Project 24: Keeping Parents Informed

We ran four parent information events to ensure that families understood the changes to their children’s maths studies as a result of Project 24.

Presentation from me
Here are the slides I used:

Thank you to Jaime Casap who put the bulk of these slides together originally.

Role Play
After my presentation, I got three pupils who experienced my time-shifted teaching last year to role play a scenario at home. Last year I found that one of the things that made it harder for pupils to watch videos for homework, aside from not having the internet at home, was younger brothers and sisters being a nuisance.

My young actors, with 10 minutes to prepare, sorted out the roles and then improvised magically…

Pupil 1 (KSA Student) and pupil 2 (Young Sibling) are in the living room. KSA Student is on a laptop watching the maths video he has to watch for homework.

Young sibling: What are you doing?
KSA Student: My maths homework. Can you leave me alone for a little while?
Young Sibling: Let me see!
KSA Student: Not now, I just need to get on with this.
Young Sibling: Let me see! Show me the computer!
KSA Student: Stop it! I’m trying to do my homework!

[In walks Pupil 3 (Parent).]

Parent: [To Young Sibling] What are you doing?
Young Sibling: I want to see what’s he’s doing on the computer and I want to play.
Parent: He’s doing his homework – you’ll need to leave him to it for half an hour. You go to your room or play over there quietly.

Ends.

Questions
Then I took questions from parents. Here’s a list of the typical things I was asked:

• Is there any evidence this works?
• How do you stop them watching videos on YouTube that they shouldn’t be watching?
• What if they don’t understand the video?
• Will you be able to tell if they have watched the video?
• What happens if the internet isn’t working?
• What if we don’t have a computer at home?

Parent Survey
We wanted a baseline ‘temperature’ check of parents’ attitudes and the internet situation at home so before parents left, they were asked to complete an online survey (I brought laptops down to the hall).

Here are some of the key findings.

This is the survey that parents completed.