Scholar Practitioners Who Impact Future Change

          As a scholar practitioner, it is my responsibility to lead evaluation initiatives for many reasons. One reason is to ensure that what goes on in classrooms is effective and open toward growth and change. It is our responsibility, as teachers, to see that we are finding ways to make programs more effective and to ensure they’re being utilized in the best possible way, in order to produce the most accurate results. The term scholar practitioner expresses an ideal of professional excellence grounded in theory and research, informed by experiential knowledge, and motivated by personal values. (Distefano, Rudestam, & Silverman, 2004).

            The greatest barrier during this process will be to ensure that everyone buys into and supports the evaluation initiative. The most difficult stakeholder to engage in this process is the parents. It seems that their support falls by the wayside more and more every year. Parents often work long hours and cannot attend school functions, or are just not informed of events taking place at their children’s school. This is not due to the schools not necessarily delivering news of such events, but perhaps children not always providing parents with the information that was to go home. When there is no parental support, achievement and grades suffer. Children need someone at home who can work with them and see that they’re on the right track.

            In a family-based involvement program, collaboration among families, schools, and communities is vital to reduce risk factors and enhance protective factors by encouraging supportive family relationships, increasing positive parenting skills, promoting adequate parental supervision, providing parents with information, and urging consistency of discipline in the home (Baek & Bullock, 2015). Since schools do try to encourage parental involvement, the way to go to help see this takes place is to get the community involved, as well. When businesses around the community are partners in education with schools, it is a great way of providing parental involvement.

References

Baek, J., & Bullock, L. L. (2015). Evidence-Based Parental Involvement Programs in the United

States of America and Korea. Journal Of Child & Family Studies, 24(6), 1544-1550. doi:10.1007/s10826-014-9958-8

Distefano, A., Rudestam, K., & Silverman, R. (Eds.). (2004). Scholar practitioner model. In

Encyclopedia of distributed learning (pp. 393–397). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Suss, D. (2015). T4 MAP™: A Scholar-Practitioner Model for Performance Improvement. Performance Improvement Quarterly, 27(4), 49-75. doi:10.1002/piq.21179