Project elbe
About the Project: What is meant by Parent Counseling at Primary Schools?
Educational professionals (e.g. teachers, tutors, instructors) are facing a lot of challenges every day. An important aspect of their work is to support and to assist the development of children with different individual conditions, learning abilities, needs and skills. Project elbe (Parental Counseling at Primary Schools) is a research program of the IDeA program area Adaptive Learning Environments. The research projects of that field deal with the question how learning environments should be created in a way that serves best the learning process of children with different learning conditions and that enhances the learning outcome of the children. There is a special focus on the development of children with development risks. In this context we take into consideration the learning environment in school (classroom environment) and the extracurricular learning environment (mainly the learning process at home and the cooperation between the parents and the teachers).
Project elbe deals with the cooperation between teachers and parents – primarily with the counseling of parents. Both, the school and the family have a major impact on the school performance of the child. It turned out that counseling interviews lead to the cooperation between parents and teachers. This kind of cooperation has a positive influence on the school performance and behavior of pupils.
Consequently, counseling interviews can be considered an important starting point to create adaptive learning environments at home. In a parent-teacher-cooperation, strategies for supporting the child in the classroom and at home can be explored and agreed on cooperatively. Thus, a more intensive individual support can be established that goes beyond the individualization in the regular classroom.
Research shows that (1) parents are longing for teacher counseling, (2) teachers do not feel well prepared performing counseling activities during daily school life and (3) offer of teacher services does not always meet the needs of the parents for counseling interviews. Furthermore, it turned out that the teacher’s counseling competence can already be improved through a short training (Hertel, 2009).
Project Goals
Project elbe performs a contribution to improve the counseling situation at schools and to insert a beginning for the support of children with development risks in their daily school life by the counseling of parents in interviews. Training programs and advanced training programs are developed and integrated into the daily school life. To guarantee an early intervention in the development of the children, the investigations focus at first on the primary school area, projects with focus on the kindergarten will follow. There is a special focus on children with development risks and the counseling of their parents.
Methodology
Within the scope of the elbe program teaching staff and parents of elementary school pupils are questioned in the area around Frankfurt about the current consultation situation (e.g. the basic conditions at school, frequency of parental counseling, personal rating of the counseling situation, subjects discussed in the consultation). In addition to that, there will be a more extensive online questioning of teaching staff in elementary schools. Moreover, individual education programs for pupils in elementary schools should be examined.
The results of the questionings and the analysis of the individual education programs will be included in the design of educational offers and advanced educational offers for teaching staff, as well as for the design of teaching materials for the daily school life.
The effectiveness of the material is checked, on the one hand, within the scope of a seminar, which deals with teacher education, at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, and on the other hand within the scope of advanced trainings for teaching staff. In doing so, we closely work together with Project IGEL. One important aim is to examine in which way the counseling services influence the domestic learning situation (e.g. the supportive behavior of parents, adaptive learning) and how they contribute to the development of the children.
Preparatory Work and Cooperation
The surveys conducted in project elbe connect to extensive preparatory works on the subject "Counseling of Parents with Children of Secondary Schools" of Prof. Dr. Silke Hertel. At the moment, an active collaboration in IDeA occurs in project IGEL and in the project Individual Adaptive Learning Environments. Other collaboration with IDeA projects, with projects of employees of the German Institute for International Educational Research is planned. Moreover, there will be cooperation with a project of the Institute of Psychology of the University of Technology Darmstadt and an international cooperation with the Zurich University of Teacher Education (PH Zurich). Cooperation with a free bearer of the youth welfare is also planned. Currently the collaboration with other institutes is set up.
Milestones for the current year
The year 2010 starts for project elbe with the questioning of teaching staff and parents in elementary schools in the area around Frankfurt and the additional federal state-covering online questioning of teaching staffs in elementary schools.
In the summer semester 2010, a seminar called "Parental Counseling – Concepts and Strategies for the Daily School Life" will be held at the Goethe University in Frankfurt.
The trainings for teaching staff start in autumn 2010 with project IGEL.
Scientific coordinators
Prof. Dr. Silke Hertel
Prof. Dr. Eckhard Klieme
Sanna-Kristina Djaković, Dipl. Psych.
