| The Compact for Reading's Simple Five-Step Process |
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The Compact's simple process for developing and implementing your Compact for Reading through family and community involvement has five steps:
Step 1: Get Started
Step 2: Write the Compact
Step 3: Put Your Compact for Reading to Work
Step 4: Evaluate Your Compact
Step 5: Strengthen Your Compact
| What to Expect as You Develop and Implement Your Compact |
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Writing a Compact for Reading provides an opportunity to create new partnerships in your community for better education. An effective partnership recognizes that a team can accomplish together what each partner could not accomplish alone. That is why it is the goal of a family-school partnership to connect learning at school with learning at home.
As you begin to develop a Compact, Steps 1 and 2--building your team and writing your compact--will help parents and teachers come together to strengthen their relationship through improved communication. Parents may feel that educators talk down to them or use educational jargon they do not understand. Teachers may feel that parents need to talk more about education with their children. The Compact encourages effective, frequent communication among families, schools, and students in a language everyone can understand. And communication is essential to building partnerships.
Step 3--using the Compact to move the partnership from planning to action--is a critical next step. All the partners need to know about the power of the Compact--what it is, how they can get involved, what their responsibilities are, and what improvements and results they can expect to see. Launching the Compact is a great opportunity to reach out to families and community members who have not been involved at the school before.
Once the Compact is launched, Step 3 will help you face one of the biggest challenges--sustaining interest in and commitment to the Compact over time. Your partners may need frequent reminders of how their daily activities--whether working with a child at home on Home Links activities, reading to a child for 30 minutes, or as teachers taking the time to contact families to discuss how they can work together to help their students progress--fulfill their commitment to the Compact and are essential for meeting the goal of improving children's reading.
When spreading the word about the Compact and gaining support for it, be patient. Identify and seek out those who are essential to making the Compact work--teachers, tutors, families, and students. Remind your partners that the Compact is more than words on a piece of paper. It is an action plan for student success and school improvement.
Once your Compact is up and running, Step 4 will help you evaluate how well the Compact is working. Evaluation can show you what you are doing well and what areas need improvement. Evaluation also sends a signal that your school and families are serious about making their Compact work. This information is needed to help all of the partners reach their highest potential.
Finally, Step 5 will help you look at your Compact to identify what you have done well and where you need to do more work. This kind of continuous improvement in the Compact process will keep your Compact powerful to meet the reading needs of your community and its children.
[Step 1: Get Started]