How Family-School Partnerships Can Support Student Success

Schools and families have important roles when it comes to promoting positive development and academic performance in children. Family-school partnerships are collaborative relationships that involve educators, parents, and other family members of students at a school. Partnerships between these stakeholders are important for helping students achieve at their maximum potential.

This blog looks at how family-school partnerships can promote student success and how Brightspace Parent & Guardian supports this concept.

Fostering Family-School Partnerships

When creating partnership plans, it’s worthwhile for schools to consider individual family needs such as communication and support strategies. Family-school partnerships work most successfully when schools create sustainable and meaningful means of collaboration.

This is more than just sending newsletters or emails. Rather, it’s about including a variety of strategies to keep families engaged and informed. Your learning management system (LMS) can be used to help families stay involved with their learners, maintain awareness of their upcoming work and plan their activities.

Brightspace Parent & Guardian

Brightspace Parent & Guardian allows authorized parents and guardians to log in to their student’s LMS to see what their children are working on, what’s on the schedule and the latest news from the classroom. This tool helps families:

• Receive updates on classroom activities: Parents and guardians can see their child’s classroom grades and shared Portfolio items, catch up on pending work and upcoming activities, and review the latest posts made by teachers. If you enable the option, parents can receive a weekly summary every Saturday of their child’s activity in D2L Brightspace. The summary contains notifications and reminders regarding any due assignments.
• Support student academic performance: Parents and guardians can view assignment details like the assignment name, instructions, score, feedback left by the teacher, rubric assessments, date-related information (start date, due date, end date), assignment status (due today, overdue, completed, closed) and can even access external attachments. If needed, they can download a student’s assignment submissions to review the completed work.
• Enjoy access from anywhere: Parents and guardians have the flexibility of either using a web application to log in to Brightspace in order to check their child’s classwork or downloading the Brightspace Parent & Guardian mobile app, which is compatible with iOS® and Android™.

As you aim to set your students up for success, it’s worth thinking about how you may want to involve families in the student learning journey. Consider family barriers and provide a communication platform that supports everyone’s needs. Brightspace Parent & Guardian can help you collaborate with families to improve student performance and create a more-enriched learning journey.

Written by

Puneet Kaur

Puneet Kaur is the Success Coach at D2L. In her role, she partners with K-12 educators and leaders to align Brightspace technology with their educational goals and achieve student success. She is passionate about the 21st Century models of learning that empower learners to become successful individuals in all walks of their lives. Puneet graduated in MEd from the University of Toronto in 2018 and her major research paper was, “Paving a Path for Global Competencies in the Ontario K-12 curriculum.” Prior to joining D2L, she worked as a curriculum analyst, education-researcher, and elementary level educator.