few. What this tells me is that the .51 effect size that Hattie found is more easily attained for us than it would be for a large public school. The thing is, parental involvement is a big idea and can take many forms. What we want to figure out is how to achieve this effect size without devoting too much of our limited energy and attention. This is where a 2014 study from Harvard and Brown comes in. 

This 2014 study found that when parents received what researchers dubbed  “light-touch” communications – emails about the curriculum or a quick note about late or missing work – student achievement rose by 13%. THAT is the sort of low-effort, high-impact system we’re looking for! 

With this in mind, we are ready to introduce our own system for light-touch communications following late/missing work and IPs on summative assessments. Whether you teach 5th grade fine arts or 8th grade math, starting the week of February 21st, this is the system that we will all be following. Is it the most fun part of our jobs to hold students accountable for late work? Of course not; but, remember: accountability is a form of love.