M anaging P arenTS and  C oMMuniTy

Arising from the previous section is the need for the project team to pro-mote the project through, among other things, managing school–parent relations, due to the impact of parents upon their child’s education and development. Good parenthood is characterized by a safe and stable home setting, discussions between parents and children, promoting education, fostering high expectations about the child’s success in school, and so on.

By engaging in educational activities with their children at home (home-work, reading, modeling), parents communicate their expectations for achievement (Oostdam & Hooge, 2013).

Basically, given an increasing influence upon their child’s learning in school, we understand as educators that we must involve parents in our new project to promote and motivate the students to take part in the proj-ect. However, the project must be culturally relevant to the parents and the school community; that is, the project should be compatible with par-ents’ educational values, norms, and formal learning experiences. One should bear in mind, though, that teachers perceive parental involvement in terms of both collaboration and threat (Addi-Raccah & Grinshtain, 2016). Therefore, a project manager should use proper strategies to move

the team toward collaboration with parents, rather than considering them as a threat.

According to Panferov (2010), school communication strategies that proved to be helpful for parents were regular, multimodal (written and spoken forms), and ideally offered in the parents’ first language. Similarly, Avvisati, Gurgand, Guyon, and Maurin (2014) showed that when parents receive invitations and support from the school, their involvement increases, and pupil’s behavior at school improves. Thus, the project man-ager might employ several strategies to recruit parents’ active and passive support in the project:

• Written messages that convey the positive content of the project and provide student’s voices of their experiences in the project. Email and WhatsApp allow the delivery of pictures, videos, and other vir-tual forms of messages to illustrate the project in practice.

• Establishing an open line of communication between parents of stu-dents who participate in the new project and the project team to respect parents’ attitudes toward the project and trace their child’s development. Personal interviews with parents about the new proj-ect can help improve it considerably and create a sense of collabora-tion between parents and teachers.

• Parents might be encouraged to take an active part in the project implementation and become good ‘ambassadors’ of its strengths in the community.

• Home visits are recommended when the community is composed of immigrant parents or minorities, to learn about their life views and educational perspective and include them in the implementation of the new project.

Several insights into parent involvement in the project merit highlight-ing. First, during the last decade, there has been a shift toward a joint responsibility of schools and parents in children’s education. Oostdam and Hooge (2013) suggested a framework of active parenting that includes three different types of partnership: (1) A social partnership is directed at cooperation between parents and school with regard to extra-curricular activities; (2) a formal partnership is related to the involvement of parents in all kinds of institutional (e.g., parents’ council) and non-institutional activities (e.g., organizing excursions); and (3) an educational partnership

is discerned as being focused on guiding, facilitating, and improving the learning process of children. Thus, the project team should first choose the type of partnership they desire to establish with parents, then invite parents to cooperate on the ‘correct’ implementation of the new project, take an active part in the project implementation, or guide the parents how to complete the learning activities inherent in the new project at home.

Second, Addi-Raccah and Ainhoren (2009) found that the least favored school context is one in which parents are empowered more than teachers are. This mode of relations creates an imbalance of power which, in the teachers’ view, undermines their work. Therefore, the project manager who invites parents to take an active part in the project implementation should be aware of the need to strike a balance between teacher and par-ent involvempar-ent, and prevpar-ent any sense of control of one group over the other.

Yemini, Ramot, and Sagie (2016) offer a novel framing for the specific type of parental interactions that can be mediated through the lens of

‘intrapreneurship.’ As more parents are taking on an active position within existing schools (Gofen, 2012; Horvat, 2011), and as parents become widely identified as an integral part of the school, ‘intrapreneurship’ is a term that can usefully describe and characterize such interactions, by unfolding such relations as corporate/in-house entrepreneurial actions.

Thus, many times parents will initiate and even lead projects within schools, providing an important asset to the school. However, such an asset should be carefully managed to increase trust and collaboration among all the involved stakeholders. Yemini, Ramot, and Sagie (2016) claim that parental intrapreneurial ventures do not involve any form of non-compliance, rather, on the contrary, they take root in parents’ deep appreciation for and partnership with the schools (and sometimes also the LEA), whereby parents proactively search for opportunities to bring change in an innovative and risk-taking manner. Parental intrapreneurship ventures become institutionalized through the profound personal ‘chem-istry’ between the involved stakeholders, with the blessing of the LEA and the active engagement of school principals and staff. Moreover, such insti-tutionalization occurs despite the fact that the various stakeholders frame the relations in different ways. Such relations nevertheless might be extremely conflictual in specific contexts and might be influenced by the existing power relations among diverse socio-economic strata. School

leadership must carefully address such assumed conflictuality to avoid dis-trust while working on projects with parents.