4/18/2013

In this issue of the FINE Newsletter, we discuss how education data can be used to connect parents and teachers as active partners in children’s success. We highlight the importance of making data sharing an ongoing activity rather than one that happens only at specific times during the school year. We also stress the value of data-focused conversations in helping families understand their child’s progress and learn what they can do to advance their child’s learning at home, at school, and in the community.

We are also releasing a new resource,Tips for Administrators, Teachers, and Families: How to Share Data Effectively, which offers each of these groups tips on how to prepare for and have conversations about data that go beyond traditional measurements of student progress such as grades and test scores. These tip sheets build on our Parent–Teacher Conference Tip Sheets to help administrators, teachers, and families understand how they can share data throughout the year and make data sharing a cornerstone of family–school communication.

As you read through and try out the tips, we invite you to share your feedback with us. Were the tips useful? Did following the tips help strengthen your family–school communication around data sharing? We’ll be crowdsourcing your feedback and using it to help improve our resources and tools, so please share your ideas with us by emailing fine@gse.harvard.edu with the subject line: Data Sharing Tips Feedback.

We also have some exciting news—we are in the process of making the FINE Newsletter interactive and plan to include some special features in future issues. In the spirit of using data to connect with you and others in our audience, we will be sending out a member survey to solicit your thoughts. Look for a survey from us in your email in the coming months!

As always, we invite you to pass on this issue to interested friends and colleagues and hope that you will encourage them to sign up for FINE at http://www.hfrp.org/subscribe/email.php . We’ve made it even easier to share the FINE Newsletter content with your social networks: Find the “share” button on the left side of every page, and send interesting articles via email or through other platforms such as Facebook or Twitter.

Source: The Family Involvement Network of Educators, Harvard Family Research Project

Available at: http://www.hfrp.org/family-involvement/fine-family-involvement-network-of-educators/fine-newsletter-archive/april-fine-newsletter-changing-the-conversation-sharing-education-data-with-families