PERCEPTIONS OF HOME-SCHOOL PARTNERSHIP AMONG ACADEMICALLY TRAINED ARAB EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATORS IN ISRAEL: A QUALITATIVE STUDY OF THE LINK BETWEEN PARENT-TEACHER PARTNERSHIP AND CHILDREN'S BEHAVIORAL SELF-REGULATION AND CONFIDENCE

Ola Abu Raiya

Abstract


Partnership between parents and kindergarten teachers is widely credited with shaping young children's development, yet little is known about how Arab early childhood educators in Israel understand this link in their own professional world. The present study examined how academically trained Arab educators perceive the connection between home-school partnership and children's behavioral self-regulation and confidence. A qualitative interpretive design was adopted, grounded in a constructivist worldview, and thirty female educators from the Galilee, the Triangle, and the Negev were interviewed in Arabic through a semi-structured protocol built around four thematic axes. Transcripts were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis, and four themes emerged. Educators described a professional journey from a defensive stance toward parents to a collaborative leadership style, portrayed children as a behavioral mirror of the teacher-parent relationship, identified parental presence in the kindergarten as an engine of child self-efficacy, and reported turning to digital tools to work around time poverty and geographic barriers. The findings are integrated into a proposed model, the Triadic Synergy of Trust, which ties educator leadership, home-school alignment, and cultural validation to a state of behavioral synchronicity in the child. Implications for the training of future educators and for partnership policy in the Arab sector are discussed.

Keywords


home-school partnership, parental involvement, arab early childhood educators, behavioral self-regulation, child confidence, qualitative research, Israel

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.46827/ejes.v13i7.6896

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