Engagement of parents and community and collaboration between parents and school managing authorities are ideals that are vigorously advocated in the literature globally (Agbo, 2007; Hands, 2010). However, many factors block engagement, either because of a schools’ actions or because of parental busy- ness or alienation. Such blocks occur in Europe as well as developing countries.

The key aim of this study is to examine how stakeholders’ engagement in Bangladeshi rural secondary schools can be improved in order to increase stakeholders’ empowerment as well as students’ learning achievements. Parents, Teachers and School Management committee (SMC) will be considered as stakeholders. This study is situated in the rural context of Bangladesh, where different professional development initiatives have been taken for secondary schools’ improvement. However, there is still little research about the process and results of such programmes. So there is also little research about how engagement could be effective for school improvement. In order to move rural schools forward in Bangladesh, it is important to explore the current practices of stakeholders’ engagement and to examine how engagement might be further developed.

What are stakeholders’ understandings of engagement in selected rural secondary education schools in Bangladesh? What are their current practices of engagement? What kind of changes in engagement might begin to develop among stakeholders as a result of increased awareness? These questions are the focus of my study.

This study is significant in the context of Bangladesh for many reasons. Stakeholders’ engagement in this context is very limited. This study will first investigate existing practices of engagement; identify achievements, problems, possibilities, expectations of the participants, based in five rural schools. In a second stage some participants may explore further engagement.

An initial stage of this study will examine the understandings of engagement held by the stakeholders in the Bangladeshi rural schools, and their ideas of how their co- operative initiatives might lead to their own satisfaction as well as improved student learning. This stage will track the nature of stakeholders’ relationships with the school and each other. Then, this study will provoke the participants to think further about nature of engagement, based on participant’s descriptions of their current practices and experiences.

In keeping with the principles of Participatory Action Research (PAR), the second stage will track the planning, action, and critical reflections of the participants. As Kemmis and McTaggart (1988) describe, action research is a form of collective self- reflective inquiry that can be undertaken by the teachers, principals, parents and other community members in a school environment, in order to improve educational practices.

Improved teaching- learning processes are mainly based on increasing teacher’s content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge. These are developed in teacher’s pre- service or in service training. At the same time, these capabilities are influenced by which teachers’ individual motivation and dispositional factors (Schieb & Karabenick, 2011). This study explores how teacher motivation may be enhance by stakeholder engagement.

It is hoped that increased stakeholder engagement may lead teachers to investigate their own capability, reality and identify opportunities for maximizing student learning achievement in the classroom level. Motivational support from the stakeholders will prompt teacher self-reflection. Stakeholder’s motivational support is very important, because, newly recruited teachers tend to lose motivation on teaching career due to the absence of administrative and parental support (Bishop, 2006).

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