Routine, Interactive, and Skills-Based

The three characteristics of natural parent involvement I derived in large part from Vygotsky's social development theory.

In essence, Vygotsky's theory is a descriptive theory of cognitive development—one which assigns a central role to the social environment and to culture:

Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological), and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formulation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relations between human individuals.

Vygotsky saw cognitive development as proceeding from the social to the individual through shared activity mediated by cultural signs:

Symbolism and the conventionality of signs were perceived by Vygotsky as important characteristics of human activity that are imposed on an individual’s behavior, shaping it and reconstructing it along the lines of the sociocultural matrix. The concept of activity thus was perceived as an actualization of culture in individual behavior, embodied in the symbolic function of gesture, play, and speech systems.

A classic example of the merits of social development theory is that of the crying baby learning through the mediation of its parents' behavior the intentionality of its own behavior. Volition itself begins first as an interpsychological (or intermental) object and gradually becomes an intrapsychological (or intramental) object:

Initially, an infant's cries are not intended by the infant to be a form of communication, their existence is simply an undirected expression. When they cry, we act on their behalf, giving meaning to their communication. She or he can communicate only through their relationship with us. This is an example of intermental ability. At a certain point in the infant's development, this changes, with the infant's behaviour becoming intentional. When an infant is able to use crying instrumentally, that is as an intentional act of communication, the ability demonstrated is intramental.

One ready implication of this idea is that, assuming that natural cognitive development in children can be characterized as moving from the intermental to the intramental, we would expect parents to be naturally capable of facilitating this process. Some research has shown that not only is this the case, but that this process of development and facilitation occurs throughout a child's life.

In her book Apprenticeship in Thinking, Barbara Rogoff provides many examples of this natural ability, including this one, which I have posted before:

To maintain understanding of the message, mothers label penguins "penguins" rather than "birds" until children have established the bird prototype, at which time mothers begin remarking that "penguins are birds." They appear to protect the process of forming prototypes by not distinguishing the specific examplar birds until children have a well-established set of prototypes and have labels for atypical birds. While these maternal adjustments may be useful for children's concept acquisition, they also reflect adherence to principles of communication (e.g., Clark & Haviland, 1977): that a speaker be sensitive to the perspective and knowledge of the listener, and that conversation focus on what is deserving of comment from the joint perspective of speaker and listener.

And I can provide at least one example from my own life, which I'm sure many other parents can relate to. Before about the age of 2 or 3, children rely on their parents' interpretation of an injury event in order to learn how to respond to it themselves. When children fall and injure themselves just slightly, they often simply become quiet. Parents instinctively respond to events like these by temporarily resisting the urge to attend to a child's injury in order to actively play down the seriousness of the event. This behavior can sometimes be comical. On more than one occasion, my wife and I have both found ourselves dancing around and singing in the presence of an injured child (slightly injured, mind you), so great is the need to interpret for him or her that the injury isn't all that bad. And, indeed, research tells us that this kind of parent behavior is capable of influencing children's subjective experiences of pain.

Assuming, then, that cognitive development proceeds (in settings outside of school) from the social to the individual through activity and that parents are naturally capable of facilitating this process, how might schools structure parent involvement programs (specifically, academic parent involvement programs, which have the greatest impact on achievement) in order to take advantage of what is already going on at home? Here are three things I would suggest all parent involvement should be:

Routine

Parent involvement should be routine. And by routine, I mean two things.

First, it should be fairly consistent and regular. Once or twice a week, if not three. If we forget about school for a moment and look at how parents are naturally involved in their children's cognitive development, we see that it is an everyday process. Children learn in environments that are consistent and regular. (If those environments are consistently and regularly chaotic, children learn from that too.)

Second, parent involvement should be non-instructional. This is because cognitive development (outside of school) proceeds naturally through activity, not through school-like instruction. Thus, it is awkward for parents to "teach" a measurement concept, but not awkward for them to read and discuss a story that presents measurement concepts. It is awkward for parents to "teach" their children about integers, but not awkward for them to help their children solve a word problem about integers. It is awkward for parents to "teach" their children multiplication and division, but not awkward for them to help their child play a game involving multiplication and division. This is not to say that parents can't teach their children the way teachers do; it's to say that they don't naturally do so. School and home are different social institutions, and teachers and parents have different social roles and ways of operating.

Interactive

This one's pretty easy. Since cognitive development proceeds from the social to the individual through shared activity, it makes sense that effective parent involvement be interactive. Both child and parent should be able to be comfortably involved. This means that not only should it be relatively quick and easy for parents, but it should also focus on material that the student has already learned, so that the student can be actively and equally involved.

Skills-Based

The relationship between this characteristic and Vygotsky's theory is a little hard to explain. I'll have to come back to it in another post. In the meantime, you can chew on this reason for why parent involvement should be skills-based:

Many observers have pointed to the NCTM's 1989 Curriculum and Evaluation Standards as a document responsible for dramatically changing the way math is taught in the United States—away from traditional, algorithm-centered instruction toward more conceptual understanding and exploration of deep mathematical ideas.

Okay. Let's assume that that change occured overnight. So, every five-year-old starting Kindergarten in 1989 learned this "new math" up through the 8th grade. Let's further assume that all those children had children at the age of 25 (the average age as of 2004). Then, five years later, they became parents of Kindergartners who are now using the "new" math.

The year that those children would enter Kindergarten: 2014.

If "new" math took hold everywhere overnight in 1989 (which of course it didn't, and in some places it still hasn't), we would have to wait until 2014 to begin to see parents of school-aged children who had a strong familiarity with "conceptual understanding," "explain your answer," "draw a model," "guess and check," etc.

And so the gap between parents and schools remains.

REFERENCES: Daniels, H. An Introduction to Vygotsky. Routledge. New York. 1996; Rogoff, B. Apprenticeship in Thinking. New York: 1990; Gleason, M. Parents' Assistance of Their Children's Scientific Reasoning. Cognition and Instruction. 17(4), 1999.

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