STIMULATING PARENTS’ INITIATIVE AS A CHALLENGE FOR CONTEMPORARY EDUCATIONAL LEADERS

In literature, parents’ activity in the school life is called ‘parental involvement’ or ‘parental engagement.’ In this division, ‘parental involvement’ means that parents perform actions proposed or invented by the school. Whereas ‘engagement’ is linked to parents’ own initiatives in various areas of school’s functioning.

Stimulating this sort of parents’ activity is one of the challenges for contemporary educational leaders. It is connected to evoking parents’ involvement and creativity and building a sense of responsibility, self-assurance and influence in them. It serves the process of the emergence of leaders among parents. This paper is trying to deal with this question. We have conducted an analysis of school heads’ statements on ways of stimulating parents’ initiative for the sake of school and students’ development. We have also analyzed statements of parents who referred to their own activity of that kind. The data used in the analysis come from external evaluations carried out in Polish schools from 1 September 2015 to 29 February 2016 with reference to the standard ‘Parents are school’s partners.’