Teacher’s Role in Establishing Linkages among Stakeholders

Stakeholder: In education, the term stakeholder typically refers to anyone who invests in the welfare and success of a school and its students, including, Administrators, teachers, staff members, students, parents, families, community members, local business leaders, elected officials such as school board members, city councilors, collective entities, such as local businesses, organizations, advocacy groups, organizations that represent specific groups, such as teachers unions, parent-teacher organizations, and associations representing superintendents, principals, school boards etc. In a word, stakeholders have a “stake” in the school and its students. They have personal, professional, civic, or financial interest or concern. Everyone in a community is a stakeholder in the local education system. Every stakeholder plays a different, significant role in supporting the education system. For example, a stakeholder’s input and relationship with other stakeholders are important in the planning, implementation and evaluation of, say, health promotion and education programs in schools. Parents, on the other hand, can support and influence the adoption and implementation of a solid school curriculum. In addition, the parents can help monitor and evaluate the implementation of the curriculum by keeping abreast with the performance of their children, particularly by monitoring their homework activities. The parents can help teachers by monitoring the behavior and social development of their children at home, especially for children with special education needs. Thus, a healthy relationship between the teachers and stakeholders and between the stakeholder and stakeholder is important, as this will enable everybody to harmoniously work together, which will have a positive impact on the students. It requires schools to develop strong cross-sectoral collaboration with a wide range of external stakeholders. Each stakeholder plays a role to support the learner’s educational journey and nurture their learning experience. Different stakeholders can bring diverse and complementary perspectives in understanding barriers to learning and can offer solutions. They can also help to address barriers to learning beyond those in the immediate school environment. For example, by improving housing conditions, supporting parents to access employment, improving access to healthcare and other services.

Teachers play a vital role in linking all of the stakeholders because he/she is the one who has a link with each stakeholder. There can be several steps a teacher can follow to link the stakeholders. These are as follows:

Ø  A teacher will communicate to the stakeholders.

Ø  As a teacher, he/she will be knowing about the purpose or aim of the school. Thus, he will be informing the stakeholders about the mission of school.

Ø  By informing about the mission, a teacher will actually be persuading the stakeholders to invest in the welfare of school.

Ø  He will provide them the layout of the school’s purpose and the steps that school will follow to achieve the goal and the role of the each stakeholder in paving the way of success for the school.

Ø  Once all the stakeholders are ready to invest in the school, then teacher will inform each stakeholders about all of the other stakeholders and the contributions that they all will make in the well-being of school and students.

Ø  Then, a teacher will provide them a platform to meet up and know comprehensively about one another.

Ø  Through meeting, they all will be knowing about the school, the stakeholders, the contribution of each stakeholder, the outcomes that the school will get by the contribution of each stakeholder.

Ø  When each stakeholder will know about each other and interact, their link will be strong and they will be more motivated to invest by seeing the participation of other stakeholders.

Ø  For interaction, a formal meeting and gathering can be arranged.

Ø  Meeting should be arranged consistently after the period of six month because only a single meeting is not enough to know about one another.

Ø  At each meeting, they will be talking about the future goals and participation in the welfare of the school.

Ø  A teacher will also involve these stakeholders in the process of planning, implementation and evaluation.