Parents International has partnered with Europass Teacher Academy, the largest organisation offering trainings for in-service teachers to offer courses on teacher-parents partnerships. This is a topic that was not on their palette before. In the framework of the partnership, we are offering 5-day in-person courses for local as well as international groups of teachers regularly starting in early May 2021. The trainings will primarily will take place in the Netherlands and Hungary, but we are happy to train teachers wherever it suits you best. We are also offering an online certificate course that will be live and available in the coming days.

The year of school closures has put a larger than ever emphasis on teacher-parent collaboration. Parents started better understanding and appreciating the work of teachers, and teachers became more motivated to consider parents and caregivers as partners.

This course helps teachers identify successful strategies and methods for maintaining an active collaboration with parents and for improving their partnerships.

As a participant, you will be supported to better understand your own attitudes towards parents as partners and identify elements that can promote collaboration. You will also dive into some literature showing the benefits of engaging with parents, and we will bust some myths about “hard-to-reach” parents. Finally, you will discover strategies for more effective learning at home, that can in turn support the learning of children at school.

By the end of the course, you will have participated in self-reflection activities for individual work and for working with peers and parents. You will have acquired novel practical ideas and you will be able to refer to background readings to improve your relationships with your students’ parents. You will begin to see parents and caregivers in a new light: they will have turned into helpful allies in promoting the wellbeing and learning of your students.

The course will help the participants to:

• Understand the role of parents in the learning of their children.
• Understand children’s and parents’ rights.
• Bust the myths of “hard-to-reach” parents.
• Learn more about the difference between involvement and engagement.
• Identify their own attitudes towards parents and potential obstacles to partnering with them.
• Build their own partnership strategy and methodology for successful parental engagement.

Details of the 5-day course can be found here: https://www.teacheracademy.eu/course/parent-teacher-collaboration/