Conversation starter tools

Understanding parent and teacher beliefs and perceptions about education is a first step toward finding alignment. As discussed in the previous section, attempts at educational change can be difficult when families and schools are not on the same page regarding the purpose of school or the types of teaching and learning experiences children and youth should have in school. Alignment around the vision of what a good-quality education looks like can be helpful for improving and transforming education systems, but it is essential for one of the transformation goals: redefine the purpose of school for students.

In communities where family and school perceptions are not understood or shared, each group’s priorities and actions can create resistance and limit the possibility for change. If, for example, a district believes it should prioritize social responsibilities without consulting families, yet families prefer a greater focus on academic preparation for postsecondary opportunities, this mismatch of beliefs and actions will create friction and hamper the community’s ability to advance a unified vision around education.

Because families are not a monolith, beliefs will naturally vary within and across jurisdictions. CUE’s surveys of parents and teachers around the world reveal a wide variety of beliefs across and within communities and jurisdictions. For education leaders and advocates to effectively work with communities to advance educational transformation, they need to systematically gather a nuanced picture of parents, teachers, and other stakeholders’ beliefs and perceptions. One way to start doing this is by using the “Conversation Starter” tools, which include an adapted version of CUE’s survey. We share these tools as prototypes to be tried by interested jurisdictions, organizations, and communities.

The tools include:

If you are interested in better understanding the level of alignment between different members of your school community (e.g., parents, teachers, students, administrators, and employers), the Conversation Starter tools can help you. The tools are specifically designed to understand the alignment of each stakeholder group’s vision of what makes for a quality education. The tools can help education leaders and community advocates learn:

The data generated from the tools can be used in various ways. It can shed light on areas of misalignment between stakeholder groups, and it can highlight the most prominent perspectives within stakeholder groups. Most importantly, it can be used to begin a dialogue within and across stakeholder groups on what the purpose of school should be and what types of experiences children, families, and communities should have with school.

The tools should be used by anyone who would like to better understand the perspectives of one or more education stakeholder groups. The tools can help education decisionmakers or community advocates start a conversation across stakeholder groups. They will also help anyone interested in moving forward with educational change initiatives to have a more in-depth understanding of the perspectives of different groups. The tools are particularly suited to helping inform those leaders looking to embark on initiatives to help transform education—meaning to change how the current school system works, particularly around redefining the purpose of education for students. They can be used by:

The tools are based on CUE’s parent and teacher surveys that it conducted in collaboration with its Family Engagement in Education Network. The parent survey was administered to almost 25,000 parents and the teacher survey to over 6,000 teachers across jurisdictions in 10 countries and across one global private sector school chain. A selection of the questions used in the parent and teacher surveys have been used in the respective Conversation Starter tools.

Although the questions used in these short surveys have been rigorously selected and trialed, these surveys themselves have not yet been used as stand-alone tools that education leaders and advocates could use in their communities. Therefore, the tools, including the contextualization checklist and discussion guide, are prototypes. It is our hope that we can collaborate with those interested in administering the tools to learn how they work and to refine and adapt the tools. Our ultimate goal is to produce a rigorous, internationally validated instrument that anyone can use free of charge.

Yes you can! The tools are specifically designed for you to adapt to your context. In fact, it will be impossible to use the tools without doing at the minimum some basic contextualization such as editing the sample text introduction of the tools to your needs.

You can adapt the tools to your particular needs in a range of ways. We have however indicated the parts of the tools where we do not advise making edits, which is solely related to rigor and survey-design good practice. For example, we designed the parent survey for the primary caregiver to answer based on their oldest child. This is because we know from our research that parents have different perspectives based on a child’s age, and it is therefore quite difficult for them to use the tool accurately when thinking about all their children at once.

These tools are for you to use in your school, jurisdiction, or community. We encourage you to try them and give us feedback at leapfrogging@www.brookings.edu. Your inputs will help us further develop an internationally validated tool for exploring alignment between communities and schools.