Dimensões da relação família-escola: programa de intervenção para professores como agentes de promoção do envolvimento parental

Abstract

Literature highlights family and school as important agents to the infant development, having special influence on child‟s learning. In this perspective, partnership between scholar and familiar systems has been seen as one of the alternatives to prevent and/or to attenuate difficulties in learning and behavioral problems presented by children at the school. Based on these assumptions and on the theoretical framework of the Bioecological Perspective on Human Development, the present study shows the need to train teachers to work with children with learning difficulties. The goal of this study was to elaborate, implement and assess an intervention program for high school teachers working with students with learning difficulties. This program enables the teachers to work with families and to increase the parental involvement in the academic activities, creating better conditions for the children to learn. In order to control the variables investigated, it was used a quasiexperimental design composed by two groups (Experimental Group GE and Control Group GC). We provided measurement of pre-test, post-test and follow-up. Overall, the study involved 180 participants. The 60 teachers, 60 parents and 60 children were divided in GE and GC groups. The program entitled Intervention Program for Teachers as Agents of Promoting Parental Involvement (PROAPEP) was consisted of 1 lecture per week during 10 weeks. The goal of PROAPEP was to provide information to teachers about the strategies to involve parental in the learning process of their children, mainly through their homework. Teachers developed practical and theoretical activities focused on the involvement of the families with their students. The instruments used to collect data from teachers, children and families were: Questionnaire (pre-test, post-test and follow-up situations, Criterion of Brazil Economic Classification, Protocol of Session Evaluation of the Intervention Program, Protocol of Final Evaluation of the Intervention Program, Parental Involvement Scale Teacher´s Perception, Parental Involvement Scale Teacher´s Practice, Home Environment Resources Scale, Rutter A2 Parent Scale, Parental Involvement Scale Practices of Families and Test of School Performance. The results were analyzed through qualitative criteria, descriptive statistics and ANOVA and MANOVA tests. The scope was to verify differences between the participants of GE and GC. We also used the pair-t test to investigate differences in the teachers‟ repertoire of the GE group between the post-test and follow-up phases. The results indicated: a) the teachers of GE group gave more importance to the parental involvement and implemented more activities than the teachers of GC group; b) the families of GE group practiced more activities related to the learning process of the children than those in GC group; c) the children of GE group had better academic performance and fewer behavioral problems compared to children of GC group; d) there was a major difference between pre-test grades and post-test grades for both groups, which indicated the improvement of the GE teachers‟ repertoire at the end of PROAPEP; and e) there was a significant differences between two of the three questions that were answered by GE teachers in the post-test and follow-up, which pointed to an increase in the repertoire of teachers even after six months elapsed from the end of PROAPEP. This way, it is possible to conclude that PROAPEP program was effective to train teachers as agents of the parental involvement in the learning process of children with difficulties. For future research, we suggest the development of studies with the randomization of participants, the monitoring the effects of long-term program and the selection of stratified samples for possible comparisons.