Strengthening Family and Child Equity

 

IPI is committed to producing and presenting trusted, best-in-class modern parenting education and family management content fueled by a distinctly modern urban cultural sensibility. We engage our parents, supporters, communities, and colleagues by inspiring, engaging, educating, and reflecting a diversity of perspectives to culturally enrich the life experience of families, communities, and especially those with children in need, at risk, and under-served.

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It is a given that teachers and student support staff face a complex continuum of learner motivation. This fact requires schools to provide a range of ways to enhance students' academic performance engagement.  Parent engagement involves engaging and maintaining employment and re-engaging those disconnected due to various life issues, including poverty, health, unemployment, illiteracy, parenting skills, grief, and pure lack of inspiration and motivation, encouragement,  or support. To do all this effectively, parents expertise must broaden their understanding of motivation, especially intrinsic motivation and the complex relationship between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.  To this end, there is growing support for parenting as a learned experience (training required) rather than an innate experience if children are to achieve their highest educational equity across their life span.

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Unfortunately, maintaining engagement with parents and students is a widespread school problem.  For those students who become disengaged from classroom learning, the disconnection is symptomatic of one or more causal factors and an additional factor exacerbating learning, behavior, and emotional problems.

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A prominent focus should be on how to (a) motivate the many students and parents who need help to engage and (b) re-engage those who have disengaged.  Of particular concern, too, is what teachers and parents should do when they encounter a student who is disengaged and misbehaving in school and at home.  In many ways, these matters are at the core of enhancing school climate.

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IPI continuously stresses the importance of focusing on motivation, especially intrinsic motivation, in all facets of our work.  In this context, we have developed a variety of resources intended to help advance the efforts of parents and those working in and with schools to support in-need and at-risk children and parents with maintaining and retaining access equity through strengthening parent, child, family, and academic equity.