The teachers´ and the parents´ view and experience in mutual cooperation

Cooperating with parents is one of the basic tasks of every educational institution. School (i. e. teachers and other pedagogical workers) and home (i. e. parents) both take priority in childrens´ education. That is the main reason for their cooperation which takes on new challenges along the way. It takes effort on both sides to be able to cooperate and establish a good, equal relationship that needs to be changed and improved constantly, and to successfully overcome potential obstacles within various cooperating forms by using certain knowledge and skills. Only then all parties included in such cooperation can truly benefit from it. The main purpose of this paper was to explore the teachers´ as well as the parents´ points of view and their experiences in cooperating in special needs primary schools. The data was acquired by using a survey, especially designed for the purposes of this research. The methods used for the pedagogical research were the descriptive and the causal non-experimental ones. The samples of the study, i. e. 30 teachers and 55 parents, were chosen from three special needs primary schools around Carinthia. The results of the study reveal that cooperation is highly appreciated and of major importance to both the teachers as well as the parents. The parents evaluate the cooperation even more positive in comparison to the teachers. According to the teachers, parents mostly attend formal forms of cooperation, i. e. parent´s meetings, parent-teacher conferences and phone conversations, while when attending the informal forms of cooperation, parents would mostly come to various school events. Both parties are most satisfied with the listed forms of cooperation and the majority on both sides would not change any of them. However, those who would like to change some forms, chose mainly the informal ones, as they are not completely aware of their purpose and width yet. Judging from the mutual expectations stated in the survey, there is a great harmony between the actual teachers´ expectations of the parents and the parents´ opinion, and vice versa. Furthermore, both survey samples claimed mainly positive experience in their cooperation