What is the problem we are addressing?
The low participation rate of parents in supporting their children’s learning community, the lack of their engagement in working with the school, their poor knowledge of the various challenges and variables that they need to know regarding their children during school stages, and the absence of effective channels in creating a connection with these parents.
What is our solution?
Launching an annual platform to offer the opportunity for parents to present their successful contributions to their peer parents on issues related to the challenges of learning and upbringing methods. This will enable us cancel the school role of direct guidance and will pave the way for the parents to listen to each other directly; in order to facilitate exploring successful experiences and investing in building a relationship with these parents towards creating programs and activities related to their experiences and successes so that to be gradually built upon as practices for schools.
An overview of our impact
A group of parents participated in presenting the personal experiences in relation to health and nutrition and their impact on the school community health. They shared these personal experiences with other parents and invited them to benefit from the experience done by the school in cooperation with this group of parents in designing the agriculture and plants yard as well as hiring a farmer to the school and this contributed to its joining as an active group in the school activities such as becoming a member of the school’s board of trustees, which will give it more opportunities to participate with the school in supporting learning in a different way. All of this came as a result of presenting this parents group successes during the forum in which they talked about their experiences.
Examples of implementation
The “Forum” is the example; where a group of parents participated by presenting workshops telling their personal experiences about nutrition and health. Some pictures are attached to those who agreed to share them along with the advertising poster and a short video in which parents from a group of 8 schools affiliated with Qatar Foundation participated in that event.
What are our future goals?
Developing the opportunity further with parents of students in schools, as 8 schools participated this year, and we want to move on to include all Qatar Foundation schools and centers with a greater number of parents and then allow later all parents in Qatar’s schools to share their successes with their peers, explain the challenges they faced, and discuss their ideas in a practical way that allows non-academics who have experiences to take part.
How can someone else implement it? What do they need?
There are two aspects that distinguish this idea: the first is the ease of implementation and the second is the low rate of expenses; as the platform is based on advertising for itself, its aspects and making it an opportunity for the participants to present their own experiences. The owner of the experience is not required to be academic or with qualifications like in conferences all over the world. Therefore, this is a great opportunity for owners of successful experiences who have no opportunity to highlight and share them with the community. Receiving requests, organizing a mechanism for selecting candidates and determining the aspects around which the experiences revolve are only administrative matters which are interesting to work on. They also contribute to creating a better relationship with the parents during the work period up to the forum day; which definitely leads to creating connections with the school and increases the contribution rate.
