Hong Kong Pre-service Preschool Teachers' Attitudes towards Home-school Collaboration and Their Correlates

Home-school collaboration brings benefits to families, teachers and children. This study therefore examined Hong Kong pre-service preschool teachers’ attitudes towards home-school collaboration and their correlates. Using... [ view full abstract ]

Home-school collaboration brings benefits to families, teachers and children. This study therefore examined Hong Kong pre-service preschool teachers’ attitudes towards home-school collaboration and their correlates. Using convenience sampling method, 163 pre-service teachers were recruited from an undergraduate early childhood education program to complete a questionnaire about their perceived benefits of home-school collaboration, their perceived importance, feasibility and confidence towards six types of home-school collaboration strategies, as well as the quality of their relationship with family members. Results showed that pre-service teachers in the sample generally agreed that home-school collaboration benefitted different stakeholders. “Communicating with families” was regarded as the most important and feasible, whereas “engaging families in school decisions” was perceived as the least important and feasible. “Engaging families in school decisions” and “helping families to create home environments supportive for children’s learning” were rated as areas of least confidence. Correlation analysis found that the more the perceived benefits of home-school collaboration, the more the perceived importance of the home-school collaboration strategies. Besides, the levels of cohesion and expressiveness in pre-service teachers’ own families were positively related to their perceived feasibility and confidence to adopt most of the home-school collaboration strategies. Pre-service teachers’ year of study, however, only had a significant positive correlation with the perceived importance of home-school collaboration strategies. These findings suggest that it would be good for teacher training programs to provide real-life opportunities for pre-service teachers to witness the benefits of different home-school collaboration strategies and their implementation. It is also important to provide more training to pre-service teachers (particularly those who are not used to communicate closely and openly with their own family members) on effective strategies of engaging families in children’s early learning and communicating with them in a professional and respectful manner. (Keywords: home-school collaboration, perceived importance, perceived feasibility, perceived confidence)