Handbook FiNCH project english

HANDBOOK

2022

The partnership in this project have developed different innovative
approaches to help schools, students, and families/parents to prevent
early school leaving (ESL).
In this handbook we will present the main methods and concrete tools
to improve communication between school and families/parents.

Content

Introduction ....................................................................................................... 3
Family methodology ...........................................................................................4

The Importance of Family Engagement...........................................................4
What is Parent/Family Involvement? ...............................................................4
How Family Involvement Leads to Student Success? ...................................... 5
Flipped Classroom.............................................................................................. 6
OVERVIEW...................................................................................................... 6
Home curriculum................................................................................................ 8
Early warning program ...................................................................................... 11
Final words........................................................................................................14

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Introduction

In 2020, an average of 9.9 % of young people (aged 18-24) in the EU were early
leavers from education and training, in other words, they had completed at most
a lower secondary education and were not in further education or training during
the four weeks preceding the survey. In this article, the terms ‘early leavers’ and
‘early leavers from education and training’ are used interchangeably.
Early leavers from education and training may face heightened difficulties in the
labour market, according to Eurostat “Early leavers from education and training,
2020”
During the implementation of “Family INvolvement in CHildren's early education
and Care” project (FINCH), European schools and its students suffered from
COVID restriction. Even though the scope of home-schooling differs from
country to country, the remote learning is expected to influence the students in
some way.
In the 2021 publication “When schools shut: gendered impacts of COVID-19
school closures” by UNECO it stated it is too soon to grasp the full scope of the
impact of school closures, but students lack of technical equipment, teachers
digital educational competence and coping with mental and physical health
challenges during the closures is reported. The pandemic have made the topic
FINCH works on even more relevant.
FINCH have worked to improve pedagogic at schools, to enable students to have
homework easier to deal with alone or together with parents. To support this,
FINCH have developed different innovative approaches to help schools,
students and families/parents to prevent Early School Leaving (ESL). In this
handbook you will find a brief instruction to different systems, methods and
concrete tools to improve communication between school and families/parents.

The full description of them is available at project web site www.finch-
project.eu.

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Family methodology

The Importance of Family Engagement
Family engagement in early education is particularly important for children in
low-income families in that it helps
create consistency between the home
and school environments. The positive
outcomes of engaged parents are
powerful: increased support for
children’s learning at home, empowered
parents, and improved family well-being.
Children see benefits like improved
cognitive development and academic
performance, better social-emotional development, and improved health.
Engaging families as partners early in the educational journey allows parents to
establish strong home-school connections that support their children’s
achievement long-term.
What is Parent/Family Involvement?
Parental/Family involvement and engagement means the participation of
parents in regular, two-way, and meaningful communication involving student
academic learning and other school activities, including ensuring—
(A) that parents play an integral role in assisting their child’s learning;
(B) that parents are encouraged to be actively involved in their child’s education
at school;
(C) that parents are full partners in their child’s education and are included, as
appropriate, in decision-making and on advisory committees to assist in the
education of their child.

Six Types of Family Involvement

Joyce Epstein of Johns Hopkins University developed a framework that defines
six different types of parent involvement. (1992). This model includes parenting,
learning at home, communicating, volunteering, decision-making, and

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collaborating with the community.

In 2013, Karen Mapp (Harvard Graduate School of Education) developed a new
framework on family engagement that emphasizes the need for family and
schools to be partners in
the process of
supporting student
achievement. See the
diagram to right for
details. In 2019, updated
version (Version 2)
How Family Involvement
Leads to Student Success?
The most accurate
predictor of academic achievement is not socioeconomic status, nor how

prestigious the school is that a child attends.
The best predictor of student success is the
extent to which families encourage learning at
home and involve themselves in their child’s
education.
When parents are engaged in their children’s school lives, students have the
home support and knowledge they need to not only finish their assignments, but
also develop a lifelong love of learning.
Teachers who focus on parent engagement often see a profound change in their
classrooms. The more parents involved in their children’s education, the better
their entire class’s motivation, behaviour, and grades become

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Flipped Classroom

This Guide is organized in 7 sections that we consider making it easy for the
readers to understand the concept of
Flipped Classroom.

1. What is a Flipped Classroom?

2. Advantages and Disadvantages

3. Differences

4. Elements of flipped classroom

5. Exploring the Flipped Classroom

6. Resources

7. Lesson plans

It is completed with some Sample lesson
plans that have been tested in the partner
schools from our project and that are on
our project’s website at https://finch-
project.eu/outputs

OVERVIEW
Blended learning is a learning approach combines learning environments that
are traditional face-to-face classroom training and computer-mediated
activities in which students can have control over time, place, path, or pace. A
combination of digital educational materials with traditional place-based
classroom methods provides more meaningful and deeper learning and makes
learning more enjoying and more interactive for students.

For many years we have been “doing” school backwards: students are sent home
with the hard stuff and with no help except their notes (if they have taken them)
and their textbooks (if they have and read them), but little else. Teachers expect
students to solve problems and apply what they have learned in class. With the
Flipped Classroom, on the contrary, students do the hard stuff in class, where
the teacher is present and can help them, and do the easy stuff outside of class.

In this the «Flipped Classroom» is innovative: the lesson becomes homework
while the time in class is used for collaborative activities, experiences, debates,
and workshops. And in this scenario, the teacher does not play the role of a lead
actor but becomes a kind of facilitator, the director of the educational activities.

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Flipped classroom will then contribute to decrease the anxiety of children (and
their families) over homework: if this consists in watching and interacting with a
short video, then this is much more doable, and parents are confident that any
difficulties linked to the hard work will be faced at school.
In addition, parents should consider a benefit for their children to have a teacher
who has flipped his/her class for multiple years as these teachers have
completely changed the dynamic of their classrooms: instead of being focused
on test preparation or busy work, their students are actively engaged in their
own learning, taking responsibility for it, and probably approaching it with more
enthusiasm.
Finally, another important aspect to highlight is that Flipped Classroom
increases student-teacher interaction because it gives students the feeling of
having more individual time with their teacher. This should be very much
appreciated also by parents whose son or daughter will get more one-on-one
time with.

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Home curriculum

The school-family
relationship is a topic of
great interest among
teachers, policymakers,
parents and all those
involved in childhood
education.

Several researches
demonstrate the benefits
of this collaboration: an
improvement in school
grades, behaviors and
attitudes of students.

However, the process of parental involvement begins with parents’ decision to
become involved: parents decide to participate when they understand that
collaboration is part of their role as parents, when they believe they can
positively influence their child’s education and when they perceive that the child
and the school wish them to be involved.

Once parents make the decision to participate, they choose specific activities
shaped by their perception of their own skills and abilities, while others demand
on specific invitations to involvement from children, teachers and schools.

But what leads a parent to make the decision to become involved? Among the
most promising activities in the case of difficult-to-reach parents are those
whereby parents, teachers, schools and students create opportunities for the
social construction of the parental role, including collaboration and a higher
sense of efficacy.

School isn't the only place for learning activities. When children are at home,
parents are their teachers: they are the major provider of their children's
education from birth through adolescence. They can guide the development of
their character and mental health and help form the foundation from which
they'll develop lifelong attitudes and interests.

The Home Curriculum is then an attempt to create a home learning environment
for parents and children. It is addressed to Lower Secondary school students
and their parents and proposes itself as a small guide with a series of activities

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to be made at home by children and parents: a sort of “Special Tasks” which
require a close collaboration between them.
The “Special Tasks” are related to school subjects: in doing them, parents
become active participants in the learning process of their child, who becomes
aware, together with them, of all the passages that allow the reworking of the
action: from doing to observing, to understanding, to documenting through
writing and images.
The activities contained in this manual are divided in three chapters and each
chapter proposes different activities and has its target group.

The “Special tasks” are always
introduced to the students by an
attractive input (an invented or real
story, a picture, a movie, a
character…). After the
accomplishment of the task, the
students share the results with the
classroom also through evidences of what done: pictures, narratives or other
outputs ...

The role of the teachers is to stimulate the discussion through questions, brainstorming,
etc... in order to foster the sharing and to highlight the acquired competences.

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Parents are asked to collaborate for the
production of all the material to be used for giving
evidence of the work done at home (pictures,
video, outputs, drawings…).
In the final part of the sheets, short questions are
posed to parents (any difficulties encountered in
the accomplishment; the usefulness or not of the
task suggested; any suggestions to improve the
teacher’s proposal; etc...) in order to help the
teachers realise the efficiency of the work
proposed.

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Early warning program

Early School Leaving (ESL) is defined as finalizing formal education before completing
upper-secondary education. ESL is a process of gradual disconnection that can begin
as early as the first grade, and no single factor can be held responsible for a student
dropping out of school. Whereas reducing the rate of ESL is the goal of countries, the
solution is unclear as the factors associated with ESL are complex and interrelated.
Although the factors underlying students' ESL are highly individual, the pandemic
process and its effects on students have been common issues such as personal, family,
and school contributing to ESL decisions lately.

Children are among the foremost victims of the COVID-19 pandemic, profoundly
changing their lives. UNICEF (2021) has reported that more than 1 billion children are at
risk of falling behind due to the closure of schools aimed at preventing the spread of the
COVID-19 virus. Although many countries implement distance education programs to
enable their children to learn, some children, especially those with disadvantages, are at
risk of never returning to school. Therefore, a struggle awaits countries in global
cooperation with ESL, expected to increase in number after the pandemic.

Before the pandemic, most existing Early Warning Systems (EWS) monitored
absenteeism as a signal for ESL; some also considered grades and pupils' exam results.
In addition to providing a narrow perspective on the risky students and their condition,
this approach has already lost its function since schools are closed from time to time due
to the quarantine measures. The partners of this project came together to find a solution
to this issue in the new period. They worked on a solution, taking into account the reality
of the pandemic and the successful examples in their countries.

The project team gathered information about the ESL through the questionnaire it
implemented and included at the end of the report in the stakeholders' countries. The
EWS prepared based on this information monitors students comprehensively in a
longitudinal way and gives the possible dropout rate as a percentile for each student. By
using the EWS, the status of all students can be monitored throughout the school period,
as well as the effect of preventive guidance studies for risky students and their families.

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The software/app (TrackingESL) will be a new class management tool for teachers,
students and parents. It will score the student based on categories as Individual factors,
Familial, Scholastic and Problematic behaviour.

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Based on research and survey done during project, the different factors is given
individual weigh, to address the importance of factor. This is a work which needs to be
followed up, since different countries and cultural factors should also be taken into
account.
The need of counselling for students or parents will be detected based on the Software
reports. After measures have been taken the software will show if the students are still
red/yellow flagged as at risk of dropping out. The software is easy to use on PC/Tablet.

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Final words

The finalization of developed methods and tool have taken part with close
collaboration with universities working with early schools leaving research and
primary schools testing and giving us feedback.
We would especially highlight the contributions from Hacettepe University how
designed and conducted a European survey to support the project work.
Also, a great thank to Portuguese school Agrupamento De Escolas De Sao Joao
Da Talha, Romanian school Scoala Gimnaziala Voievod Litovoi Targu Jiu and
Italian school Istituto Comprensivo Aldo Moro for testing developed tools and
giving useful feedback for improvements.
The developed methods and tools will now be available for all schools to
investigate them and implement those you find useful for your school.
We recommend you visit the web site www.finch-project.eu to learn more and
explore the opportunities to help schools, students, and families/parents to
prevent Early School Leaving.

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