Book by Muamer Tinjak "How We Built the Partnership between Family and School" Presented

SARAJEVO, (Patria) - The promotion of the book by Dr. Muamer Tinjak "How We Built the Partnership between Family and School" was held in Sarajevo.

- I had the opportunity to visit schools in Italy and Turkey where I had the chance, through conversations with teachers, to exchange opinions on how important parental involvement is in all school processes as an indispensable form of support for the school's work and the child's progress. This book also contains research on good practices from a total of 20 European Union countries that we covered in the project Strengthening Teacher Competencies for Cooperation with Parents. We are happy that we can provide these examples of good practices to schools in Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as to schools in the European Union as an example of good practice that they can use, adapt, and apply in their work with students and their parents – said the author.

Tinjak pointed out that the goal of the book is to present quality ideas that certainly exist in our schools.

- My wish was to somehow standardize what we have been doing for years and establish it as a system that is continuously applied in our work. Once we managed to establish that, we wanted it to be recorded in this manual that is before us tonight and made available to the wider public. The fact is that in our schools there are a lot of quality ideas that are implemented as good practices, but no one records or publishes them, so they disappear over time. Because of this fact, we constantly try to invent something new.

However, if we consider that an idea can be seen as a different combination of the existing and the known, our job will be easier if we return to our experience, our good practices, and of course share them with others, exchange, improve, and enhance them. In this way, our work will be quality and easier. We are not all Einsteins to constantly invent something new, why not try and use something that other professionals in education have already examined, tested, tried, and standardized. This is especially useful for young people who are just starting work, who have no experience and who encounter many unknowns, if we enable them to use examples of good practice that have already been recognized as good practice in education.

Some of these practices have already been mentioned, I will mention the one that is especially dear to me, and that is the education of parents of future first-graders, which we did with parents who enrolled their child in the first grade and are waiting for testing with a lot of questions in their heads: what to do, whether the child should study, whether to organize tutoring, what to buy for the child, what the school will provide, what subjects are in school, who the teacher will be, how many shifts there are, how many classes, and numerous other questions to which we very successfully gave answers to curious, and in some cases even frightened and worried parents.

It turned out to be a very good practice because we noticed that on the first day of school, our parents bring their child completely relieved of all those worries with a smile on their face without questions and anxiety. The book contains useful examples of instruments for non-experimental observation of the family-school partnership that enable a researcher who wants to determine the current state of the family-school partnership and discover areas of possible improvement if they want to work on improving the family-school partnership – Tinjak pointed out.

The author added that the book was created with the aim of finding better solutions between school and family.

- This book was born out of the need to examine existing practices, but also with the aim of offering better solutions at the level of partnership between family and school. The relations between family and school are based on the knowledge of modern pedagogical theory and practice, whose cooperation affects the quality of socialization that young people go through from an early age, and which largely determines that person. In modern conditions, family and school have almost equal importance and role in socialization, but that does not automatically make them good collaborators or opponents in this process. The relations of the most responsible factors in the family (parents, guardians, and other influential relatives) and the most responsible factors in the school (teachers, professional associates, teaching assistants, members of school management) imply a strategy, mutual respect, and respect for the autonomy of each participant.

At the end of the book promotion, the author pointed out that we live in a time based on constant learning and development and that improving cooperation with parents is of great importance.

- Factors that largely determine the quality of these relationships also have a significant impact, and these are individual characteristics of teachers and parents, specific family and school factors, and social influences. All mentioned factors act synergistically and significantly determine the course and quality of these relationships. And finally, modern tendencies of social development have shown that education is at the very top of the priorities of global national strategies.

Continuous changes in society, accelerated scientific and technological growth, and the expansion of modern achievements require continuous work and development in all segments of the educational system, including the improvement of cooperation with parents. Modern society develops on knowledge in which education and learning have the status of basic instruments of this entire development. Parents get the role of a group that participates equally in the educational work of the school. The school, as a very complex system, i.e., a subsystem of a larger number of systems – legal, local – concluded Tinjak.