Masters Thesis

Engaging Parents in Thinking About Their Young Child’s Learning Strategies

Purpose of the Study: Parent engagement is important to support young children’s development and learning. Reggio Emilia schools seek to engage parents by sharing children’s learning through display of documentation panels. Learning stories document a child’s play-based learning experiences at school and can be used as a tool to assess a child’s learning and development over time. In this study, I seek to determine the ways in which learning stories would engage the parent community at my program, a small Reggio Emilia inspired preschool in northern California. Procedure: I created learning story documentation for five children at my preschool over the course of four months. Each child’s parent(s) received four or five learning stories about their child’s learning. At the end of each story parents were asked to answer reflection questions aimed at understanding how the learning stories were being used and what parents learned from them. Parents additionally completed a survey before and after the study. I analyzed each case individually and then looked across cases for emerging themes. Findings: In all cases, parents read the learning stories, shared them with their child, and shared their own stories of their child’s experiences outside of school with the teacher. Additionally, parents indicated that the learning stories increased their understanding of their child’s learning and that they would use the ideas shared in the story to support their child’s learning outside of school. Conclusions: Learning stories strengthened relationships between parents and teachers in my program by increasing the dialogue between these groups and also encouraging dialogue between parent and child at home. Learning stories served as an assessment tool as they supported me, as teacher, in observing my students closely to seek opportunities to scaffold their development. Learning stories also supported an increased understanding of the play skills in a child diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and helped me support him in increasing his social skill development.

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