Rene Schillinger- How to Get Parents Involved in School Reform

Rene Schillinger has been an educational consultant in New York for many years. During his career, he has been involved with helping schools and school districts with improving their literacy rates and school reform. When it comes to school reform, parent involvement is an important part of the process. Successful parent involvement can help improve the behavior and attendance of students, as well as positively affecting student achievement. Many schools struggle with parental involvement and feel that their efforts to get parents involved are unsuccessful. Here are some ways to get more parents involved in their children’s education.

Improve Communication

Having an effective system of communication requires information to flow two ways. Not only do schools need to have an efficient method for getting information out to families, they also need to have a way to ensure feedback from parents is actively sought. Keep in mind that each strategy needs to be tailored to the population of the school.

Teach Both Parents and Teachers

Often times, parents remain uninvolved at their children’s schools because parents don’t know what they can do to be more involved. Taking an active role in helping parents learn a variety of ways to be involved can help increase their involvement. However, this can’t happen if the teachers feel they are unprepared to effectively involve parents.

Personalize

Each school is different; therefore, each strategy must be tailored to the specific needs of each school. Successful parent involvement programs are typically developed in response to a specific need in the school or surrounding community. They must be focused and flexible when addressing those needs.

The most important partner in a child’s education is his or her parents. Rene Schillinger has been helping schools and school districts improve literacy rates for more than ten years. 

Rene Schillinger - Teaching Vocabulary: Strategies That Work

Rene Schillinger has dedicated his life to education. He has been a consultant in the educational field for more than ten years. He spends his time working with schools that are trying to improve their literacy instruction. An important part of literacy is vocabulary knowledge. Critical to reading comprehension, it is important for young readers to develop a large word bank and effective vocabulary learning strategies. Below are some strategies that adults can employ with readers of any age. 

Pre-teaching Vocabulary Words
Before sitting down with the material, review it to determine which words may be unfamiliar to the child. Define and discuss these words to allow them to develop an understanding of the word's connotations and denotations. After you’ve pre-taught them the vocabulary words, they should read the text.

Repeated Exposure to Words
The more time we are exposed to a word, the stronger our understanding of the word becomes. Repeat vocabulary words often in order for the child to truly understand its meaning and solidify their understanding. 

Keyword Method
Prior to reading, unfamiliar words are introduced to the child, like with pre-teaching, but instead of encouraging them to remember the definition of the new word, you teach them a word clue to help them understand it. The clue might be a part of the definition, an illustration, or an image that is connected to the word to make it easier to remember. 

Restructure Reading Material
Many times grade level reading material is inaccessible to readers because too many unfamiliar words are used. Restructuring these materials in different ways can help readers comprehend them more easily. 

Vocabulary instruction involves more than simply looking up words in a dictionary and using them in a sentence. It is acquired both incidentally and intentionally through instruction and word-learning strategies. Rene Schillinger has been helping schools improve literacy through vocabulary acquisition for many years.

Rene Schillinger - The Process of Writing

Rene Schillinger is an educational consultant in New York who is dedicated to helping teachers improve their literacy instruction, including best practices relating to the teaching of writing. Writing is an important skill that is often not adequately taught in schools. As a vital life-skill that is important not only for succeeding in school, but the work world as well.
Learning to write isn't simply a question of grammar. While teaching proper sentence structure, appropriate use of tenses and punctuation is important, teaching writing must also include proper use of punctuation, paragraph structure, vocabulary, spelling, word choice, and other components of correct writing. For students to begin to understand that writing is a form of communication, they must first be taught the writing process. This process includes:

• Pre-writing – students gather information and begin to organize it into a cohesive unit. No matter the type of writing that is being done, this stage is the most important. The process includes brainstorming, reading, taking notes, and categorizing information.
• Writing – this stage is essentially an extension of the pre-writing process. The information that was gathering in the pre-writing stage is gathered and organized into a traditional format. This stage allows them to settle on the course the paper will take.
• Revising – this can include adding, deleting, rearranging, and substituting words, sentences, or even entire paragraphs. This helps them to make their writing more accurately represent their idea.
• Proofreading – in this stage, students are able to scan their writing for mistakes in grammar, punctuation, and spelling. It is important for the child to do this stage themselves in order to improve their writing over time.

There are many best practices related to the teaching of writing. Rene Schillinger is dedicated to helping teachers understand these practices and showing them how they can improve their instruction in writing.