• Soup For Success: Ingredients For Meaningful School-Family-Community Engagement
    GPA Title I Parent Teacher Family Engagement Initiative - Cohort I

    Iron Chef Champions

    Family Engagement focused on connecting families and community to student learning by sharing strategies to support learning at home and providing opportunities for two-way communication, feedback, and a positive perception of school leadership.  

    Designed for Title I teachers or school designees, participants developed themselves as family engagement leaders through professional development, new knowledge, best practices, and a program of work for implementation through the end of the year. The Soup for Success initiative began in 2019-20 with Cohort I. Participants during 2020-21 will serve as Cohort II, and Cohort III in 2021-2022.

    Participants stirred up family engagement at their schools by attending Soup for Success professional development leadership sessions with a focus on GPA’s Five Fibers of Successful Collaboration adopted from the research of Drs. Karen Mapp and Steve Constantino. They simmered in interactive activities to assist in developing SMART goals unique to their school’s family engagement needs. Cohort I participants gathered new ingredients from best practices on how to develop and implement attractive family engagement activities aligned with their School Improvement Plan (SIP). The Taste and See engagement involved collaborative learning, take-a-ways, and creative family engagement program development.

    A panelist of community partners judged presentations and announced an Iron Chef for Family Engagement from each school level. Participants increased their motivation hearing from Author and Educator Michael Bonner, nationally-known teacher at Ron Clark Academy featured on The Ellen Show and NBC Nightly News, and received a signed copy of Bonner’s Book, Get Up or Give Up: How I Almost Gave Up on Teaching. 

    Click here to learn more about this initiative for Title I teachers and school designees. See Facebook and Twitter posts from the event.