As you have learned, one way to involve families is to use storybooks. For this assignment read this article on The Literacy Benefits of Listening. As well, review this
blog posting (Links to an external site.)
by Erika Burton on Parent Involvement in Early Literacy. Finally, read this article by Children’s Book Council on how to choose books for children to read.
Choose a storybook from either your local library or one that you may use with your own children at home.
Then, from the resources above and your readings from the text, create a lesson to engage children and their families. Your lesson should include the following elements and should be four-six pages in length not including the title and references page. You will need to include at least three credible sources, one of which must be your text. Use all three sources to cite your work and be sure to use correct APA formatting as per the Ashford Writing Center Guidelines.
· Summarize the text in your own words. Describe your rational for choosing the book and what you hope to accomplish by using it with your students and their families.
· Write a family letter about your chosen story book and invite families to attend school to take part in group activities related to the book.
· Create at least five discussion questions to use with your students and their families.
· Describe two different activities that can be completed by families and their children in the classroom. Be sure to cite your source(s) for these activities.
· Describe one activity that can be completed by the family at home. Be sure to cite your source for this activity.
· Create an evaluation form to solicit feedback from parents and students to assess the value of this program.
Carefully review the
Grading Rubric (Links to an external site.)
for the criteria that will be used to evaluate your assignment.see full work attached
Week 2
Assignment Using a Storybook to Involve Families
As you have learned, one way to involve families is to use storybooks. For this assignment read this article on The Literacy Benefits of Listening. As well, review this
blog posting (Links to an external site.)
by Erika Burton on Parent Involvement in Early Literacy. Finally, read this article by Children’s Book Council on how to choose books for children to read.
Choose a storybook from either your local library or one that you may use with your own children at home.
Then, from the resources above and your readings from the text, create a lesson to engage children and their families. Your lesson should include the following elements and should be four-six pages in length not including the title and references page. You will need to include at least three credible sources, one of which must be your text. Use all three sources to cite your work and be sure to use correct APA formatting as per the Ashford Writing Center Guidelines.
· Summarize the text in your own words. Describe your rational for choosing the book and what you hope to accomplish by using it with your students and their families.
· Write a family letter about your chosen story book and invite families to attend school to take part in group activities related to the book.
· Create at least five discussion questions to use with your students and their families.
· Describe two different activities that can be completed by families and their children in the classroom. Be sure to cite your source(s) for these activities.
· Describe one activity that can be completed by the family at home. Be sure to cite your source for this activity.
· Create an evaluation form to solicit feedback from parents and students to assess the value of this program.
Carefully review the
Grading Rubric (Links to an external site.)
for the criteria that will be used to evaluate your assignment.
Instructor Guidance
Week 2
Welcome to the second week of our class. In this week, we build on the paradigm of collaboration that we saw in week 1. This week, you are asked create some specific strategies to develop collaboration, summarize research about the effectiveness of family and school collaboration, and create a literacy project that promotes family involvement. This is a hefty set of learning outcomes for the week, but I’m certain that if you read the text and the additional resources, you will have no trouble in being successful. There are resources from the US Department of Education, the National Education Association, and a group that has been around for a long time, Reading Is Fundamental.
As part of this class, we are examining the connection between family and school. When we think about the families of the students we have in school today, we have to consider their cultural background. An individual’s culture has a strong influence on attitudes, values, and behavior. Developing a classroom that is culturally responsive is necessary. According to the author, creating a culturally responsive school is a collaborative task requiring the school and the families to work together (Amatea, 2013). This fits completely within the collaborative paradigm described in week 1.
In the first discussion for this week, you will create an activity that will engage multiple families at school. The goal here is to work on projects that have a group focus and that are engaging to multiple people. Following on chapter 1 of the text, we want to ensure that families become a participant in children’s learning. As you are describing your activity, be sure to use the required resources. You are asked to cite at least one source in addition to the textbook. There are some sample sources provided.
In the second discussion for this week, you are asked to go to the Ashford Library and find an article or report that describes the importance of the family-school relationship. Summarize the article and identify how you would implement the information in your own classroom. Please be sure to cite the source in full APA.
This week’s written assignment asks you to use a storybook to involve families in your classroom or school. First, take some time to review sources provided in the assignment. Using these resources, you are asked to create a lesson that will engage children and their families. You will summarize the text that you chose, describe the rationale of the book you chose, write a letter to families inviting them to participate, create discussion questions and activities, and create an evaluation that will ask for feedback from parents and students. This is a big assignment, but if you use the resources well, you can create a wonderful activity that students enjoy and that involves their families. Please be sure to follow the guidelines in the posted assignment. You should have somewhere between four and six pages, not including the title page and reference page. Be sure that you cite all sources of information, according to APA guidelines.
References
Amatea, E. S. (2013). Building culturally responsive family-school relationships (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.
Readings
1. Read from your text,
Building culturally responsive family-school relationships
:
· Chapter 3: Building Culturally Responsive Family-School Partnerships: Essential Beliefs, Strategies, and Skills
2. Reveiw the following material:
b.
Ashford University Library (Links to an external site.)
. (http://library.ashford.edu/index.aspx)
1. This website will assist you in your Week 2 Discussion 2. To access the full library website, you need to enter the Library either via the Library link within your student portal or through the Library link within your online classroom.
b. Burton, E. (2013, January 8).
Parent involvement in early literacy (Links to an external site.)
[Blog post]. Retrieved from https://www.edutopia.org/blog/parent-involvement-in-early-literacy-erika-burton
b. Children’s Book Council. (n.d.).
Choosing a child’s book
. Retrieved from http://www.readingrockets.org/article/choosing-childs-book.
b. Scholastic. (n.d.)
The literary benefits of listening
. Retrieved from http://www.scholastic.com/parents/resources/article/developing-reading-skills/literacy-benefits-listening
Recommended Resources
1. U.S. Department of Education. (2009, October 26).
Tools for student success (Links to an external site.)
. Retrieved from
https://www2.ed.gov/parents/academic/help/tools-for-success/index.html (Links to an external site.)
2. National Education Association. (2017).
Achievement gaps (Links to an external site.)
. Retrieved from http://www.nea.org/home/AchievementGaps.html
CHAPTER 3 Building Culturally Responsive Family–School Partnerships: Essential Beliefs, Strategies, and Skills
Ellen S. Amatea
Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter, you will be able to:
■ Summarize the essential beliefs about family–school partnerships that guide educators’ professional practice.
■ Describe specific strategies that an individual teacher might use to develop collaborative relations with his/her students’ caregivers.
■ Summarize the specific aspects of a school’s social climate that might be altered to create a more collaborative family–school environment.
■ Describe specific core routines that can be redesigned to enhance the climate of family–school relations across a classroom or school.
■ Discuss the structural supports needed to create family–school partnerships.
■ Summarize the research evidence about the effectiveness of family–school collaboration.
■ Outline the essential attitudes and skills needed by educators committed to building collaborative family–school partnerships.
I was surprised to learn how many of the messages we send to parents from schools have been about the school telling parents what to do. We need to make our family–school communication more two-way so we can learn from families as well as they can learn from us.
I never thought about how intimidating the school and teachers are to some parents, particularly those who did not have good experiences in their own schooling. I need to recognize that parents/families may have very different perspectives on my invitations from the school.
I am recognizing that if we only contact parents when there is a problem, they will continue to dread interacting with schools and teachers.
Like the educators depicted in the previous comments, many educators are beginning to realize that the traditional ways that schools have interacted with caregivers can often put them on the defensive. To send a different message to families—especially those who are culturally diverse—these educators are redesigning both how they think and how they act with the families of their students. Rather than having a one-sided focus on getting parents involved, these educators are using a variety of ways to come together with families to enhance children’s school performance and development. How are they doing this? What theories and ways of working with families do they rely on? How are their new ways of working responsive to the widely varying cultural backgrounds of today’s students and families? In this chapter, we discuss the distinctive beliefs that underlie a culturally responsive approach to family–school collaboration and the theories on which it is based. We then illustrate how these ways of thinking have been translated into action by showcasing the practices of individual educators and of school-wide teams committed to developing these types of family–school relations. Finally, we discuss the skills required to create such partnerships and describe how we will examine them in this book.
3.1 Thinking and Working as Partners
The word partnership refers to a relationship that involves close cooperation between people who have joint rights and responsibilities (Merriam-Webster OnLine, 2006). As early as 1989, Seeley proposed that educators move from thinking of their relationship with students’ families in terms of service delivery—provider and client or of professionals and target populations—to one of partnership characterized by common goals and complementary efforts. Illustrative of this shift from viewing families as clients to viewing them as partners was the work of Swap (1993), who spoke to the need for a “true partnership” between families and educators characterized by a mutuality of interaction. She states:
A true partnership is a transforming vision of school life based on collegiality, experimentation, mutual support, and joint problem solving. It is based on the assumption that parents and educators are members of a partnership who have a common goal: generally improving the school and supporting the success of all children in the school. (p. 56)
Although thinking of families and educators as partners does not refer to a specific approach or set of activities, it is characterized by a common set of beliefs and expectations:
1. A belief that all families are knowledgeable experts who powerfully influence their children’s in-school and out-of-school learning. Educators who collaborate with families are aware of the many forms that families may take and the many ways that families may influence children’s learning, both in school and out of school. As a result, these educators define a family as including two or more people who regard themselves as a family and who carry out the functions that families typically perform. These people may or may not be related by blood or marriage and may or may not usually live together. In addition, these educators believe that it is important to build on, rather than ignore, the strengths and ways of knowing of these families. This requires that educators learn from families about how they uniquely function and the challenges they face in rearing their children; seek to understand their diverse strengths and perspectives; and utilize the skills, experiences, and wisdom that families can share with them.
2. An expectation that educators will seek ways to reach out, listen to, and understand the unique needs, perspectives, and strengths of families and to use that information to enhance children’s learning. Some families have no difficulty in initiating contact with the school and expressing their perspectives and concerns. Other families, particularly those who have had negative experiences with schools or come from cultures that differ markedly from the middle-class culture of most schools, are intimidated by schools and teachers and avoid contact with the school. Many families expect the school to contact them only when their child has a problem. Educators committed to building collaborative relationships with families are aware of the differences in power and resources that can block caregivers from interacting with school staff. Rather than expect parents to bridge the economic and cultural gap, these educators assume that it is their responsibility to develop ways to interact with and involve all families in their children’s learning, not only with those families who are easy to talk with or easy to reach. In addition, these educators seek out ways to learn about and build on families’ distinctive cultural values, expectations, and social and economic resources.
3. A belief that sharing responsibility for educating children can best be fostered by schools developing a school-wide climate characterized by trust, two-way communication, and mutual support in achieving their educational aims for students. Educators who view parents as partners and co-decision-makers design their family–school routines (e.g., orientations, parent–teacher conferences, school-written communications) so that care-givers have meaningful and active roles. Rather than involve parents only as consent givers or audience members, these educators actively involve families in the planning and decision making about their children’s educational experiences. To do this, educators invite parents to participate in new ways in resolving children’s academic and behavioral difficulties and to practice “no-fault” problem solving. In this approach to problem solving, both parents and students are invited to play an active and co-expert role with teachers in developing concrete action plans in which everyone (family and school) has a task to do to help the child.
4. An expectation that educators will develop positive, nonproblematic ways to interact with families in the educational process of their children, and recognizing that this may look different for different families. Many educators are recognizing that investing in building relationships with families and developing trust before a problem emerges can make any problem-focused interaction run more smoothly. Looking at how they might “Dig the well before they are thirsty,” these educators are creating opportunities to get to know and become known by their students’ families, and to build trust with the caregivers of their students. Rather than communicate with families only when there is a problem, these educators are creating opportunities for ongoing, routine, and informal communication between the school and families for the purpose of sharing information, developing educational plans, and solving problems. This requires that teachers learn how to (a) reach out to get acquainted with student’s families, (b) design family–school interactions in which all their students’ families can participate, and (c) tie family–school contacts to children’s learning and development.
5. A belief that sharing responsibility for educating children can best be fostered by reaching out and engaging members of the larger community in developing their assets and resources to support the development of children and families. Many educators are recognizing that they must think about what children and families experience beyond the school walls. This requires educators to learn about what children and families need during out-of-school as well as in-school time and to create community resources to meet those needs. To do this, many educators are working to make their schools a vital hub for community support of children and their families, either by helping community members develop a stronger network of community resources and social ties, or by offering to function as a school-based health center that provides referral or direct community social services to families.
Translating Beliefs into Action
How are educators translating these beliefs into action? Current-day educators have developed a variety of different approaches and strategies to create culturally responsive family–school partnerships. These approaches differ in terms of whether the change agent is an individual teacher concerned with adopting a practice for connecting with the families of their students or a team of educators who are promoting a school-wide practice/program that they expect their entire school staff will adopt. Moreover, the target audience for these strategies may be (a) an individual caregiver/family, (b) a group of caregivers or families in a teacher’s classroom, or (c) all of the families enrolled in a particular school. Finally, these strategies may differ in terms of the depth of influence in educational decision making expected from the family. The depth of family influence may range along a continuum from (a) activities/strategies in which educators reach out and elicit the caregivers’ perspective but do not directly involved them in the learning and teaching process, to (b) activities in which educators both elicit and actively use caregiver perspectives in the teaching and learning process.
Table 3.1
depicts different strategies that educators have developed that vary in terms of who is the change agent (i.e., individual teacher or school-wide team) and what is the level of influence of students’ caregivers in student learning (i.e., either caregiver contacted but not actively involved in actual teaching and learning process, or caregiver contacted and actively involved in child’s learning and problem solving). As you can see, the individual teacher strategies can range from activities that build a connection with caregivers, such as
Welcome Letters
and
Teacher Storybooks
, to activities in which teachers invite families to become significant participants in their children’s learning by contributing their oral or written words, ideas, and experiences as part of the text of schooling.
Strategies implemented by a school-wide team typically involve a team of educators redesigning their existing parent–school activities. These activities can range from those designed to create a more welcoming climate for families—through back-to-school orientations or school letters—to activities that give families a more powerful voice in decision making about their children, such as family–school problem-solving meetings, or student-led progress evaluation practices. The school-wide team focus is well illustrated in the work of the Family–School Collaboration Project of the Ackerman Institute (Weiss & Edwards, 1992) and the work of Amatea, Daniels, Bringman, & Vandiver, (2004), Epstein, (2010) and Comer, (2004).
These individual teacher and school-wide team approaches to developing family–school partnerships have been implemented in a wide variety of schools serving culturally diverse student populations. Thus, each approach provides a unique avenue for rethinking and redesigning family–school interactions so that educators are more responsive to culturally diverse students and families. In the next sections, we examine specific strategies illustrative of each of these approaches.
TABLE 3.1 Change Agent for Family–School Collaboration and Level of Family Influence
Individual Teacher Change Agent |
School-Wide Team Change Agent |
Limited Influence of Family on Educator Decision Making |
|
Welcome Letters |
Back-to-School/Program Orientation |
Teacher Newsletters |
|
Teacher Storybooks |
School Letters/Newsletters |
Family/Home Visits |
|
Substantive Influence of Family on Educator Decision Making |
|
Family Storybooks |
Student-Led Parent Conferences |
Interactive Family Homework |
Special Education Planning Meeting |
Family Funds of Knowledge Lessons |
Family–School Problem-Solving Meeting |
3.2 Collaborative Strategies Used by Individual Teachers
Many educators are committed to developing positive and collaborative relationships with their students’ families so that students can become more confident and competent learners. Three types of relationship-building strategies have been depicted in the professional literature: (a) reaching out and sharing oneself with families, (b) valuing and affirming family expertise and ways of knowing, and (c) involving parents as significant participants in children’s learning.
Reaching Out and Sharing Oneself
Many educators emphasize the need to establish personal relationships with their students’ families characterized by trust and understanding. One strategy for creating such relationships is to reach out and share oneself with students’ families. A teacher might reach out and become known to students’ families in a number of different ways. First, a teacher might make immediate personal contact either before school starts or in the first weeks of school when the parents bring their children to school. Alternatively, teachers might send home letters that express their pleasure in having the child in their class, meeting the parents, and inviting the parent into the classroom to see how their children are learning. Not only is it important to ensure that the letter is written in the home language of the child, but also that the tone of the letter is friendly and inviting. (This may require the teacher to establish relationships with someone whom they can rely on to translate their letter into the home language of the child and to convey a friendly tone.)
Figure 3.1
depicts an example of a letter that one first-grade teacher wrote and sent home.
Figure 3.1
Teacher’s Introductory Letter to Family
To make parents feel more comfortable with them, teachers also look for ways to share information about who they are and what they are like. As described in her book Building Communities of Learners, McCaleb (1994) reported one creative way that a teacher described herself and her curriculum to parents by creating and sharing a storybook that she had written about herself and her own family.
The teacher explained that all of the children in the class would become authors that year by writing and illustrating their own books and that with many of these books they would be seeking their family’s participation or asking for their help. The teacher then confessed that she had written a short book about herself that she was soon planning to read to the students, but that she would first like to read it to the parents. It began with an old black-and-white baby snapshot from her family album and talked about where she was born. A beautiful picture of her parent’s wedding was also included, alongside a picture of herself when she was three, wearing her favorite bathrobe. Another picture of the teacher was included as a youngster being lovingly carried by her parents and another with a baby goat named Schwenley, whose mother had gone away. The teacher also had included some pictures of her travels to Latin America before she became a teacher and mother. Finally, she had pictures of her husband, her children, and other children she had taught. When the story was finished, the parents applauded. In the parents’ eyes, the teacher was becoming a real human being. (p. 35)
Other teachers talk about sharing poems or pictures of themselves and their own families during back-to-school nights as a way to bridge the social distance between themselves and their students’ caregivers (Ada & Campoy, 2003). These books authored by teachers also encourage students’ own writing, and play a significant role in helping to create a bridge between students and their parents or relatives. Teachers can begin this process by writing a personal book about themselves, their families, their aspirations, or their life experiences. When they subsequently share this book with students’ families in a meeting at school or invite students to share this book with their families, they are opening the door to a closer relationship with students’ caregivers.
In earlier chapters we note that many parents from economically or culturally marginalized groups often feel intimated by the school their child attends. They may have lacked the opportunity to attend school themselves, or their own school experiences may have been painful. They may look on the teacher with respect, but they may also feel a great distance. By choosing to create books about themselves, their families, or their life experiences, teachers open a different route of communication with parents. Such books written by teachers can also serve as a catalyst to help parents or caregivers feel more comfortable sharing information about their own histories and life experiences. When their stories subsequently become the subject matter for books written in the classroom by students, a stronger relationship link is created. According to Ada and Campoy (2003),
There are certain human experiences we can all relate to. We all have names, we all have relatives and friends, and we all have life experiences. In everyone’s life there is someone who has served as a model, an inspiration, someone who can be remembered with kindness and appreciation. At this very human level, there are no false distinctions between the teacher and the parents. (p. 33)
If you were to develop storybook about yourself and your family that you could use to introduce yourself to your students and their caregivers, how would you go about it? In Reflective Exercise 3.1, we ask you to create such a storybook by which you might share some of who you are with your future students and their families.
REFLECTIVE EXERCISE 3.1 Creating a Teacher Storybook: I Am
We invite you to create a storybook about yourself to share with your students and their caregivers. In deciding what to depict in your story, it helps to first think about the multiple ways that we define ourselves. Ada and Campoy (2003) offer useful suggestions for how you might create such a storybook:
We might define ourselves by our relationships—as daughters, mothers, grandson, nieces, aunts…. Or we might define ourselves by what we are drawn to—we are lovers of plants, birds, nature, cars, music, art—or by things we know how to do—we are cooks, artists, builders, listeners…. Choose one of these ways to define yourself and illustrate your story with drawings or photographs. Also this approach is an easy model for students and parents to follow if you want to have them make storybooks. At the same time, it is very personal; no two books will ever be alike. (p. 56)
Valuing and Affirming Family Expertise
An effective strategy for building trusting relationships with families that can directly influence how teachers develop their instruction is to make it part of their routine to invite families to share their perspective and expertise about their child. Rather than assume that the educator is the sole expert, these educators look for ways to learn from and use the parents’ perspective. You might decide that at your back-to-school night activities, you might ask the parents in attendance to help you make a list of what they thought would be important for their children to learn during the year. Another way that educators profit from parents’ expertise and knowledge is through requesting them to tell us about their children. This might take the form of the teacher sending a letter home requesting the parent/caregiver to tell them about their child, such as in the following case:
One teacher issued an open-ended invitation to parents at the beginning of the year. She wrote: “Welcome to third grade! It’s always exciting to start a new school year with a new group of students. I am looking forward to working with your child. Would you please take a few moments and tell me about your child?” Every parent wrote back. They shared how very special their child was in their family. They shared tips and talents, information about illnesses and family situations, and, most of all, the love they have for these special children. (Shockley, Michalove, & Allen, 1995, p. 19)
One might decide, however, that the task of writing a letter is too challenging for some parents and instead visit each family to learn from them and have them get to know you. One group of teachers (Kyle, McIntyre, Miller, & Moore, 2002), who believed that the low-income caregivers of their students might be intimidated by the task of writing about their child, initiated a routine of making family visits in which they visited children’s homes and invited parents to talk with them about their children’s strengths and interests. They differentiated these visits from the traditional home visit conducted when professionals believed there was something wrong in the home. Instead, these family visits were a way to gain information about a family’s educational and cultural practices that the teachers could use to improve what they did in school. A teacher could learn not only more about a child, but also about the unique circumstances of the family. These authors (Kyle, McIntyre, Miller, & Moore, 2002) report:
Through our family visits we learned of the schedules and circumstances of our families’ lives and gained a deeper understanding of the relationship between home and school from the parents’ perspectives. We learned how much time the families have to read to their children or help with homework projects and during what part of the day this gets done. We learned about who works and when they work and who is without work. We learned of family problems that interfere with the child’s sleep and homework. We learned about who cooks dinner and whether they use recipes or read off packages to prepare food. We learned which parents struggle with literacy and how they try to compensate. We also learned who teaches their children and how they do it. (p. 65)
Involving Families as Significant Participants in Children’s Learning
Teachers’ assumptions about the family environment of their students can either build links between home and school or sever them. In the separation and remediation paradigms, the diverse social, economic, linguistic, and cultural practices of some families are represented as serious deficits rather than as valued knowledge. Yet the belief that “These kids don’t live in a good environment” can destroy the very relationship a teacher is trying to create. In the collaboration paradigm, rather than ignoring families’ ways of knowing, educators seek to build on culturally diverse students’ and families’ experiences and knowledge by first focusing on learning about what students already know from their home and community, and then designing instructional activities that are meaningful to students in terms of this locally constructed knowledge.
McCaleb (1994) describes one teacher’s application of this teaching philosophy that involved first-grade children and their non-English-speaking families developing individual family storybooks. The teacher chose themes for the books based on the participants’ common interest in improving their children’s literacy. The goals of the book development project were to (a) create a tool to give voice to parents and encourage their participation in the school, (b) offer them an opportunity through dialogue to nurture their children’s literacy by engaging in literacy development activities with their children, and (c) celebrate and validate their home culture and family concerns and aspirations. McCaleb reports the following:
In the first book development session that involved both parents and children, I explained to the participants how to make a simple bound book with masking tape, needle, thread, and glue. At the end of the session, they had completed a book with blank pages, ready for words and illustrations. I then asked them to try to write a story in which their children and other family members appear as the principal characters. I suggested that the parent could write the words and that the child could do the illustrations, or that the whole effort could be collaborative. I encouraged them to include photographs and collage materials (which they had in their supply box). Encouraging students and their families to write stories about themselves gives them the opportunity to be the main characters in a story that the child reads and other children will read in class. Not only are the children excited, but also parents feel that their experiences are heard. (pp. 114–116)
Ada and Campoy (2003) expanded on McCaleb’s approach by designing a process of writing and publishing books in the classroom authored by students and their families that served as a cultural bridge between home and school and fostered respectful family-school interaction. As Ada and Campoy note:
When students are encouraged to write books that reflect their own experiences, valuable bridges are built between the worlds of home and school. Although all students benefit from a stronger home–school interaction, the benefits are even more significant for students who come from a marginalized culture. For unless students feel that the two worlds of home and school understand, respect, and celebrate each other, they will be torn between the two. (p. 33)
There are a variety of ways in which students’ parents/caregivers can be invited to become authors in the classroom. They can
■ Visit the classroom during or after school hours and write their own books with the teacher
■ Participate in an afternoon or evening program to write books collectively
■ Write their books independently at home
■ Give their children oral and or written feedback so that students can write books about their parents’ thoughts and experiences.
However, it is important to design the authoring experience so that parents are successful. Hence, Ada and Campoy suggest: (a) keep the process simple, (b) be positive in your expectations, (c) be patient, and (d) share and celebrate each contribution. In
Figure 3.2
we illustrate how Ada and Campoy invited parents to become authors of family storybooks with their children.
Figure 3.2
Parents’ Collective Writing: We Are
Source: Ada, Alma Flor; Campoy, F. Isabel, Authors in the Classroom: A Transformative Education Process, © 2003. Reprinted by permission of Pearson Education, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ.
As you can see this process honors the communities in which students belong, portrays the life experiences of children’s families, and recognizes the accumulated wisdom of caregivers and other family members. These types of activities underscore the importance of empowering parents to contribute intellectually to the development of lessons by using the funds of knowledge of the family. We define a family’s funds of knowledge as the various social and linguistic practices and the historically accumulated bodies of knowledge that are essential to students’ homes and communities (Moll & Gonzãlez, 1993). Gonzãlez, Moll, and Amanti (2005) recommend assessing the funds of knowledge in the family and community and then using this knowledge to teach academic concepts. For example, they describe how a teacher discovered that many parents in a Latin community where she taught had expertise in building construction. As a result, she developed a unit on construction, which included reading, writing, speaking, and building, all with the help of responsive community experts—the children’s parents. Another teacher (Gonzãlez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005) assessed the funds of knowledge of one of her students through a home visit. She discovered that one of her students was quite the little merchant, selling candy that the family brought back from their numerous trips to Mexico to children in his neighborhood. As she talked with the family and learned of the mother’s candy-making abilities, the teacher decided to develop a curriculum unit around the use of mathematics and culture in candy making and invited the mother to help her develop some of the learning activities and to demonstrate candy making in the classroom. We describe these strategies in more depth in
Chapter 9
.
REFLECTIVE EXERCISE 3.2
How do you think you might go about learning more about the families of your students? How might this information be useful to you as you plan lessons that might fully engage your students? What might be the benefits of using these instructional methods?
Designing Interactive Homework
Homework is a leading factor for improving students’ academic performance. When parents are interested in young children’s homework, students are more likely to successfully complete their homework assignments. Thus, several educators have begun to experiment with ways that parents might play a more meaningful role in assisting young children in homework. In contrast to traditional approaches of having parents help their child with homework, interactive homework is designed to promote meaningful conversations between family members and their children. Yet injecting homework into students’ homes without regard to their background can be ineffective and patronizing. Teachers should only assign such homework after having some opportunities to get to know students’ parents so that they can become more fully aware of the child and family’s competencies and resources. Under the auspices of the National Network of Partnership Schools, Epstein and Van Voorhis (2001) developed sample interactive homework lessons for various content areas.
Figure 3.3
is an example of such a lesson.
Figure 3.3
Language Arts Interactive Homework Assignment: Hairy Tales
Source: Epstein, J. L., Salinas, K. C., Jackson, V., & Van Voorhis, F. E. (2000). Teachers Involve Parents in Schoolwork (TIPS) Interactive Homework for the Middle Grades. Baltimore: Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships, Johns Hopkins University. (Adapted for the elementary grades.) Also see
www.partnershipschools.org
and the TIPS section. Reprinted with permission.
As you can see, there are a variety of ways in which the individual teacher can build positive and trusting relationships with students’ families, ways that place families in a more influential role in helping teachers develop and implement effective learning experiences for children. As children’s caregivers feel respected and comfortable with their child’s teacher, they are more willing to share their family world with educators who can then develop instructional strategies that more directly include families in their children learning.
3.3 School-Wide Collaborative Strategies
In contrast to the strategies implemented solely by an individual teacher in her classroom, many educators are joining forces to focus on building more collaborative relations with families through changing school-wide routines and practices that affect an entire school, grade level, or special program of services. To do this, a team of educators decides to meet (typically at the invitation of their principal) to look at how staff in the school are currently interacting with families (i.e., where they are now) and how they wish to change (i.e., where they want to be) so as to interact more collaboratively with their students’ families. The team might be composed of a group of teachers from different grade levels, a school counselor or psychologist, and a school administrator; or the team might consist of educators serving a particular population of students (e.g., students who are English language learners, students with specific disabilities).
The team typically considers how they might redesign their current core routines and practices (e.g., school orientations, parent–teacher conferences, problem-solving meetings) to enhance the opportunities for collaboration and parity between themselves and students’ families. To do this, the team often uses a group problem-solving approach to assess and redesign family–school activities. This entails inviting important stakeholders/constituencies to work with the school team in (a) identifying the primary concerns experienced in the classroom or school, (b) determining the priorities among these concerns, (c) deciding who will be involved (the target group), (d) selecting a goal, (e) planning an activity and follow-up, and (f) implementing the activity and conducting a follow-up.
The team usually starts by examining the primary concerns of the school, and looking at the current school routines by which families and staff interact to determine if they might be enhanced to address the concern. The school team then plans together with other key stakeholders how they might design (or redesign) specific school practices or routines to create a more collaborative social climate between their staff and families that addresses their concerns. To determine how effectively school routines are having the desired effects, the school team often assesses specific aspects of the school’s organizational climate. Weiss and Edwards (1992) draw from the work of Taguiri (Taguiri & Litwin,1968) to define an organizational climate as a relatively enduring quality of the internal environment of an organization that (a) is experienced by its members, (b) influences their behavior and shapes how they relate to one another, and (c) can be described in terms of the values of a particular set of characteristics (or aspects) of the organization. (Later in this chapter, we describe how each of these aspects of school climate can be used to design more collaborative school practices.)
Why focus on improving the school-wide climate? First, individual educators always operate within the larger organization of the school, an organization that gives distinctive messages about the appropriate role of parents and educators. Hence, if the message that parents receive is consistent across educators, it has a more powerful impact. Second, because educators work with multiple students, they need time-efficient ways to build relationships with families in a group rather than one by one. Third, many parents cannot attend school events, volunteer at the school, or participate in school decision-making bodies on a regular basis. Therefore, it is especially important to be thoughtful about the choice of events and how they are conducted to give the message that families, students, and school staff must work together to support and enhance the education of the students. Let’s briefly describe several of the core routines that have been redesigned by school teams depicted in the works of Weiss and Edwards (1992); Amatea, Daniels, Bringman, and Vandiver (2004); and Christenson and Sheridan (2001).
Redesigning School or Program Orientations
Many educators hold meetings at the beginning of the school year to introduce parents or students to the school and its staff. Traditionally, these back-to-school programs are designed for either parents or students. Typically, they consist of one-way communication from the school to parents (or to children) about the curriculum, rules and routines, and typical procedures in the school. Although the information conveyed is important, the traditional way in which these meetings are structured often sets up a hierarchical rather than a collaborative relationship between families and schools. Weiss and Edwards (1992) describe a more collaborative format for an orientation meeting designed to send the message from the school that they need the parents as partners in educating their children.
The goal of this type of orientation is for the teacher, parents, and students to get to know one another and to send a message that “we need to work as partners to achieve quality education for our children.” To do this, the orientation includes the students, as well as the teacher and parents, and gives each an active role and an opportunity for meaningful discussion. One teacher invited participants to first discuss their goals for the school year together in family dyads and then report them to the rest of the group. The teacher listed the family’s goals on the board, identified commonalities, and then linked the family’s goals to the teacher’s goals for the year. Another teacher invited parents and students to first discuss students’ strengths and ways they could make progress, then pooled these ideas, and linked them to the teacher’s goals and planned activities. Because the orientation occurs at the beginning of the school year, the effects on students’ families can be powerful. The teacher has an opportunity to demonstrate group problem solving (obtaining information, checking for consensus, and developing joint plans) and to establish the norm of collaboration around educational goals early.
1
Sometimes there are special programs in the school (e.g., special education, English as a Second Language, a remedial reading program) that may require a separate orientation. Groups may also exist that are isolated from the rest of the school and may require their own orientation. In
Figure 3.4
, Weiss and Edwards (1992) describe one such orientation meeting for parents of students in an English as a Second Language program.
1H. Weiss and M. Edwards, “The Family–School Collaboration Project: Systemic Interventions for School Improvement,” in S. Christenson and J. Conoley (Eds.), Home–School Collaboration: Enhancing Children’s Academic and Social Competence (pp. 232–233). Copyright © 1992 by the National Association of School Psychologists, Bethesda, MD. Use is with permission of the publisher.
www.nasponline.org
Orientations such as this can affect the social system by reducing the isolation of parents. Parents can get to know the parents of other children and can see the children with whom their child will be in school. Parents might also decide to set up their own network to organize volunteer projects for the school or to pass on communications from the school. A meeting of this type can also allow the teacher to get to know the different parents and children in the class, and vice versa, thus addressing the milieu of the classroom. Attention to the ecology is also important. Letters sent to parents communicate the expectation of a family–school partnership and welcome questions from parents. Engaging the students in the preparation of the invitations for the meeting, and in verbally inviting their parents to attend, is a strong physical channel that invites participation.
Table 3.2
depicts some of the key differences between these types of collaborative orientations and the more traditional style orientation. We describe this collaborative style orientation in more detail in
Chapter 8
.
Figure 3.4
Sharing the Meanings of School: A Special Orientation
Source: H. Weiss and M. Edwards, “The Family–School Collaboration Project: Systemic Interventions for School Improvement,” in S. Christenson and J. Conoley (Eds.), Home–School Collaboration: Enhancing Children’s Academic and Social Competence (p. 234). Copyright © 1992 by the National Association of School Psychologists, Bethesda, MD. Use is with permission of the publisher.
www.nasponline.org
REFLECTIVE EXERCISE 3.3
When you were a student in school, did you invite your parent/caregiver to attend a back-to-school night or orientation? Did you attend, and were you involved as an active participant? What was your parents’ role? Would you design such an event differently?
Restructuring Family–Teacher Conferences as Student Progress Conferences
Another activity that many educators are redesigning to enhance the collaborative climate is the traditional parent–teacher conference. Because parent–teacher conferences are a common mode for parents and teachers to have face-to-face interaction, they can be a powerful vehicle for reshaping family–school relationships. In the traditional parent–teacher conference, the teacher is central, parents have a passive role, and students are typically not included. Although teachers are expected to offer parents regular opportunities to confer about their child’s progress in the elementary grades and in the middle and high school grades, conferences are usually scheduled only when a student is experiencing problems. Often, communication at these meetings is one-way, from teacher to parent. As a result, many parents are unsure what they can do to influence their children’s learning or achievement. In contrast, collaborative educators are redesigning these conferences as family–teacher–student progress conferences, in which the teacher, parents, and student meet together. In these meetings, each of the participants has an opportunity to talk about what is going well and not so well, and then through consensus a plan is developed that helps the child improve.
TABLE 3.2 Comparison of Traditional and Collaborative Family–School Core Activities and Routines
Traditional |
Collaborative |
Orientations |
|
Goal is to provide information to parents. |
Goal is to get to know one another and establish partnership. |
Parents are passive recipients of information. |
Parents are active participants. |
Child is left out. |
Child is included. |
Family–School Progress Conferences |
|
Teacher is central. |
Teacher is part of team with parents and child. |
Child is left out or is passive audience. |
Child is active participant and prepared beforehand. |
Family–School Problem-Solving Meetings |
|
Calling in parents is often used as a threat. |
Parents are seen as an important resource for solving problems. |
Child is left out of process. |
Child is central to process. |
Parents hear one of two messages: (1) “Fix your child,” or (2) “Here is what we are going to do to fix your child.” |
Parents, school staff, and child work together to arrive at a joint solution. |
Parent, teacher, or child feels blamed for the problem. |
Blame is blocked. |
Source: Used with permission of Howard M. Weiss, Center for Family–School Collaboration, Ackerman Institute for the Family, New York, NY.
To make their parent–teacher conferences more collaborative, one group of educators (Amatea, Daniels, Bringman, & Vandiver, 2004) introduced a student-led parent conference format. Drawing from the work of Austin (1994), they set as their goal the development of a new conference format in which students would share their school progress (academic and behavioral) and develop a plan together with their parents for how to move forward. In this new format, students prepared a portfolio of their work during class time, presented it to their parent(s), and together with their parent(s) assessed their current strengths and weaknesses and brainstormed necessary steps they could take to move forward. These student-led conferences occurred in a large group meeting, in which, after the teacher introduced the conference format and provided ideas for the parents’ role in the conference, student and parent dyads met simultaneously together to review their portfolio and plan. We describe this strategy in more detail in
Chapter 10
.
Although there are a variety of ways in which student-led parent conferences might be formatted (e.g., involving the individual teacher, student, and parents in a meeting; having the student and parent meet, with the teacher merely starting the event), each format can have a powerful effect on the climate between the school and family. The milieu changes by including the child because, in any activity, it is important for all relevant constituents to be present. This new approach enhances students’ skills in self-reflection, cooperative planning and problem solving, and communicating with their parents in a respectful and cooperative manner. The changes also affect the school culture by building the norm that a collaborative approach to education is more effective and reinforcing the belief that children ought to be involved in the discussions and planning around their own education.
REFLECTIVE EXERCISE 3.4
What were your experiences of your parents’ meetings with your teacher(s) to discuss your school progress? Were you included? Did you have an important role? Were you interested in what was talked about? If you were included in such a meeting, were you prepared for your role in it?
Rethinking Problem-Solving Meetings
Educators have a long tradition of meeting with parents, usually the mother, when children are experiencing difficulties at school (Christenson & Sheridan, 2001). Students are usually left out of these conversations or included only as a punitive measure. Typically, these are conversations in which the teacher tells parents the nature of their child’s problem and recommends a particular solution (such as telling parents how they need to fix their child or how the school plans to fix the child).
Educators interested in collaboration have developed a very different format for such problem-focused meetings in which parents and students are invited to play active and co-expert roles with teachers and have renamed these meetings family–school problem-solving meetings. In these meetings, teachers first solicit everyone’s perspective regarding their concerns, and then the participants then prioritize these concerns and select a target concern. Next, the participants develop a concrete action plan together to address the concern with the family (student and parents), in which everyone (family and school) has a task to do to help the child. This action plan is written down and a copy is made for the family and teacher(s). What is unique about this family–school problem-solving format is its task focus, blocking of blame, and involvement of the child as well as the teacher and caregiver as persons who could contribute to resolving the child’s problems. The message of this meeting format to parents is that the student/child can be helped only when everyone—including the student—works together.
The idea of including the child in an active, problem-solving role in such a meeting, along with the parents and teachers, was first proposed by Weiss and Edwards (1992) of the Ackerman Family Institute, who initiated this meeting format in their work with the New York City public schools in the late 1990s. We describe this problem-solving meeting format in more detail in
Chapter 11
. Using this group problem-solving meeting format with students and their families across an entire school, Amatea et al. (2004) report the following benefits:
First, the children had an opportunity to observe their parents and teachers cooperating. In addition, they heard the same message coming from both parents and teachers and had an opportunity to clarify the expectations that adults had for them, as well as those that parents and teachers had for each other. Another benefit derived from students being invited to come to such meetings was that they could be “experts on themselves” because they were the best suited to describe their own experience. Including the student as an active participant also increased the student’s ownership of the plans and solutions that the teachers developed in the meeting. Finally, including the children gave the teachers an opportunity to teach them how to function as active participants in conferences organized to address their problems. (p. 402)
Revising Written Communications
Another type of climate-building strategy involves the written communications sent from the school to parents. The way in which school memos or letters are written always sends a powerful message to parents about the relationships that the school wants to have with them. An underlying goal of written communications of educators interested in collaboration is to provide consistent messages to families that the school will work with them in a collaborative way to promote the educational success of the student. Weiss and Edwards (1992) emphasize that a school staff must examine the messages they send to parents. If the school staff want to send consistent and positive messages to parents about collaboration, they may need to examine and possibly revise existing letters so that they send such messages as (a) “We want to build a working partnership with you/families”; (b) “We know that your input is essential for the educational success of your child”; and (c) “If there is a problem, we can and will work together with you to find a solution.” These messages are quite different from the authoritarian tone conveyed by letters that contain phrases such as: “We regret to inform you that your son/daughter may not be promoted to the next grade,” or “You are required to attend a meeting to discuss your son’s/daughter’s academic progress,” or “Please come to a meeting where the team will present their assessment findings to you and make recommendations for your child’s placement.” Rather than emphasizing the power of the school, a collaborative message must convey the notion that all of the resources of the school, parents, and students (i.e., shared power) are needed to help students do as well as they can in school. Hence, a different message about the same types of situations might be, “We share your concern for your child’s education. We are holding a group meeting for parents, children, and teachers to discuss ideas and suggestions about how to help children improve their school performance. Teachers will also be available for individual family conferences following the meeting.”
3.4 Using School Climate Dimensions to Redesign School Routines
How do we change the climate of interaction with families in a school? Where do we start? Before making changes in a particular family–school routine, we must determine what are the current norms of their school, how these norms organize interactions with and beliefs about students’ families, the consequences of these interactional patterns and beliefs, and what alternative ways of relating might be developed. For example, staff may find that many activities at their school are based on the assumption that the parent is the cause for the student’s misbehavior or poor academic performance and hence must assume responsibility for improving it. Weiss and Edwards (1992) recommend that staff look at how they are now interacting with families with an eye toward determining whether these practices address the goals they wish to meet and provide the messages they want to send to caregiv-ers/family members and students (
Figure 3.5
gives examples of illustrative goals).
Figure 3.5
General Goals for Creating Collaborative Family–School Relationships
To do this, school teams must first assess how effective are the existing school activities and routines in sending a message that educators value families and wish to collaborate with them. For example, does a current practice in which all families are to be engaged with educators make culturally marginalized or linguistically diverse families feel included—that their culture and their competence and their language are respected and valued? Do families feel their involvement in a particular activity is meaningful (i.e., that what they are being asked to do is something that they believe will really contribute to their child’s achievement or motivation)? Do families understand what is being asked of them in a particular activity? Are families invited to engage in activities that they feel able to do in terms of skill and time resources (e.g., events are scheduled with family work hours in mind)?
Weiss and Edwards (1992) describe four aspects of a school’s organizational climate that can be used to determine whether existing school routines are having these desired effects and to redesign those routines: the school’s (a) culture, (b) milieu, (c) social system, and (d) ecology. The first aspect of school climate, the culture, is defined as the belief systems, values, general cognitive structure, and meanings that characterize the social environment. A school’s culture is composed of beliefs associated with how children learn, with the value of education in one’s life, with specific ideas about how teaching and learning should occur or be evaluated, with the conception of children’s problems and how to solve them, or with the meanings attributed to the language used in schools (e.g., the “English only” debate).
The second aspect of climate, the milieu of the organization, refers to the characteristics of persons and groups involved with the organization. A school’s milieu captures the characteristics of the specific persons and groups that make up the family–school community, such as the morale of the school staff, or parent/family racial and ethnic backgrounds; socioeconomic status; level of education; age and experience as parents; previous experiences with schools; and specific role expectations for how families and educators should interact. In many schools, the families and school staff are composed of a wide range of ethnic heritages, socioeconomic statuses, role expectations, and previous experiences with schools; in other schools, the milieu may be more homogeneous. Being aware of and respecting the diversity of cultural heritages and resources represented by families is a necessary precondition to designing effective family–school activities and routines.
The third aspect, the social system, consists of the patterned ways in which school staff, family members, and students relate with one another. These relationship patterns might range from being hierarchical to collaborative, from shared leadership to solitary leadership, from adversarial to allied, from alienated to close, and from task focused to emotion focused. For example, the usual ways of communicating among teachers and parents might be face-to-face (e.g., when parents drop off or pick up their children at school), by computer (e.g., email, web pages), by telephone, or by written letters or notes.
The fourth aspect, the ecology, is composed of the physical and material aspects of the organizational environment. In a school, this might encompass (a) the arrangement and condition of classrooms and other spaces designated for particular purposes; (b) the design and condition of school buildings; (c) signs and bulletin boards; (d) letters and messages; (e) the condition of telephone and intercom systems; (f) the computer system; (g) money; (h) time; (i) quality of educational materials; (j) allocation of resources, such as the scheduling of classes; and (k) the nature of the surrounding neighborhood and transportation systems.
These four aspects of organizational climate are also used by Weiss and Edwards (1992) to guide a school staff in the process of designing family–school activities by serving as a checklist. For example, do the aspects of the school ecology send messages of collaboration and partnership, or messages of domination and disconnection? Do signs at points of entry to the school welcome parents and invite their involvement, or do they emphasize the school’s position of power and control? Is the central school office organized in a way that it separates the staff from family members by a high physical barrier behind which one must wait to be recognized, or is the office open and accessible? Does the condition of the classrooms or building have an inviting, yet purposeful quality? Will the planned activity increase a sense of shared power for both family and school? Does the activity take into account the attributes of the specific persons and groups who are to be involved? Will it promote interactions in which families, students, and school staff share information, make plans, and solve problems together? Although all four aspects of a school’s climate are attended to, Weiss and Edwards (1992) emphasize that the nature of the social interactions (i.e., social system) and the physical characteristics of the environment (i.e., ecology) are often the most useful entry points for change. Reflective Exercise 3.5 offers guidelines for conducting an assessment of a school core routine using the climate dimensions discussed here.
REFLECTIVE EXERCISE 3.5 Assessing the Climate of a School Core Routine
Instructions: Reflect either on the way a school core routine you have experienced was conducted or assess the back-to-school night/orientation described by Stephen’s parent in the previous chapter. Use the following five questions to assess the message intended by this activity, and the four aspects of the schools’ climate carrying that message. Then discuss how effective was the activity in creating a collaborative family-school climate.
Message: What was the purpose or educational goal of the activity?
Aspects of the Climate:
Culture:
What messages were being conveyed regarding values, norms, and beliefs of the school and teacher?
Milieu:
Who was included, and in what capacity? How were their characteristics considered in designing the activity?
Social System:
How were interactions structured between persons and groups to reach the goal and convey the message? What were the roles of the people involved?
Ecology:
What physical and material aspects of the environment conveyed the message?
Source: Workshop materials developed by H. Weiss, The Family–School Collaboration Project, Ackerman Institute for the Family. New York. Adapted with permission of Howard We
3.5 Structural Supports for School-Wide Collaboration
Most educators involved in family–school collaboration recommend that the principal be committed to family–school collaboration as central to academic and social school activities and must communicate this commitment to staff, parents, and students. (In
Chapter 14
we describe some of the ways that the principal might function to support such an effort.) In addition, an action team or coordinating committee of school staff (and, ultimately, family members) should be established at the school to initiate efforts to assess current family–school relationships and identify areas of need, to plan key family–school activities, and to obtain feedback from parents and students about these activities. Finally, a family–school coordinator should be designated at the school site to organize and facilitate activities to enhance family–school relationships.
With these supports, educators can implement a philosophy of collaboration that pervades everything that happens in the school. In these ways, individuals who may initially seem different because of diverse educational background, culture, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status can get to know one another. They can develop an alliance based on their shared vested interest that the family and school have in each child’s educational progress and social/emotional development. As a result, they can begin to communicate regularly and reciprocally, develop trust in one another, and find ways to cooperate in educating the children. In the final chapter of this book, we describe the school-wide efforts of school staffs to change their ways of interacting with their students’ caregivers.
However, this way of thinking and working cannot be mandated, nor can it be rushed. Although there may be a school or district policy to enhance parent involvement, both educators and caregivers need to believe in the value and benefit of collaboration. As Fullan (1996) notes, “If you try to mandate certain things—such as skills, attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs—your attempt to achieve change starts to break down. Where change is mandated, policies at best are likely to achieve only superficial compliance” (p. 496).
Moreover, one single activity or event does not by itself change the quality of family–school relations, nor do any number of activities when they are experienced as “one-shot” events. Hence, most schools must develop a repertoire of routines and activities that influence how parents and students see the school and staff. This idea of building a repertoire of interventions over time is reflected in the comments of one principal whose school had been involved over 3 years in such efforts.
You know, in the first year, I thought family–school collaboration was having a meeting with the child, parents and school staff when the child was having trouble in school. In the second year, I revised that and thought that family–school collaboration was changing our parent–teacher conferences into progress conferences involving the child in leading his/her conference. In the third year, I revised that and thought that family–school collaboration was about climate-building activities that involved the whole school. Now I realize it’s none of these things. Family–school collaboration is a process, a philosophy that pervades everything you do in the school. (Amatea & Vandiver, 2004, p. 332)
REFLECTIVE EXERCISE 3.6
You probably have noted that some of the schoolwide practices we describe might be implemented by an individual teacher and vice versa (i.e., the practices we describe that individual teachers have developed might be adopted by an entire program or school staff). How might you go about building support for introducing a new strategy into your classroom or school? How would you feel as a member of a school team working to redesign a particular school routine?
3.6 Evidence of Effectiveness
Although considerable research has been made on the parent involvement practices driven by the remediation paradigm, the effect of the collaborative relationships among parents, teachers, and schools on children’s school outcomes is a recent area of study. Four of the programs we discuss in this book—McCaleb’s (1994) Building Community of Learners Program, Comer’s School Development Program (Comer, 2004; Comer & Haynes, 1991; Comer, Haynes, Joyner, & Ben-Avie, 1996), Epstein’s (2010) National Network of Partnership Schools, and Weiss and Edwards’ (1992) Family–School Collaboration Project—report successful outcomes. Parents in McCaleb’s program increased their involvement in their children’s school and became more empowered in communicating with school staff. Research studies (Comer, Haynes, Joyner, & Ben-Avie, 1996; Cook, Murphy, & Hunt, 2000) on Comer’s program demonstrate that SDP schools have been very successful in increasing the academic achievement of low-income, inner-city students with improvement in attendance, overall academic achievement, behavioral problems, parent–teacher communication, and parent participation in school activities. The Teachers Involve Parents in Schoolwork (TIPS), sponsored by the National Network for Partnership Schools, carried out research on the efficacy of interactive homework and developed criteria for designing such homework as a result of its study of the impact of this practice on families (Epstein, 2010). Research conducted on the Family–School Collaboration Project reports that project schools significantly increased parent–teacher communication and parent attendance in parent–teacher conferences and other school activities (Weiss, 1996).
3.7 Developing Your Skills in Family–School Collaboration
As you can see, collaborating with families may take many forms. Underlying these various educational practices are some important skills. In
Chapter 2
we illustrate the nature of collaborative family–school relations as a stationary bridge that forms a connecting path between the worlds of home and school that students traverse each day. If you recall, the bridge symbolizes the nature and quality of the family–school relationship. In a solid bridge that one trusts to have their child cross, the family–school relationship is strong, predictable, and positive. If the family–school relationship is weak, the bridge does not offer reliable support to the child who traverses the path between home and school. Hence, the child cannot depend on it as a trustworthy resource. In
Figure 3.6
, six pillars supporting the bridge and denote the six foundational skills needed to build strong working relationships with your students’ families. Let’s describe these six skills.
Skill 1: Understanding Yourself, Your Personal Reactions, and Attitudes
Figure 3.6
The Foundational Pillars/Supports for the Bridge Between Home and School
Why take the time to develop relationships with your students’ families? After all, don’t you have enough to do just working with their children? Why can’t you just follow the traditional way of relating to parents, of calling them in only when a problem arises and otherwise leaving them alone? Teachers may have this common reaction to the idea of reaching out and learning from families. It may be fueled by the anxiety of not knowing how to relate to parents who look and act far differently from themselves, or the concern that the teacher may “lose control” of their classroom if they invite in parents who become overintrusive and demanding. Obviously, your emotional reactions and attitudes are important to understand as you undertake this new role. The more you are aware of and understand your own emotional reactions and attitudes toward change and difference, the more you can decide how to proceed in trying out new behaviors. This personal understanding can also help you understand and appreciate the attitudes and emotional reactions of others.
You may be familiar with the concept of personality type that owes its existence to the work of Carl Jung and two American women, Katherine Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers. Intrigued with similarities and differences in human personalities, Briggs and Myers (as reported in Myers & Kirby, 1994) developed a system for “typing” people that can be useful for predicting how you will respond to others and they to you. Although there are four different dimensions that Briggs and Myers developed for typing people, we focus here only on the extraversion/introversion dimension. This aspect of personality, which concerns how we prefer to interact with the world and where we direct our energy, greatly affects how you might choose to interact with the families of your students and they with you.
According to Tieger and Barron-Tieger (1995), each of us has a natural preference for living either in the world outside ourselves or the world inside ourselves, although by necessity we do function in both. We call those who prefer the outer world extraverts and those who prefer the inner world introverts. Most people think that extraverted means “talkative” and introverted means “shy.” (This is a good example of how the terms used to describe personality preferences can be somewhat misleading.) However, there is far more to extraversion and introversion than talkativeness.
Because they focus their energy in opposite directions, there are profound differences between extraverts and introverts. Extraverts focus their attention and energy on the world outside of themselves. They seek out other people and enjoy lots of interaction, whether one-on-one or in groups. They are constantly (and naturally) pulled to the outer world of people and things. Because extraverts must experience the world to understand it, they tend to like a lot of activity. As Tieger and Barron-Tieger (1995) note,
Extroverts get their “batteries charged up” by being with others and usually know a lot of people. Because they like to be at the center of the action and are approachable, they tend to meet new people frequently and with ease. Extraverts look at a situation and ask themselves, How do I (or might I) affect this? (p. 14)
Introverts focus their attention and energy on the world inside themselves. Tieger and Barron-Tieger (1995) describe introverts as
Enjoying spending time alone and need this time to “recharge their batteries.” They try to understand the world before they experience it, which means a lot of their activity is mental. As a result, introverts tend to prefer social interaction on a smaller scale—one-on-one or in small groups. They avoid being the center of attention, are generally more reserved than extraverts, and prefer to get to know new people slowly. (p. 14)
Introverts look at a situation and ask themselves, “How does this affect me, or how does this affect the people with whom I am interacting?”
As you might conclude, extraverts tend to be much more public than introverts and share personal information freely. Asked a question, an extravert usually starts talking, thinking out loud (in the outer world) to think through an answer. In contrast, introverts are more private, and there is often a pause before an introvert answers a question, because introverts are more comfortable thinking silently (in the inner world). As a result, Tieger and Barron-Tieger emphasize that introverts and extroverts have different gifts. Usually extraverts are interested in many things, but not necessarily at a very deep level. In contrast, introverts have fewer interests, but pursue them in much greater depth. Hence, extroverts have the gift of breadth and introverts have the gift of depth.
Now that you have read about extraverts and introverts, can you guess which one you are? How might this knowledge be useful in anticipating how you might interact with students’ caregivers? Because students also prefer one or the other styles of interaction, how might this affect how you respond to them? We have noticed that many elementary teachers are extraverts, so they tend to move quickly from one child to the next and from one topic to the next. Many extraverted teachers realize that when they learned to wait just a few seconds after asking an introverted child (or parent) a question, they began to get much more participation from them. We believe that to work effectively with students and their families, you must be willing to explore and examine your own personal style as well as your emotional reactions and beliefs; and reflect on how these affect your relationships with students, their families, and other school staff. Throughout this book, we will invite you to reflect on your attitudes and personal reactions to specific families and their situations and your beliefs and expectations as to how you should structure your interactions with families. We find this to be an important first step toward working effectively with others.
Skill 2: Understanding and Valuing Family and Community Strengths
How do families contribute to their children’s academic development? Do they differ in how they rear their children? What life-cycle experiences do families go through that affect their resources and their abilities to foster their children’s learning? Just as it is important for you to understand yourself to function as a competent and compassionate educator, you must also understand families. Traditionally, many educators viewed nontraditional family forms, families with limited incomes, those from minority groups, and those with children born out of wedlock as being deficient or defective. As a result, those educators thought such families needed remediation and parent education. However, the collaborative approach to working with families requires that you recognize and appreciate the unique ways that families influence children’s learning, both in school and out of school, and build on, rather than ignore, those strengths and ways of knowing. This requires that you learn how to look for family strengths and build on them. To do this, you must learn from families about how they function, appreciate the challenges that families face in rearing children, and seek to understand their diverse strengths and perspectives. In addition, you must learn about the distinctive cultural values, expectations, and social and economic resources that families possess and build on those resources and strengths. Part II is devoted to (a) understanding more fully how families function to influence children’s learning, (b) appreciating the unique challenges and stresses they experience, and (c) recognizing the impact of diversity of family cultural backgrounds and of their socioeconomic circumstances. Part II introduces you to ways of looking at family life and assessing family strengths, whereas Part III introduces you to specific strategies you can use to reach out and learn from families.
Skill 3: Reaching Out and Communicating
There has always been communication between school staff and students’ families. However, in the past, schools and families rarely established ongoing and routine vehicles or opportunities for sharing information in a two-way dialogue. One reason for this is that school staff often lacked the skills necessary to elicit input from parents and students or to use that input constructively. When parents and teachers talked, they often talked at each other, not with each other. In addition, the interactions that occurred between the family and school were triggered exclusively by problems. As a result, most communication that parents had with the school was negative and problem focused and was typically authoritarian and one way (from the school to the home). School staff told families what to do, and families generally expected interactions to be negative. School staff did not place much value in interacting with students’ families, believing it would take too much valuable time away from teaching. Families were only contacted when educators had a problem they could not solve.
As you read in this chapter, collaborative educators are moving away from the “No news is good news” mentality (i.e., contacting parents only when there is a problem) and are recognizing that investing in building relationships with families and developing trust before a problem emerges can make any problem-focused interaction run more smoothly. Looking at how they might “Dig the well, before they are thirsty,” they are creating opportunities to get to know and become known by their students’ families, and to build trust in the parents of their students. Hence, they are creating opportunities for ongoing, routine communication between the school and families for the purpose of sharing information, developing educational plans, and solving problems. This requires that you learn how to (a) reach out and communicate with students’ families, (b) design family–school interactions for all students’ families, and (c) tie family–school contact to children’s learning. In Part III, we describe in detail the skills and practices that you will need to engage in collaboration and introduce you to specific skills for developing family–school activities that allow you to create regular vehicles for communicating with your students’ families.
Skill 4: Understanding and Appreciating Family Diversity
Family diversity refers to the different elements that shape family members’ sense of identity, such as the family’s composition, culture, economic circumstances, and religious beliefs. We assume that each of the social groups to which a family belongs contributes to the construction of their identity as a family as well as to the identity of individual family members. Many factors shape our cultural identity and family group identity, such as race, ethnicity, immigration status, gender, religion, geographic location, income status, sexual orientation, disability status, and occupation. Appreciating/honoring family cultural diversity means (a) reaching out to people with cultural identities different from your own by learning about the assumptions, belief systems, role perceptions, and prejudices that may affect how families rear their children and interact with the school and larger community; (b) developing opportunities to incorporate the unique skills of families from different cultural contexts into their children’s learning; (c) creating comfortable and respectful relationships with them; and (d) tailoring family–school activities to the constraints and capacities of individual families. In Part II, we look at the diversity of family cultural backgrounds and social and economic circumstances and the unique strengths and stresses of these families. In Part III, we introduce strategies for tailoring family–school activities to the diverse cultural backgrounds of your students’ families.
Skill 5: Building in Opportunities for Positive Nonproblematic Family–School Interaction
Collaborative educators are creating opportunities for interaction with parents that are driven more by a desire to build positive alliances with them rather than to respond only to problems. By making current school activities (e.g., parent orientation night, letters to parents) more positive and engaging, and by communicating with parents about the positives as well as negatives of their children’s school life, educators are creating opportunities for interaction that are not problem-driven only. To do this, you must know how to (a) carefully assess the current family–school activities and communication you engage in and (b) redesign these activities so as to create more positive and meaningful roles for parents and students. In
Chapters 8
,
9
, and
10
, we describe specific skills and practices for designing nonproblematic opportunities for families to participate in their children’s learning and schooling.
Skill 6: Creating Active and Co-Decision-Making Roles in Planning and Problem Solving and Accessing Needed Services
To develop strong and collaborative relationships with students and their families you should create active and co-decision-making roles for them in matters concerning their child. For example, to solve a child’s problems, it is important to restructure the nature of your problem-solving efforts with students’ families so that the major focus of these efforts shifts from assigning blame (i.e., determining who caused the problem) to addressing what solutions and people are available to help solve a problem. To do this, you should develop skills in conducting meetings to which both parents and students are invited to play an active and co-expert role with you in developing a concrete action plan in which everyone (family and school) has a task to do to help the child.
Chapters 11
,
12
, and
13
are devoted to showcasing the skills for conducting group problem-solving meetings with families in the context of resolving children’s academic and behavioral problems, of individualizing educational plans for students with special learning needs, and of accessing community resources to meet family needs.
Discussion
As you can see, the process of developing a collaborative family–school philosophy is a developmental process that occurs over time and involves a multitude of skills. Even when you are committed to a philosophy of partnership, learning how you might restructure your typical ways of interacting with families can be a challenging experience. Discovering how you might invite families into their children’s educational process—how to invite their input, how to seek consensus, and how to develop joint plans and decisions—involves new types of learning for most educators. Hence, it is important as you learn of these possibilities and to be patient with yourself as your try out these ways of working with families from your own classroom or school.
Summary
In this chapter, we looked at how educators are redesigning the nature of their relationships with culturally diverse families to be more collaborative. We looked at the typical ways of thinking and working with families that these educators have developed. We then described how these ways of thinking and working to develop collaborative relations have been translated into both strategies that an individual teacher might choose to implement or those that a team of school professionals might implement. The individual teacher strategies include (a) reaching out and sharing oneself with families, (b) valuing and affirming family expertise and ways of knowing, and (c) involving parents as significant participants in children’s learning. In contrast, school team strategies typically focus on (a) redesigning existing school routines, such as orientations or parent–teacher conferences, to be more collaborative; (b) creating more positive and nonproblematic family–school interactions and communication; or (c) redesigning family–school problem solving and blocking blame. Development of these strategies is enhanced by examining the specific message of social connectedness to be sent via the four aspects of a school’s climate: (a) culture, (b) milieu, (c) social system, and (d) ecology.
Finally, we describe six skills needed to develop such family–school partnerships that are showcased in this book: (a) understanding oneself, one’s personal preferences, beliefs, and attitudes; (b) understanding families and communities and valuing their strengths; (c) reaching out and communicating; (d) understanding and appreciating family diversity; (e) building in opportunities for positive nonproblematic family–school interaction; and (f) creating active and co-decision-making roles for families.
Activities and Questions
1. Discuss the essential beliefs about family–school partnerships embraced by many educators.
2. Describe three strategies that you as an individual teacher might use to build a collaborative relationship with your students’ families.
3. Describe three practices or school routines that a school team might choose to redesign to create a more collaborative climate of family–school relations.
4. Conduct a family–school climate assessment of a type of communication that a school has with students’ families. What is the purpose of this communication? What are the characteristics of the families that are the audience for this communication? What message is sent about how the staff expects roles to be structured? What does the physical ecology of the communication convey to families? What does this tell you about the norms of this school and beliefs about families and their expected contribution to children’s learning?
Resources
Family Involvement Network of Educators (FINE), Harvard Family Research Project
3 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Phone: 617-495-9108
www.gse.harvard.edu/~hfrp/
FINE is a national network of more than 3,000 people who are committed to promoting strong partnerships between children’s educators, their families, and their communities. There is no cost to join. Members receive free monthly announcement through email of resources related to partnerships; information online includes research, training tools, model programs, and other topics of interest.
National Coalition for Parent Involvement in Education (NCPIE)
1201 16th St NW, Suite 317
Washington, DC 20036
Phone: 202-822-7312
www.ncpie.org
NCPIE is a non-profit organization aiming to advocate the involvement of parents and families in their children’s education, and to foster relationships among home, school, and community to enhance the education of all our nation’s young people.