Elementary Preservice Teachers' Opinions About Parental Involvement

The study examines preservice teacher opinions about their preparation in learning parental involvement strategies and what kind of experiences regarding parental involvement they think teacher education programs should provide. Multiple data sources used for this study. Preservice teachers indicated that teacher education programs could better prepare preservice teachers to effectively deal with parents by multiple lectures in other courses or offering specific parental involvement courses, seminars, and workshops during the teacher education program. Not surprisingly, student teachers thought themselves to be more prepared to implement parental involvement strategies than the other groups. Out of the six respondents, four inservice teachers suggested that it would have been helpful to have had a class session dealing with parental involvement. Four of the inservice teachers responded that their student teaching helped them more in regard to parental involvement in areas such as learning different ways to involve parents, having parents help in the classroom, and conducting parent conferences.