Smart Use of Technology for Home-School Communication

“In an era when commonplace technology makes communication easier than ever, the communication infrastructure of public education often seems shockingly antiquated,” says Mica Pollock (University of California/San Diego) in this important Teachers College Record article. “We know a lot generally about necessary communication in school communities: for example, we know that youth do better when they get regular feedback from teachers on their classroom performance and ongoing personal support from mentors; teachers teach better when youth and colleagues share supportive feedback on improving their teaching; parents and teachers support children’s progress better when they communicate often about students’ strengths and struggles; families, youth, teachers, and service providers tap local resources better when information about those resources circulates widely.”

She goes on to describe a program aimed at improving home-school communication in Somerville, Massachusetts – a city of 77,000 adjacent to Boston with three distinct populations: older working-class citizens, new immigrants, and new gentrifiers. Pollock’s “communication infrastructure” project, dubbed OneVille, aimed to answer several questions:

• Who in a diverse community needs to communicate what to whom in order to support young people?
• What barriers prevent such communication?
• Which tools, channels, and habits might support this communication and necessary relationships?
• Are the people who need to be included in a given communication actually included?
• When can technologies truly broaden access to necessary communication, rather than widen disparities of access?

Often, says Pollock, “a support network goes underutilized – like a city at night, with half the bulbs gone dark… Technology can’t be treated as if it will automatically enable such necessary communications; instead, researchers and school community members need to test which channels, which detailed designs of channels, and which habits and ground rules for using channels enable specific communications necessary for student support.” 

Pollock sees an individual student – José – at the center of a web of potential support: teacher, paraprofessional, administrator, nurse, specialist, best buddy, peer, counselor, career mentor, afterschool provider, tutor, coach, community program staff, parent/guardian, other family, and parent liaison. “Now,” says Pollock, “think of rare face-to-face support team meetings between ‘specialist’ and ‘counselor’; backpack fliers in English from ‘administrator’ to recently immigrated ‘parent/guardian’; and a ‘student’ rarely asked by ‘teacher’ what he enjoys learning. Each communication habit likely fails to enable potential partners to communicate in necessary ways or in a timely manner about supporting José. If ‘teacher’ knows José is absent regularly but has no idea why, or knows about his love of science but not about a free summer program for local youth, or if ‘administrator’ doesn’t tell José’s father about an afterschool opportunity available for José, there’s a crack in the infrastructure of their partnership.” 

“I propose,” says Pollock, “that a key design task in education is to figure out which communications in educational communities are necessary [i.e., supporting students’ talent development], and to test how a combination of tech tools, face-to-face talk, and (for the time being) paper might enable such communications between diverse people.” The OneVille project was designed to carry this out by making home/school/community communication ready and reliable, robust, rapid, routine, and far-reaching. Here are the six facets of the project:

• The Dashboard Project – The aim was to provide ready and reliable student information to teachers and parents. In her discussions with teachers and administrators, Pollock found that student data were buried in different “fields” in the student information system, and the district couldn’t afford to modernize it. Administrators sent data requests to the central office, and teachers created their own Excel spreadsheets and analyzed them by hand. “Unable to see different kinds of student data at the same time in a single display, people wasted hours flipping between screens, file folders, spreadsheets, or drawers,” says Pollock. For parents, access to information was even more difficult.

Using open-source software, she and her colleagues worked to create a free, accessible platform for report cards, teacher comments, and other important information. Unfortunately, there were glitches in creating the dashboard – not enough programmer time and problems with software – and Pollock acknowledges that better programs and better models are needed, not to mention the challenge of getting people to use the dashboard. But she believes that in an era “when anyone can Google any product, for free, there’s also no reason why districts should have to drain scarce resources to access basic data.” To solve these problems, OneVille turned to…

• The EPortfolio Project – Creating electronic portfolios of students’ work proved to be a breakthrough. Previously, paper portfolios (consisting mostly of students’ five-paragraph essays) were kept in a locked cabinet and viewed during formal accreditation visits. Once the OneVille team figured out how to upload portfolios (using Google-sites, Wikispaces, and Posterous), teachers, administrators, peers, parents, admissions officers, and employers were able to view students’ writing, their videos narrating original poetry or solving math equations, and much more. Teachers were able to get to know students in ways that were impossible before and used the information for much-improved running communication with students. One Spanish-speaking student was encouraged by a teacher to post her original poetry online – the first time she had shared her work with anyone. Peers began praising her work and said they wanted to post their own. The girl said the whole experience was transformational. 

• The Texting Project – The only limitation of EPortfolio was that students couldn’t share the full range of their personal struggles in such a public, relatively static format. For this kind of rapid and routine communication between students and their support team, texting was the best channel. Pollock and her team got the school up and running with GoogleVoice (a free texting tool), met with staff, students, and parents about basic ground rules (don’t expect a response after 10 p.m. or before 8 a.m.), and soon teachers and students were texting rapidly and frequently about coming to school on time, completing homework and requirements, and participating in school activities. “Texts showed banter and over time, deeper revelations over personal struggles, failures, even rehab placement,” says Pollock. “Over time, through call and response on this simplest and hardest to ignore of channels, students and teachers at first skeptical about texting built relationships that many students said made them want to come to school at all… Teachers also noted that far from replacing face-to-face communications, texting outside of school often served as a portal to more informed face-to-face communications inside school.” 

The Texting Project raised obvious concerns about confidentiality, boundaries, and teachers’ out-of-school time, but Pollock says that “refusing tech because of these uncrossed frontiers is sort of like refusing the printing press because it could produce dangerous books. The design task for schools is to determine acceptable habits of using tech channels.” 

• The Parent Connector Project – Although texting was the most common-denominator technology in Somerville, not everyone had access to cell phones and computers and many non-English-speaking parents found it difficult to communicate with teachers. So OneVille created a low-tech connection to parents using phone calls and face-to-face meetings. This included Reading Nights – in-person parent dialogues on literacy strategies; multilingual coffee hours in which bilingual parents served as interpreters for the principal; and parent dialogues about specific issues in the school. In addition, bilingual parent volunteers started making phone calls to recent immigrant parents to explain important school information, hear parents’ questions, offer assistance, translate key information for an open-source hotline, and get computers to more parents. More information on these efforts is available at

http://wiki.oneville.org/main/The_OneVille_Project. 

“It Takes a Network to Raise a Child: Improving the Communication Infrastructure of Public Education to Enable Community Cooperation in Young People’s Success” by Mica Pollock in Teachers College Record, June 2013 (Vol. 115 # 7, p. 1-28),

http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentId=17045 

From the Marshall Memo #494