Everyday Engagement

Making Students and Parents Your Partners in Learning

In this book, author and teacher Katy Ridnouer focuses on the potentially overwhelming, sometimes puzzling, often delicate work of engaging both students and parents in the pursuit of learning and achievement. Structured around the questions teachers ask themselves about engagement goals and challenges, Everyday Engagement offers specific strategies to try—in your classroom, with your students, and with their parents—that will help you* Connect with students and parents as individuals. * Communicate invitations to engagement (and regroup and respond if your initial invitations are rejected). * Provide appropriate, ongoing support and encouragement that will keep students in class, behavior in check, and learning on track. * Anticipate and handle setbacks and complications in teacher-student and teacher-parent relationships. * Tap outside resources to extend learning beyond the walls of the classroom. Ridnouer believes that every teacher has the power to make students and parents partners in learning. When a teacher embeds pro-engagement action and attitudes into everyday practice, the question is not if students and parents will be engaged in classroom learning, but how they will choose to engage and how far that engagement will take them.