Family and Caregiver Involvement
As your team continues to develop and implement your CCL program, you will want to consider how to support diverse parent and caregiver involvement through authentic partnership and ongoing collaborative engagement.
One of the ways is to invite parents and guardians of learners to help them update it annually through grade 12. Best practices to support these actions may include sharing information with the preferred mode of communication and outreach on days and hours that are family-caregiver friendly. Providing advocates, liaisons, or a translator may also bridge the barriers that impact true parent-caregiver connections and sustained engagement.
Another is utilize suggestions offered in this document published by Advance CTE - Elevating Family Voice in Career Pathways
As noted in the introduction, Research has shown that family engagement in education has short- and long-term benefits related to program quality and learner success including having a positive impact on learner grades, persistence and completion.
Families across socioeconomic status levels play a valuable role in helping learners navigate educational and career decisions, and they are influential in shaping learners’ perceptions about their futures.
For example, learners who are well-informed and engaged early on in college planning, with the help of their families, have higher college aspirations and are in a better position to secure the academic, social and economic resources needed to achieve their goals.
State and local leaders should recognize the critical role families play in career pathways. Whether at the state, district or local level, there are opportunities to deeply engage families in the development and implementation of career pathways to support learners. Family engagement is also a critical factor for equity in education; engaging diverse families have the potential to help close opportunity gaps among groups of learners.
Realizing this potential requires a dedication to using an equity lens in all aspects of the work of meaningful family engagement practices.
The Oregon Employability Skills website has extensive resources for your work with families and caregivers as does Career Connect Oregon.
Ryan Marshall is a counselor at South Salem High School in the Salem-Keizer SD and the 2021 OSCA school counselor of the year. In this video, he provides his perspective on the value of the program improvement processes presented in Module 4. Note that Ryan calls attention to how the utilization of the processes and procedures shared in this module helped build a web of support for his team of counselors. This is an added benefit: not only do your services to your students improve, but as you share with your partners more about your program, what you do, and how your CSCP improves student outcomes, you build a web of support for your team.
Review the Course Development Template Activities for Module #4 so you are ready to respond to each item in the template as you engage with that activity/information in the module.