Create one activity (to work for a group of families) that will encourage the positive relationship between an educator and a students’ family. The academic activity/strategy should focus on the community as a whole and increasing the involvement of parents school wide. The goal is to encourage each student’s individual family to become a significant participant in their child’s learning. Name the academic activity/strategy and give an explanation of how the academic activity/strategy can change the climate of family-school relations in a school. The activity/strategy should be engaging to both students and parents and will demonstrate the understanding of how parents involvement improves students learning. You must include at least one reference, in addition to the text, to support your response. Consider using the
U.S Department of Education (Links to an external site.)
or the
National Education Association (Links to an external site.)
.See full work attached
Week 2
Discussion 1 Group Focus
Create one activity (to work for a group of families) that will encourage the positive relationship between an educator and a students’ family. The academic activity/strategy should focus on the community as a whole and increasing the involvement of parents school wide. The goal is to encourage each student’s individual family to become a significant participant in their child’s learning. Name the academic activity/strategy and give an explanation of how the academic activity/strategy can change the climate of family-school relations in a school. The activity/strategy should be engaging to both students and parents and will demonstrate the understanding of how parents involvement improves students learning. You must include at least one reference, in addition to the text, to support your response. Consider using the
U.S Department of Education (Links to an external site.)
or the
National Education Association (Links to an external site.)
.
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
Summary
In this chapter, we discussed the changing context of schooling in the United States, the research evidence that examines the influence of families on children’s school success, and the evidence on the influence of schools on families. We highlighted the revolutionary changes in teacher beliefs and practices that undergird educators’ current efforts to build more culturally responsive relationships with students and their families. These new practices require educators to (a) build on students’ and families’ funds of knowledge, (b) share the role of expert with families, (c) practice no-fault problem solving, and (d) create opportunities for nonproblematic family–school interaction. We described the benefits and barriers to be derived from these new ways of interacting with families. Finally, we discussed the philosophy and goals that underlie the development of this book.
Activities and Questions
1. Consider the dramatic demographic changes in the student population, ages birth to 17, that are predicted in the next 10 years. How might these changes affect your ideas about whom you might be teaching when you enter the profession?
2. In contrast to the traditional ways that educators relate to families, describe four ways that collaborative educators are connecting with families. Which specific changes in these teacher beliefs and practices of interacting with their students’ families seem most different from the teacher practices that you or your family experienced during your elementary and high school years of schooling?
3. Is there any evidence that parent–family involvement in their children’s schooling matters? If so, what is it?
Resources
ChildStats.gov
www.childstats.gov
ChildStats.gov
provides information on key national indicators of U.S. children’s well-being on an annual basis.
Children’s Defense Fund
www.childrensdefense.org
The Children’s Defense Fund provides effective advocacy for all children in the United States, with a particular attention to the needs of impoverished children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. This organization offers current data related to trends in children’s well-being and highly relevant publications.
CHAPTER 1 Connecting with Families: A Nice or a Necessary Practice?
Ellen S. Amatea
Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter, you will be able to
■ Describe the changing demographics of the student body and teacher workforce in U.S. schools.
■ Summarize the research documenting the differences in educational outcomes and school conditions among low-income, racially and ethnically diverse students, and middle-income student populations.
■ Describe the influence of families on children’s learning and the influence of schools on families.
■ Describe the fundamental changes in how educators who seek to make schools more responsive to culturally diverse students and their families teach and structure their relations with students, their families, and other persons in the community.
■ Explain the basis of the belief that undergirds the development of this book—that working with students’ families is a necessary, not simply a nice, aspect of educational practice.
■ Outline the benefits of these new ways of interacting with students and their families and the challenges to traditional family–school roles and practices that these ways imply.
In all likelihood, today’s teachers will work with students whose backgrounds and lives are quite different from their own. Drawing on information collected from Census 2010, it is predicted that,
although some 45% of the school population is now from racially and culturally diverse groups, by 2035, children of color will be in the majority; by 2050, they will represent 62% of the school population.
However, researchers predict that this population growth will be uneven across the United States. According to Humes, Jones, and Ramirez (
2011
), “Most of the population growth in the past ten years has been due to an increase in the Hispanic and Asian populations; but then, as now, the minority population growth was concentrated in the South and West with 10 states containing 90% of the Hispanic population, 10 containing 90% of the Asian population, and 7 with both” (p. 17).
A comparison of the racial–ethnic background of U.S. children ages 0 to 17 for 1980 and for 2010 (National Center for Education Statistics,
2010b
) illustrates how this segment of our population is shifting. As seen in
Figure 1.1
, in 1980, White, non-Hispanic children made up 74.6% of this population, but by 2010, they made up only 54% of all U.S. children ages birth to 17. There was a slight decrease of U.S. children who were Black/non-Hispanic, from 14.5% in 1980 to 14% in that category in 2010. The most dramatic population growth occurred among Hispanic children. In 1980, they made up 8.5% of U.S. children, but by 2010, they made up 23% of all children in the birth-to-17 age bracket. Similarly, although 1.7% of U.S. children were Asian or Pacific Islanders in 1980, by 2010, they made up 5.9% of the total group. Moreover, students of two or more races increased to 5% of the total group. Yet the distribution of these demographic changes occurred unevenly across the country. In only seven states (Arizona, California, Florida, Hawaii, New Mexico, Nevada, and Texas) and the District of Columbia, 50% or more of the students are children of color. Not only does
Figure 1.1
depict the percentage of U.S. children from birth to 17 years by race and Hispanic origin from 1980 to 2010, but also the projected percentage from 2010 to 2050. For example, by 2050, the White, non-Hispanic population is projected to decrease to approximately 38%, and the Hispanic population is projected to increase to about 39%.
Figure 1.1
Percentage of U.S. Children Ages Birth to 17 Years by Race and Hispanic Origin, 1980–2009; and Projected, 2010–2050
Source:
childstats.gov
. (2010). America’s Children in Brief: Key National Indicators of Well-being. Retrieved June 18, 2011, from
www.childstats.gov/americaschildren/
.
Note: Data from 2000 onward are not directly comparable with data from earlier years. Data on race and Hispanic origin are collected separately; Hispanics may be any race. In 1980 and 1990, following the 1977 White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) standards for collecting and presenting data on race, the decennial census gave respondents the option to identify with one race from the following: White, Black, American Indian or Alaskan Native, or Asian or Pacific Islander. The Census Bureau also offered an “Other” category. Beginning in 2000, following the 1977 OMB standards for collecting and presenting data on race, the decennial census gave respondents the option to identify with one or more races from the following: White, Black, Asian, American Indian or Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander. In addition, “Some other race” category was included with OMB approval. Those who chose more than one race were classified as “Two or more races.” Except for the “All other races” category, all race groups discussed from 2000 onward refer to people who indicated only one racial identity. (Those who were “Two or more races” were included in the “All other races” category, along with American Indians or Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians or Other Pacific Islanders.) Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Population Estimates and Projections.
Meanwhile, as a result of the declining enrollments of Hispanics, Asians, and African Americans in teacher education, today’s teaching force is becoming increasingly White European American. White teachers currently account for some 83% of the teaching force, and teachers of color collectively account for only 17%. Moreover, most teachers are White European Americans from middle-class backgrounds and speak English only, yet they have many students who are people of color, live in poverty, and/or speak a first language that is not English (National Center for Education Statistics,
2010a
). Because of these differing life circumstances, teachers find that they do not have the same cultural frames of reference or points of view as their students, and they live in “different existential worlds” (
Gay, 2000
, p. 23). As a result, teachers often label such children and their families as deficient and have difficulty serving as role models for their students or as cultural brokers helping students bridge the differences between their home and school worlds (
Gay, 2000
;
Goodwin, 2000
). Teachers also have difficulty in developing curriculum, instruction, and classroom interactions that are culturally responsive (
Ladson-Billings, 1995
).
Indicative of the difficulties that White, middle-class educators have had in effectively teaching students who are not like themselves is the staggering disparity in the educational outcomes and conditions for students from diverse cultural groups who are poor. The United States has the highest rate of children who live in poverty among advanced nations worldwide (
Children’s Defense Fund, 2010
), and the percentage of school-age children living in poverty increased from 15% to 19% from 2000 to 2009 (
Center for Educational Statistics, 2010
). Moreover, the number of Black and Hispanic children who live in poverty (35% and 31%, respectively) far exceeds the percentage of White children (16%). Further, more than 20% of children under age 5 are poor, with more than 40% of Black and more than 33% of Hispanic children under age 5 being poor (
Children’s Defense Fund, 2010
).
The achievement levels of Black and Hispanic students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) mathematics and reading assessments are markedly lower than levels for White students, as are high school graduation rates (
National Center for Education Statistics, 2010a
). Villegas and Lucas (
2002
) assert, “The consistent gap between racial/ethnic minority and poor students and their White, middle-class peers… is indicative of the inability of the educational system to effectively teach students of color as schools have been traditionally structured” (p. 9).
In addition to the staggering differences in educational outcomes are major differences in the allocation of resources (e.g., teacher quality, equipment, supplies, physical facilities, books, access to computer technology, class size) to urban, suburban, and rural schools (
Darling-Hammond & Young, 2002
). In addition, growing evidence shows that children of color and children who live in urban or poor areas are the most likely to have teachers who are less experienced, less well prepared, and less likely to have a regular teaching license (Clotfelter et al., 2007).
Take a moment and consider your expectations for the children you will teach by completing Reflective Exercise 1.1.
REFLECTIVE EXERCISE 1.1 Your Vision of Your Future Life as a Teacher
Imagine yourself 5 years from now. You may be starting your third or fourth year as a teacher and are reflecting on your previous experience as you prepare for the new school year. Describe the following:
1. Whom do you envision you will be teaching? (What student grade level? What type of student population in terms of race, socioeconomic status, disability?)
2. Where do you envision you will be teaching (e.g., geographic location and school site, such as urban or rural; private/public school/parochial school)?
3. What will you be teaching? (What subjects do you most enjoy? Why? What subjects do you least enjoy? Why?)
4. How will you be teaching? (What does your classroom look like? How is it equipped? How are you interacting with students?)
5. Are you interacting with anyone else?
6. How and when are you interacting with adults from students’ homes? How and when are you interacting with other adults at your school? What do you most appreciate about your relationships with these other adults?
7. Why are you teaching? (What are the personal results you want to create in the world? What is the legacy you want to leave to the children, other educators, or community with whom you work?)
Reflection:
What was it like creating your answer to this assignment? What was the hardest part to imagine? What was the easiest?
From your vision, consider the assumptions and expectations that you are noticing about the following:
What will your classroom of students be like? (Who will be your students?)
How will you teach your students so that they can learn?
What will be your role with families and the families’ role with you?
How do you expect other school staff to be involved with you?
How much did your past experiences help shape your vision about how families of students should be involved with you?
Which assumptions do you think must be examined more carefully?
1.1 The Influence of Families on Children’s School Success
What does all of this mean? Are children from poor or culturally diverse families destined to fail in school? Are such families incapable or unwilling to help their children succeed in school? As early as the 1980s, researchers who studied the family’s impact on children’s academic achievement began reporting that some children from low-income and culturally diverse families did very well in school, and that it was not the family socioeconomic status (SES), the cultural group membership, or the type of family structure (e.g., single-parent versus two-parent) that was the main predictor of children’s school success or failure (
Clark, 1983
;
Dornbush, Ritter, Leiderman, Roberts, & Fraleigh, 1987
). What appeared to make the difference was not the families’ social class position but their engagement in their children’s learning and development. As Clark (
1990
) asserts, “It was not class position that determined a family’s ability to support their children’s learning, rather it was the child’s development of ‘survival knowledge’ for competent classroom role enactment resulting from the positive attitudes and communication encounters they had with family members” (p. 121).
Since the early 1990s, many more researchers have studied the specific ways that non-White, low-income families function together to positively influence their children’s school achievements. Edin and Lein (
1997
), for example, interviewed 379 low-income, single mothers and discovered that many of these families lived in conditions of extreme poverty and deprivation yet demonstrated surprising resilience and creativity in building strategies to help their children overcome these poor life conditions. Even with low incomes and the struggles of getting and keeping public assistance, many of these families were able to keep their children in school, set family rules, get children to school on time, monitor their children’s whereabouts, organize their households, and engage their children in developmentally appropriate activities. As a result, young children in these families experienced early school success (
Hill & Craft, 2003
), and older children had higher grades and test scores, better long-term academic achievement (Jeynes, 2003), better student attendance and attitudes about school (
Eccles & Harold, 1996
), greater maturation, and more positive self-concepts (Bempechat, 1998).
What does all of this add up to? First, teachers and schools do not educate alone. Instead, a child’s family can make the difference in whether the child succeeds in gaining an education from schools. Second, educators cannot simply blame families or invoke income or social class as explanations for children’s failure to learn. Instead, educators must connect with families to bridge the chasm between the school and life experiences of those without social, cultural, racial, and economic advantages. Such an effort requires fundamental changes in the ways teachers teach and structure their relations with students, their families, and other persons in the community (
Cochran-Smith, 2004
).
1.2 Changing Models of Teaching and Learning
Historically, teachers and schools have been expected to be the exclusive experts at “delivering” education to children. They are supposed to be all-knowing, make no mistakes, be completely organized, have everything under control, and have all students on task (McCaleb, 1994). Children’s social, economic, and cultural backgrounds have often been viewed as obstacles to be addressed or overcome outside the classroom through provision of parent education or specialized mental health or social services (Dryfoos, 1994). The basic structure of roles in schools has been top-down and bureaucratic. In the past, teachers and schools did not place much value or invest much effort in building collaborative relationships with students or with their families. Instead, students and parents were expected to accommodate the school and follow its lead. Those parents who do not “come when called” by the school for various events or conferences were viewed as “not caring,” “deficient” (i.e., lacking time, interest, or competence), “hard to reach,” and “having little to offer to the education of their children” (
Lott, 2001
, p. 248).
Yet there is now overwhelming evidence that parents from all income groups care about their children, want them to succeed in school, talk about the importance of schools, and say they would like to be more involved in the school or at home in helping their children. However, many parents, especially those from lower socioeconomic groups, feel reticent about communicating with the school. These parents report feeling unsure about how to help their children succeed in school because they lack confidence, communication skills, and knowledge about the teaching and learning processes used in schools (Lareau, 2003).
In contrast to affluent parents, the communication that low-income parents have with schools is typically negative and problem-focused. Most of these parents perceive themselves as being talked down to and blamed when required to interact with school staff. Despite wanting an equal, person-to-person relationship and not a professional–client relationship with school staff, many parents report that they are often dissatisfied with school personnel who are “too business-like” or “patronizing” or who “talk down” to them. Culturally disenfranchised groups are particularly vulnerable to feelings of judgment and blame. As a result, parents often avoid contact with school staff or view them as adversaries (
Lott, 2001
, p. 255).
As schools have grown larger and busing has become a fact of life for most students, many schools have become distant and impersonal organizations for families. Although some schools are apparently committed to programs that invite community input and reflect family values, many ethnic minority parents report feeling intimidated by the large and institutional structure of the school. For some, this feeling may be based on unhappy memories of their own schooling experiences. Others may be intimidated because they are brusquely received, spoken to in a language that they do not understand, or confused by expectations that they do not think they can meet (
Finders & Lewis, 1994
;
Lott, 2001
).
Many educators are now recognizing that these traditional ways of thinking about their roles with students and their families do not work for today’s students. As educators learn more about the disparities between children’s home worlds and culture and the world and culture of school, they are discovering that the traditional ways of delivering instruction actually undermine the sense of identity and efficacy of many children (
Trumbull, Rothstein-Fisch, Greenfield, & Quiroz, 2001
).
1.3 Building on Students’ and Families’ Funds of Knowledge
When researchers began to look more closely at the educational disparities that exist among middle-class suburban and working-class and poor children, they discovered that children from different home, community, and economic backgrounds learned different “funds of knowledge” (
Velez-Ibanez & Greenberg, 1992
), and that these funds of knowledge are not treated equally in school. We use the phrase funds of knowledge to mean the various social and linguistic practices and the historically accumulated bodies of knowledge that are essential to students’ homes and communities (
Moll & González, 1993
). For example, in her influential study Ways with Words, Heath (
1983
) describes the language practices of three communities in the rural Piedmont Carolinas. One was a working-class, predominantly White community; one was a working-class, predominantly Black community; and one was a middle-class community with a history of formal schooling. Heath found that, although the people in these communities lived within a few miles of one another, they socialized their children into talking, reading, and writing in profoundly different ways.
As she followed the children into school, Heath discovered that the differences in language practices among these three groups had significant implications for the children’s academic success. To varying degrees, the children from the working-class families, both Black and White, found that they did not know how to show their teachers what they knew in ways the teacher could recognize. Further, these children were often asked to engage in activities that they did not fully understand, and found that their teacher talked in ways that were unfamiliar and confusing. Thus, from the start, the culturally diverse, low-income, or working-class children often found school to be a confusing and sometimes uncomfortable place because their ways of knowing were not culturally compatible with the schooling environment (i.e., curriculum, teaching practices, structure, content, materials, and organization). In contrast, children from the middle-class homes, where the funds of knowledge corresponded nicely to those that were valued at the school, experienced much less discontinuity. They knew what the teacher was talking about most of the time, and if they did not, they knew how to ask for help in ways that the teacher recognized. In addition, they were likely to know how to tell stories in ways that the teacher understood. As a result, school failure was a much less likely outcome for the middle-class than for the working-class children. The children from the working-class families, both Black and White, fell behind in school—some early on, others more gradually—and, eventually, dropped out of school. In contrast, the children from the middle-class families, although not all top scholars, ultimately graduated from high school.
Building on Heath’s work, other researchers have also described the discontinuities that children from diverse economic and cultural backgrounds can experience between the world that they know at home and the world of school. Valdes (
1996
) examines how schools ignore the Hispanic language and culture of its students, whereas Delpit (
2006
) demonstrates the inadvertent effect of schooling in undermining African-American students’ cultural ways of knowing. These researchers concluded that when the “ways of knowing” of the home and community are discounted or rejected (i.e., when the student believes that people at school do not value the ways of knowing that they brought with them to school), a student’s sense of competence and identity is threatened. Students then often feel forced to choose between allegiance and respect for their teacher(s) or loyalties to their family and home community, and to accept one set of ways of knowing and talking and reject the other. Other children report that they feel ashamed of the language and culture of their parents and other family members. Some children believe that if they take on one identity, they must give up the other.
Influenced by these findings, many educators (Ada & Campoy, 2003;
McIntyre, Roseberry, & González, 2001
) began to see teaching and learning in a new way. They began to realize that they needed to pay attention to students’ different ways of knowing and talking and not view these abilities as deficits in need of remediation. If they could focus on what students’ households and communities actually do, they could bring multiple dimensions of students’ lived experiences to life in the classroom. Further, these funds of knowledge could become the foundation for student learning of school-based funds of knowledge. For example, González, Moll, and Amanti (
2005
) and McIntyre, Roseberry, and González (
2001
) described how teachers first interviewed families to learn about their distinctive funds of knowledge and then used that knowledge to contextualize their instruction and curriculum. In a similar vein, Heath (
1983
) describes how she coached teachers to help their students use their own ways of knowing and talking as a foundation for learning the language system of the school. Rather than attempting to destroy or replace the language or knowledge that the students brought to school, teachers encouraged students to identify the differences between their familiar world and the unfamiliar world of the classroom. “They became researchers into the reality of their dual language and knowledge worlds, and they gained a new sense of self awareness as they reconstructed a social and cognitive system of meanings” (Heath,
1983
, p. 202). By inviting students to articulate how the knowledge that they had gained from their homes and communities related to what the school wanted them to know, they became more successful learners.
The latest research that assesses the effects of various bilingual education approaches mirrors these new ways of thinking about teaching and learning. Many of these programs that build on the home language of non-English-speaking children through a dual-language immersion approach (in which there is a dual emphasis on speaking and reading in the primary or home language and culture and in the secondary language of English) result in stronger academic gains than those resulting from traditional monolingual instructional methods (Center for Research on Education, Diversity and Excellence, 2010). In the dual-language immersion approach, the goal is student bilingualism. The students start off in their primary language, but over time, the secondary language is introduced during a portion of the day so that gradually the primary and secondary languages of instruction are balanced out across the school day. Parents are closely involved in this instructional effort, both in agreeing to this dual language focus and in reinforcing the home/primary language skills and the secondary language skills.
1.4 Sharing the Role of Expert with Families
Discovering the value in using children’s home and community funds of knowledge to contextualize new, school-based knowledge resulted in many educators rethinking how they might develop their relations with students’ families. Rather than relegating family members to an invisible role or calling on them only when a student has difficulties, these educators are creating strong and ongoing working relationships with students and their families, centered on sharing the role of expert with families. This means working with and learning from families instead of doing to or for families.
To build such relationships effectively, educators must examine their own beliefs and expectations about how roles should be structured and how power should be shared. Many traditional parent involvement efforts are based on the belief that something is wrong or lacking in families when their children struggle in school, and that because educators know what parents should be doing, the educator’s job is to help parents change their ways of relating to their children and to have parents teach their children the skills that schools deem are important (and in the same manner as the school). As a result, educators often devise practices such as (a) giving parents guidelines, materials, and training to carry out school-like activities in the home; (b) training parents in effective parenting; (c) teaching parents about the culture of American schooling; and (d) developing parents’ language and literacy skills. These practices inadvertently convey the message that the schools’ and educators’ knowledge and ways of knowing are all important and that the families’ knowledge is not important or valued.
However, a growing body of research evidence indicates that families successfully use a wide range of “non-school-like” experiences to teach their children. For example, Taylor and Dorsey-Gaines (
1988
) studied the literacy practices and experiences of children in poverty-level families and found that, although direct parental instruction in school-like literacy tasks did not occur, families used significant experiences that occurred on a regular basis—such as family outings, a visit to the clinic, or a game of cards—to enhance their children’s literacy. The most important aspect in determining whether these were successful literacy experiences seemed to be that children were engaged on a regular basis in activities that were integrated into their lives in meaningful ways.
As a result of these findings, teachers are inviting parents 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. For example, Ada and Campoy (
2003
) developed a project in which Spanish-speaking parents and their first-graders were invited to coauthor books that depicted their life and values. These books then become the texts that were used to teach reading and writing in the children’s first-grade classrooms.
1.5 Practicing No-Fault Problem Solving
Teachers are also inviting parents to participate in new ways resolving children’s academic and behavioral difficulties. Traditionally, teachers have met with parents, usually the mother, when children are experiencing difficulties at school (
Christenson & Sheridan, 2001
). Parents usually dread these encounters with the school for fear of being blamed for their children’s difficulties, and teachers dread them as well (
Lightfoot, 2003
). Students are usually left out of these conversations or included only as a punitive measure. Because these are the most common and the most anxiety-producing encounters that teachers have with parents, a number of educators (
Amatea, Daniels, Bringman, & Vandiver, 2004
;
Weiss & Edwards, 1992
) have put considerable effort into redesigning these meetings to change the pattern of fault-finding endemic to them. Amatea et al. (
2004
), for example, introduced a “no-fault” parent–teacher conference format in which both parents and students are invited to play an active, co-expert role with teachers, and renamed these meetings family–school problem-solving conferences. The message is that the student/child can be helped only when everyone—including the student—works together. The school staff develops a concrete action plan 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 the school. Unique features of this conference format are its task focus, blocking of blame, and involvement of all members of the family as persons who can contribute to resolving the child’s problems. Although the development and implementation of a concrete action plan usually helps a child significantly, the more important outcome is the change in the relationships among the students, school staff, and family members. Data from parents and students reveal that they like this new format because it provides a specific approach for the student, teacher, counselor, and family to work together in a nonblaming context to develop solutions to students’ behavioral or learning problems. Data from teachers reveal that what they most value in this new format is having time to think through possible ways of solving a student’s problem together with families and other staff while keeping the blaming between parents and teachers at a low level so that people can remain calm and level-headed while solving problems (Amatea, Daniels, Bringman, & Vandiver,
2004
).
1.6 Creating Opportunities for Meaningful and Nonproblematic Interaction
Educators are recognizing that to develop more collaborative relations with students and their families, they need opportunities to have positive and nonproblematic contacts in which the student and family can play meaningful roles. Rather than assign parents to the usual passive roles of audience member or supporter, educators are creating opportunities for parents and students to demonstrate their interest in their child and interact more directly with them. One illustration of this shift to more meaningful roles is the student-led parent conference, in which students are given an opportunity talk about their goals and share their academic work with their parents (
Austin, 1994
;
Benson & Barnett, 2005
). Not only do students share their school progress (academic and behavioral) and develop a plan together with their parents for how to move forward, but also they learn an approach to cooperative planning and problem solving that gives them ways of communicating with their parents in a respectful and cooperative manner.
1.7 Discovering the Benefits of Connecting with Families
Powerful benefits result from these new ways that educators are connecting with families. First, researchers report positive changes in student achievement when educators involve families in their children’s learning at the preschool, elementary, middle, and high school levels. More specifically, researchers report that for preschool- and elementary-age children, family–school involvement is associated with early school success and with increased language and literacy skill development and social competence (
Dearing, Kreider, Simpkins, & Weiss, 2006
). Second, researchers report long-term benefits to children whose families are involved in their learning during early childhood. For example, in a longitudinal study of 704 parents in Chicago, Miedel and Reynolds (
1999
) found that the number of school activities in which parents participated while their children were in preschool and kindergarten was significantly related to higher reading achievement, to lower rates of grade retention by the time the student was age 14, and to fewer years of needing special educational instruction. In a subsequent study that followed up on this same sample of families, Barnard (
2004
) reports that family involvement during the elementary school years was significantly associated with lower rates of high-school dropout and greater rates of on-time graduation. In another study, elementary students’ reading literacy improved significantly when their families were involved with their children at home in specific learning activities around reading (
McCarthy, 2000
).
Homework completion, report card grades, and attitudes about school and teachers are also positively affected by the involvement of families of elementary, middle, and high school students (Patall, Cooper, & Robinson, 2008). For example, Scott-Jones (
1995
) reports families’ involvement in monitoring and interacting with their high-school-age children about homework, and particularly family discussions about schoolwork, courses, grades, and the future, had strong positive effects on high school students’ report card grades and attitudes about school and teachers.
Second, parents reap benefits from participating in their child’s schooling. Not only do parents develop a greater appreciation for their important role in their child’s learning, but also family–school connections enhance parents’ sense of adequacy and self-worth, strengthen their social network, motivate them to resume their own education, and enhance their view of their child’s teacher and school (
Hoover-Dempsey et al., 2005
). For example, a study of parent involvement in elementary schools found that parents’ confidence in their ability to help their children with school tasks was increased when teachers coached them on how to help their children with schoolwork (
Dauber & Epstein, 1993
). In addition, teachers’ practices of reaching out to students’ families strongly influences what families do to support their children’s learning and schooling. In fact, what teachers do to connect with the families of their students appears to be a much stronger predictor of a parent’s involvement in their children’s school progress than family background variables, such as race, ethnicity, social class, marital status, or mother’s work status (
Green, Walker, Hoover-Dempsey, & Sandler, 2007
).
Third, many teachers report significant benefits from collaborating with parents, such as (a) strengthened school programs through expansion of teaching resources, (b) improved student academic achievement, (c) improved student behavior and reduced student discipline problems, (d) greater retention of student skills over the summer because of work conducted at home during the vacation, (e) more favorable perceptions of families, and (f) reduction in their feelings of isolation and nonsupport (
Sheldon & Epstein, 2002
). For example, researchers report that when children and their peers receive similar messages about appropriate behavior from their parents and teachers, they demonstrate less problematic social behaviors and less confusion about expectations (
McNeal, 1999
).
Several studies of parent involvement in elementary schools note that parents and principals rate teachers higher in overall teaching ability and interpersonal skills if the teachers frequently use practices of parent involvement. In a large-scale study of elementary teachers, parents, and students, it was found that teachers who were “leaders” in the frequent use of parent involvement did not prejudge less-educated, poor, or single parents (
Dauber & Epstein, 1993
). Instead, teachers who frequently involved families in their children’s education rated single and married parents and more and less formally educated parents equally in helpfulness and follow-through with their children at home. By contrast, teachers who did not frequently involve families gave more stereotypical ratings to single parents and to those with less formal education, marking them lower in helpfulness and follow-through than other parents.
1.8 Identifying the Barriers
The ways of working that we describe in this book take time, reflection, and an openness to change. We know that many teachers and administrators say they would like to interact more with their students’ families but have neither the time nor the know-how to go about building such positive and productive relationships and, consequently, are fearful of trying (
Epstein, 2008
). Some teachers do not believe that encouraging parent involvement is a part of their professional role and see it as interfering with the teaching tasks that have been entrusted to them (
Christenson & Sheridan, 2001
).
The culture and work norms of many schools present significant barriers to developing these ways of thinking and working with students and their families. Swap (
1993
) notes that many teachers expect to be self-sufficient in their teaching practice and to operate independently from their colleagues and from students and parents. “Adult collaboration in any form is relatively rare in schools…. The traditional approach to managing schools emphasizes hierarchy, individualism, and technology rather than dialogue, relationship and reciprocity” (p. 17). Moreover, traditional family–school interactions are often designed to avoid conflict by minimizing opportunities for personal contact and expression of differences. Teachers expect to channel parents into passive roles as audience members or supporters at family–school events. Students are often expected to be either absent from such encounters or passive participants.
As a result, there are few opportunities for educators, students, and families to develop skills in working together to enhance student learning, resolve conflicts, develop educational plans, or solve student problems. Krasnow (
1990
) contends that schools are characteristically structured to withhold negative information to avoid conflict, and neither interpersonal nor intergroup conflict is discussable at school. Because schools fail to learn how to deal constructively with conflict, they fail to improve as organizations that represent a broad-based constituency.
In addition, many teachers feel overburdened by expectations to teach in new ways, to develop new curriculum, and to help all students learn and perform well in high-stakes testing. Collaborating with families may not seem possible. Because we know that time is in scarce supply in the lives of educators, we have found that these ways of working can be time-efficient in the long run. We are proposing that teachers not add to what they do but change their existing ways of doing things. Showing educators how to work differently—not add on more work—is our goal in writing this book; thus, you will see examples of how both individual teachers and entire school staffs have changed how they involve families in their children’s school lives. Clearly, this new way of working is more effective when it can extend across the whole school. However, a teacher’s influence may not span the entire school. Hence, we showcase the individual teacher’s experiences with these changes in practices.
1.9 The Philosophy That Underlies Our Approach
This book is based on our experiences working in schools with educators, students, and families, and in teaching pre-service courses on family–school involvement to elementary and middle school teachers, counselors, and administrators. As a result of our front-line experiences, we believe that developing strong working relationships with the families of students is not only a nice activity, but also a necessary step for developing effective ways of reaching and teaching all students. In this book, we describe various ways of learning from students and families and how to use that knowledge to build instructional activities that foster children’s learning and development. We believe that interacting with families is a means to an end for improving students’ learning and school achievement, not simply an end in itself. In addition, we do not offer one approach that we assume will work for everyone. Hence, you will see many different ideas are showcased concerning how you might change your teaching practices.
Because these ways of working with students and their families are a radical departure from traditional practices and beliefs, information about these new teaching practices, the research on their effectiveness, and the theories that underlie their development have not been a standard part of teacher preparation programs. Consequently, most beginning education professionals continue to have an exceedingly narrow conception of the role that families might play in their children’s schooling—conceptions that all too often keep families in a marginalized and disempowered position.
This book is designed to acquaint you with the new ideas and practices in the field of family–school relationship building and to highlight the changes in thinking that underlie these new educational practices. In this book, we hope to describe
■ The changing context of schooling in the United States and the challenges to traditional beliefs and practices about how we, as educators, should interact with students, their families, and their communities.
■ What practitioners and researchers are learning about how families’ beliefs, values, and interactions contribute to children’s success in school.
■ A new approach to family–school relations, the family–school collaboration approach; the theories about child development and culturally responsive teaching and learning that undergird it, and the distinctive beliefs and practices that characterize it.
■ Everyday instructional and noninstructional routines that individual teachers use to communicate, build collaborative partnerships, and forge a sense of co-ownership and connection with students’ families and the larger community.
■ How school staffs are changing the school-wide norms and routines to support a more collaborative way of working with students, their families, and their communities.
CHAPTER 2 From Separation to Collaboration: The Changing Paradigms of Family–School Relations
Ellen S. Amatea
Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter, you will be able to
■ Explain what is meant by a mental model or paradigm.
■ Describe how educators’ mental models/paradigms of family–school relationships have changed over time as a result of changes in theory, research, and legislation.
■ Summarize the distinctive assumptions of the separation, remediation, and collaboration paradigms and their influence on educational practice.
■ Describe the benefits and drawbacks of each paradigm of family–school relations.
■ Explain your current mental model or paradigm of family–school relations and how you may wish to modify it.
How are you planning to interact with the families of your students? Would you prefer to have parents come to school only when their child has a problem, or will you encourage them to drop in at will to observe your classroom activities? Do you hope to invite parents to share their expertise and knowledge about their children and their family’s culture, or do you believe that information is unnecessary? Do you expect to have “the final say” on decisions that you make about your students, or will you share your decision-making power with their parents?
Each of us—whether educator or parent—operates from a particular mental model or map that consists of certain beliefs as to how roles and relations between educators and families should be structured and responsibilities allocated. These beliefs are socially constructed, shaped through our interaction with others and their ideas. As we move through the world, we build up our beliefs about what the world is like by means of our conversation with other people. The beliefs we hold about how we should interact with students, their families, our colleagues, and our superiors grow out of responding to the (a) specific implicit or explicit expectations and norms of members of our key reference groups (e.g., our work associates at school, our students and their families, our professional organizations); (b) larger cultural stories or beliefs that shape our own personal conceptions about how we should behave; and (c) actual role experiences and behaviors that we learn to perform (
Harrison & Minor, 1978
).
Our mental model is like a windowpane, both clarifying and distorting what we see. For example, as clearly and objectively as we think we see things, we may discover that other people may see the same set of circumstances quite differently based on their own apparently valid and objective point of view. Sometimes we may find that our mental model of family–school relations is not supported by the policy (written or unwritten), customs, and culture of the school in which we work. For example, one teacher who wanted to design her classroom’s “back to school night” event to include children as well as their parents was met by the response, “We just don’t do that around here.” In another case, a principal who wanted her teachers to learn more about their students’ lives reported that she got raised eyebrows when she suggested that the school staff put on a parent workshop in one of the housing projects where many of the school’s students lived. Often, however, our mental models are so widely shared by others in our world that they are difficult to see. Only when a new mental model or paradigm emerges can we see more clearly the features and assumptions of the old paradigm. As we compare the features of our old mental model, or way of thinking, with the new way of thinking, we experience “news of a difference” that allows us to revise or change our old mental model or paradigm.
Three different mental models or paradigms of family–school relations have emerged in the field that prescribe how roles should be structured between home and school. Each of these paradigms is based on distinctly different assumptions about the purposes of family–school interactions, the responsibilities of each role participant, the structure of power relations, and the preferred styles and methods of interaction. As a result, educators in the same school may hold widely differing mental models about how adults at school and at home should relate with one another. Similarly, parents may hold very different mental models that shape their ideas about how they should interact with their children’s teachers.
Before you interact with your students’ families, you must become aware of your current mental model of family–school relations and discover what other options you have for how you might structure your relations with students and their families. In this chapter, we describe three different mental models or paradigms for how educators should interact with students’ caregivers and families: (a) the separation paradigm, (b) the remediation paradigm, and (c) the collaboration paradigm. Each of these paradigms represents a consistent pattern of assumptions, goals, attitudes, behaviors, and strategies that help us understand how people believe that families and school staff should behave with one another. You will find educators who operate from each of these paradigms in today’s schools. In this book, we hope to encourage you to move toward a more collaborative paradigm in working with the families of your students. First, however, let’s explain what we mean by a paradigm.
Summary
In this chapter, we described a typology of mental models/paradigms of family–school relationships that can provide a framework that can be used to reflect on the nature of your own beliefs as well as to locate in which paradigm other educators operate. Two out of the three paradigms—the separation/separate spheres paradigm and the remediation paradigm—locate parents in more limited and passive roles, whereas the other—the collaboration paradigm—offers opportunities for both parents and educators to take on active roles in which all parties can bring their knowledge and strengths to improving students’ academic achievement and social and emotional competence. We end this chapter with a discussion of the change process you may experience as you experiment with ways of thinking and working with families that may be new to you.
Activities and Questions
1. Imagine that you have been asked to create an advertisement to “sell” one of the three family–school relationship paradigms to a group of parents and community members. Develop a specific advertisement and accompanying jingle to sell this audience on the benefits of this approach to family–school relating.
2. What impact do our lived experiences have on the development of our thinking about family–school relating? What types of experiences should we create for ourselves to develop more comfort with the collaboration paradigm?
3. Discuss three assumptions about family–school relating that undergird the separation paradigm, then do the same for the remediation paradigm.
4. Describe some benefits of relating to families using the collaboration paradigm.
Resources
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) U.S. Department of Education
400 Maryland Avenue SW
Washington, DC 20202
Phone 800-USA-LEARN (1-800-872-5327)
www.ed.gov/nclb/landing.jhtml
Provides information on NCLB’s key principles. It also has a teacher’s toolkit and parents’ guide as well as opportunities to sign up to receive email updates.
National Head Start Association
1651 Prince Street Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone: 703-739-0875
www.nhsa.org
Comer School Development Program (SDP)
55 College Street New Haven, CT 06510 Phone: 203-737-1020
www.info.med.yale.edu/comer
2.1 Understanding Paradigms
The word paradigm comes from the Greek and was originally a scientific term; today, it is more commonly used to mean a model, theory, perception, assumption, or frame of reference. In the more general sense, it is the way we see the world—not in terms of our visual sense of sight, but in terms of how we perceive, understand, and interpret the world. A paradigm depicts distinctive ways of “ordering experience” or of “constructing reality” (
Bruner, 1996
, p. 11). For our purposes, a simple way to understand family–school paradigms is to think of them as “mental maps depicting how our relationship should operate.” (
Bruner, 1996
, p. 15) Of course, we all know that the map is not the territory; that is, a map is simply a depiction or explanation about certain aspects of a territory. That is exactly what a paradigm is. It is a theory, a system of explanation or model of something, a larger cultural story or discourse that describes how our particular social world operates, how we expect to behave with students’ caregivers, and how we value or judge the ways in which students’ caregivers interact with us.
Why might you want to examine your paradigm? Suppose you want to arrive at a specific location in central Miami. A street map of the city would be a great help to you in reaching your destination, but suppose you are given the wrong map. Through a printing error, the map labeled Miami is actually a map of Orlando. Can you imagine the frustration and the ineffectiveness of trying to reach your destination? You might decide to work on your behavior—you could try harder, be more diligent, or double your speed. However, if you are using the wrong map, your efforts to find your way to your destination in Miami may only succeed in your getting you to the wrong place faster.
Or you might decide to work on your attitude—you could think more positively. However, you still might not get to the right place using the mislabeled map as your guide, but perhaps you do not care. Your attitude is positive, so that you are happy wherever you were. Our point is, with the wrong map, you are still lost. The fundamental problem has nothing to do with your behavior or your attitude; it has everything to do with having a wrong map. If you have the correct map of Miami, then diligence becomes important, and when you encounter frustrating obstacles along the way, then attitude can make a real difference; however, the first and most important requirement is the accuracy of the map.
Each of us has many different mental models or maps in our heads about various aspects of our social worlds. We interpret everything that we experience through these mental maps, yet we seldom question their accuracy. We simply believe that the way we see things is the way they really are or the way they should be. For example, we may believe that the inclusion of students with disabilities into regular classrooms or the tracking of students by ability levels is the ideal way to organize schooling and instruction. As a result, we see the evidence to support these beliefs much more readily than evidence that does not support them.
More important, although each of us tends to think that we see things as they are and that we are objective, in fact we see the world not as it is but as we are—or as we are taught to see it by others in our social world. Consequently, when we open our mouths to describe what we see (in our classroom, our school, our community), in effect, we describe our perceptions and mental models. When other people disagree with us, we immediately think that something is wrong with them. However, sincere and clearheaded people can see things quite differently because they are following their own mental map.
This does not mean that no facts exist. However, the more aware we are of our basic mental models or paradigms and the extent to which we have been influenced by our experience, the more we can take responsibility for them, examine them, test them against reality, listen to others and be open to their perceptions, and thereby get a larger picture and far richer view.
2.2 The Power of a Paradigm Shift
Perhaps the most important insight to be gained from studying the different ways that people look at their social world is in the area of paradigm shifting—what we might call the Aha! experience, as if a light were suddenly turned on inside their heads and when someone finally sees a certain situation in another way. The more bound people are by their initial perception, the more powerful the Aha! experience. The term paradigm shift was introduced by Thomas Kuhn (
1970
) in his highly influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn showed how almost every significant breakthrough in various scientific fields is first a break with tradition, with old ways of thinking, with old paradigms. For Ptolemy, the great Egyptian astronomer, Earth was the center of the universe, but Copernicus created a paradigm shift—and a great deal of resistance and persecution as well—by placing the sun at the center. Suddenly, everything took on a different interpretation. The Newtonian model of physics was a clockwork paradigm that is still the basis of modern engineering, but it was a partial and incomplete view of the world. The scientific world was revolutionized by the relativity paradigm proposed by Einstein that had much higher predictive and explanatory value. According to Kuhn (
1970
), when a paradigm becomes established and dominates public discourse, it becomes difficult for other systems of explanation to emerge and become institutionalized. When one paradigm replaces another, Kuhn states, a scientific revolution takes place. However, in education and the social sciences, rarely does one paradigm replace another. More typically, new paradigms compete with established ones, and they coexist. So the educational world is characterized by competing paradigms and explanations.
The educational world has experienced two significant paradigm shifts regarding family–school relations in the United States. The first paradigm shift involves a shift from educators who assume that they can operate successfully on their own in educating students despite what students experience at home, to believing that they must educate and remediate families to support the school’s efforts to educate their children. For example, the separation paradigm was depicted in the 1960s by educators and policymakers who made no provision for interaction with parents and believed that educators alone could minimize the impact of low-income conditions by offering compensatory education to remediate children from low-income families. This separation paradigm was represented in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the federal compensatory education initiative, in which the assumption was made that the school environment could “mitigate the poor or negative experiences provided by the home and compensate for the disadvantaged background of certain students” (
Swap, 1993
, p. 34). By the 1970s, however, educators and policymakers had shifted to a remediation paradigm, in which educational programs that served economically disadvantaged children were required to involve parents in their children’s education. This remediation paradigm is illustrated in the development of Head Start, a preschool program that was designed to provide economically disadvantaged children the opportunity to get a head start before entering school. An important feature of Head Start is the expectation that parents be involved and taught to work with their children (
Greenberg, 1990
). The Education Amendments of 1978 also made explicit reference to the requirement of parent participation in programs designed for economically disadvantaged children.
We are now experiencing another paradigm shift in family–school relations as the educational world is revolutionized by the paradigm of collaboration. With this shift in thinking, school staffs embrace the idea of seeing students and their families as collaborators or partners in the effort to educate children. Instead of assuming the role of expert and believing that the school staff know best about how to fix students or families, educators are reaching out to students’ families, viewing them as co-experts and sharing power with them, and identifying together those resources that exist in the family and school for taking action to enhance children’s learning or resolve their difficulties.
Several factors have contributed to this second paradigm shift toward family–school collaboration. First, theories of child development, such as Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory (
1979
;
1997
), shifted the focus from exclusively emphasizing how the family influences the child’s development to underscoring how the broader sociopolitical context influences the attitudes and resources that shape how schools and communities interact with students’ families. Hence, rather than just looking at family life, educators began to see how a child’s family, school, and community collectively influence a child’s development by means of their interactions. In addition, theorists—such as Vygotsky (
1978
), a Soviet psychologist who studied how children learn—revolutionized how educators think about the teaching and learning of children from low-income and culturally diverse families. A basic premise of his approach is that the teacher must recognize and use (rather than ignore or erase) a child’s existing conceptual repertoire as a bridge to learning new concepts (
McIntyre, Roseberry, & Gonzãlez, 2001
).
Second, researchers who study what families do to support children’s learning and development have repeatedly documented the powerful influence that families have on the in-school and out-of-school socialization of children (
Weiss et al., 2003
). For example, whether through home-based modeling, instruction, and reinforcement or school-based activities or parent–teacher communication, family influence and involvement have been repeatedly documented to be positively linked to indicators of student achievement, including teacher ratings of student competence, student grades, and achievement test scores (e.g.,
Epstein & Van Voorhis, 2001
;
Hill & Craft, 2003
). Family involvement and influence have also been strongly associated with other indicators of school success, including lower rates of retention in grade, lower dropout rates, higher on-time high school graduation rates, and higher participation in advanced courses (
Barnard, 2004
;
Trusty, 1999
). Family involvement has also been linked to important psychological processes and cognitive, social, and behavioral attributes that support student achievement, such as students’ sense of personal competence or efficacy for learning (“I can do this work”; e.g.,
Frome & Eccles, 1998
); their mastery orientation (
Gonzalez, Holbein, & Quilter, 2002
); their perceptions of personal control over school outcomes (
Glasgow, Dornbush, Troyer, Steinberg, & Ritter, 1997
); their self-regulatory knowledge and skills (“I know how to do this work”; e.g.,
Brody, Flor, & Gibson, 1999
); as well as their beliefs about the importance of education (“I want to do this work”; e.g.,
Sheldon & Epstein, 2002
).
Third, federal policies for family involvement established in various laws began to link families and schools explicitly and encouraged educators to consider how school policies and practices influence their relationships with families. For example, the Improving America’s Schools Act of 1994 (Public Law 103–382) includes detailed parental involvement components designed to empower parents to be a part of their child’s educational program, while requiring that Title 1–funded (formerly
Chapter 1
of the Education Consolidation Improvement Act of 1981) schools provide avenues for them to do so. In addition, National Education Goals 1 and 8, presented in
Figure 2.1
, lay out the expectation that every child will start school ready to learn, and that every school will promote partnerships that increase parent participation in facilitating the social, emotional, and academic growth of children (National Education Goals Panel, 1999).
These ideas were further explicated in other legislation, such as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA;
U.S. Congress, 1999
,
2004
), the IASA Title 1 (U.S. Department of Education, 1997), and the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 Title 1 and Title 3 (U.S. Department of Education, 2002), all of which underscore the pivotal role that families play in developing children’s learning habits and values. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (U.S. Congress,
1999
) and its reauthorization (
U.S. Congress, 2004
) require state education agencies and local education agencies to provide every student who has a disability with a free and appropriate public education. Part B of the law provides for the education of students ages 3 through 21; part C provides for the education of infants and toddlers from birth to age 3.
Figure 2.2
describes the six key principles of IDEA that have contributed to an awareness of the need for more collaborative relationships between schools and families.
Figure 2.1
National Educational Goals 1 and 8
Source: From Goals 2000: Educate America Act, Public Law 103–227.
Figure 2.2
Six Key Principles of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (Public Law 107–110) embodies six principles of parental involvement that empowers parents to be a part of their children’s educational and explicitly commanded Title 1-funded (formerly
Chapter 1
of the Education Consolidation Improvement Act of 1981) schools to provide avenues for parents to do so. Not only does this law increase the means for parents to monitor and evaluate the academic progress of their child, but also it requires schools to inform parents about the performance of the whole school and their options if their child’s school is not making adequate yearly progress in meeting state-mandated achievement outcomes.
Figure 2.3
describes NCLB’s six principles for school reform.
Figure 2.3
Six Principles of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB; Public Law 107–110)
2.3 A Typology of Family–School Paradigms
How might we make sense of these changing ideas about family–school relations? At first glance, the term family–school collaboration may be easily confused with the term parent involvement. Yet these terms represent significantly different paradigms about the nature of the family–school relationship. Whereas parent involvement depicts a one-way flow of information between schools and parents, family–school collaboration involves a two-way exchange of information (
Christenson & Sheridan, 2001
). In addition, although parent involvement focuses on parents becoming involved in their children’s education, family–school collaboration focuses on the joint involvement of parents/caregivers and school staff in children’s education.
Let’s look more closely at how researchers depict these varying beliefs about how family–school relations should be structured. Swap (
1993
) describes four distinctive philosophies of family–school relations held by educators: (a) protective philosophy, (b) school-to-home transmission philosophy, (c) curriculum philosophy, and (d) partnership philosophy. Henderson, Jones, and Raimondo (
1999
) identify four philosophies that characterize a school’s relations with families: (a) fortress mentality, (b) “come when called” mentality, (c) “open door” mentality, and (d) partnership mentality. In contrast, Lewis and Forman (
2002
) identify three distinctive “narratives” about parents depicted in the conversations of school staffs: (a) in loco parentis narrative, (b) deficit narrative, and (c) relational narrative. Although each of these typologies emphasizes different aspects of family–school relations, they consistently point to the importance of two basic dimensions. The first dimension depicts variations in the structure of power relations between parents and educators (i.e., the extent to which one role participant has more social power than the other). The second dimension concerns the extent to which educators and parents view their roles and responsibilities as shared and overlapping or as specialized and separate. We have integrated the thinking of Swap (
1993
); Henderson, Jones, and Raimondo (
1999
); and Lewis and Forman (
2002
) into a typology of three different family–school paradigms. In the following sections, we describe each of these paradigms and identify the expectations as to the roles and responsibilities that educators, students, and parents should play; the purposes and styles of communication and decision making; the structure of power relations; and the specific practices in which educators engage.
The Separation Paradigm
Some educators believe that home and school should be separate spheres, each having separate goals and responsibilities and providing different inputs to the education and socialization of children (
Epstein, 2010
). These educators might say, “The school’s job is to help children learn; the parents’ job is to inculcate values which prepare their children for learning and schooling. If parents have any role at all in the school sphere, it is that of encouraging children’s compliance with the school’s socializing and academic demands” (
Weiss & Edwards, 1992
, p. 219). According to Swap (
1993
), this philosophy is driven by three assumptions: (a) that parents delegate to the school the responsibility of educating their children, (b) that parents hold the school personnel accountable for the results, and (c) that educators accept this delegation of responsibility.
Educators who operate from this paradigm assume that parents rely on their expertise, and that direction and discussion with parents (or with students) to do their job are not needed. They believe that the teacher’s job is to provide an academic, and often social and emotional, education with very limited or no participation from students’ families. Parent involvement in decision making or problem solving is seen as an inappropriate interference with the educator’s job. Instead, educators believe that their decisions (whether about classroom instruction or individual children’s class placement) do not require negotiation and hence can be made independently of interaction with students’ families. Educators who embrace the separation mindset consider this arrangement ideal for minimizing conflict and for maintaining their professional autonomy. These educators assume that, because parents delegate children’s learning to the school, conversations with parents are necessary only when there are problems. As a result, communication between parents and educators is implicit, limited, indirect, and based on tacit agreement and presumed mutual goals.
The origin of this philosophy that home and school are separate spheres has been attributed to the school management theory that developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when many schools faced the challenge of inducting large numbers of children of immigrants into the American culture (
Reich, 1983
). In this bureaucratic management theory, educators viewed their purpose as educating students to be American citizens. They saw schools as giant factories organized to educate children for their role in society on a high-volume, large-batch basis. There was often a rigid boundary constructed between the school and the home so as to reduce the cultural impact of the home and increase the school’s socializing influence in producing American citizens. Schools were managed in a top-down, hierarchical fashion, with the separate operation of each part, or component, determined by a grand design developed by the organizational layer above it. For example, teachers were individually responsible for designing and delivering to their batch of students an educational experience in a specific and separate domain whose content was determined by standards set at higher organizational levels (e.g., district and state level curriculum mandates/standards for first grade level or for eleventh grade English).
Educators who embrace this philosophy assume that interaction between educators and families is inherently conflictual and should be kept to a minimum to minimize the inherent/inevitable conflict between these two parties. This should be done primarily through the separation of parents’ and educators’ functions. Second, this clear separation of functions should also be based on the idea that schools clearly have more competence at teaching, have been delegated responsibility for teaching the child, and see families as deficient in educating their children. Thus, the role of expert is not shared. Swap (
1993
) labeled this mental model the protective model, because its aim is to protect the school/ teacher from conflict and interference by parents. The following teacher’s comment illustrates the expectations for desirable parent behavior held by teachers operating in this paradigm:
Parents should adhere to the rules and trust teachers to do what is right by their children. They should trust the fact that the teachers are following the program. (
Swap, 1993
, p. 29)
As a result, in this paradigm the preferred style of interaction between educators and families is a very distant and impersonal one. Events are impersonal and highly ritualized (such as the traditional open house in which educators tell parents about their program), communication is one-way (from educator to families), and opportunities for authentic dialogue (i.e., two-way communication) are greatly restricted. One of the consequences of using this philosophy is that it is generally very effective at achieving its goal of protecting teachers against parental intrusion in most circumstances. However, it assumes that teachers are familiar enough with each child’s context to be able to function effectively in place of the parent, knowing what each child needs. Unfortunately, as Swap (
1993
) describes, the negative consequences of operating from this paradigm are that
this approach to family–school relations often (a) exacerbates the conflicts between home and school by creating no structures or predictable opportunities for preventive problem solving, (b) ignores the potential of home–school collaboration for improving student achievement, and (c) rejects the rich resources for enrichment and school support available from families and other members of the community that could be available to the school. (p. 29)
For example, when a student experiences academic or emotional difficulties, school staff often do not call on a student’s parents until all other avenues within the school have been exhausted. When they do meet with parents, educators often delegate responsibility to the family to “fix” the child and assume that the parents will think like them regarding their child’s difficulties. Viewed this way, educators often see that the solution to children’s learning problems is to “take over the job of educating and socializing children and put it in the hands of real experts since the parents obviously are not equipped to prepare their children” (
Swap, 1993
, p. 30).
Educators who operate from this paradigm assume that working-class and poor parents generally are not capable of contributing in significant positive ways to their children’s education and development. Lewis and Forman (
2002
) captured the essence of this thinking in their observation: “Many urban schools have taken the posture of educating students in spite of their families rather than in concert with them” (p. 82). As a result, educators have high expectations for students, but limited or low expectations for their parents.
Evidence of this paradigm can be found in several recent reform initiatives that exhort educators to raise their expectations for the potential of their working-class and low-income students and to work to narrow the achievement gap among students of different classes and races, yet do not articulate a significant or visible role for parents in accomplishing these objectives. For example, in the popular Success for All reading initiative, parents are not mentioned in any particular area of work, but are identified only in terms of supporting them in getting their child to school or being the recipient of social or psychological resources. Although the role of parents may be evolving in this project, it would appear from the written materials that the relationship between parents and educators is one of separate spheres. As a result, the nature of family–school relations in the separation paradigm might be depicted as a tall fortress with a deep moat around it (
Figure 2.4
).
A fortress is an appropriate illustration of this philosophy of interacting with families because not only does it depict educators structuring their roles with families so as to have a great deal of protective distance from them, but also it shows the lack of a permanent structure for interacting with them.
Figure 2.4
The Fortress Mentality of the Separation Paradigm of Family–School Relations
REFLECTIVE EXERCISE 2.1
Most school districts now require teachers to conduct back to school orientation activities. What might your back to school orientation activities look like if you adopted an approach to family–school relating that is shaped by a separation paradigm? For example, how would you structure your role and that of students’ families? Who would be involved in planning and decision making about the orientation? What would be the purpose of the orientation? What would you do (and have caregivers do) in this activity? How does the process of thinking how you would plan such a required activity reveal the advantages and disadvantages of using a separation paradigm of family–school relating?
The Remediation Paradigm
In the 1950s, educators began to recognize that the impact of family life strongly influences children’s school success, and that to succeed in educating students, educators need students’ families to support the school’s efforts. Fueled by the growing interest in looking at the social context of the developing child and the discrepancies in academic achievement observed between students from affluent and those from economically deprived backgrounds, educators began to shift their thinking from believing that they could educate children in spite of their families to believing that their efforts at educating students were undermined by the problems and pathologies of their families. Embracing the deficit view of family life promoted by social scientists and mental health professionals of that era, educators believe that some families are flawed by problems or deficiencies and that these parents must be remediated by showing them how to create environments that support their children’s school success. As a result, unlike the “hands off” philosophy depicted in the separation paradigm, educators who embrace the remediation paradigm expect to be very involved with parents in encouraging them to actively adopt and support the values and “ways of being” that have traditionally led to children’s success in school.
In the remediation paradigm, educators believe that their views of what students must learn to succeed should be dominant, that they know best. Consequently, educators who operate from this philosophy are focused on enlisting the parent to support the objectives of the school. Swap (
1993
), who termed this the family-to-school transmission philosophy, asserted that this paradigm is
based on the assumptions that (a) children’s achievement is fostered by a continuity of expectations between home and school, (b) educators know which values and practices outside the school contribute to school success, and (c) parents should endorse educators’ ideas regarding the importance of schooling, reinforce school expectations at home, provide conditions at home that nurture development and support school success, and ensure that the child meets minimum academic and social requirements. (p. 30)
Many current parent involvement efforts are based on this philosophy. In contrast to the separation paradigm, the remediation paradigm acknowledges that there is (and should be) a continuous interchange between the home and school, and that parents have an important role in enhancing children’s educational achievement. Epstein (
1987
) illustrates this viewpoint:
The evidence is clear that parental encouragement, activities, and interest at home and participation in schools and classrooms affect children’s achievements, attitudes and aspirations, even after student ability, and family socio-economic status are taken into account. Students gain in personal and academic development if their families emphasize schooling, let the children know they do, and do so continually over the school years. (p. 120)
In her early work, Epstein (
1987
) proposed four ways that parents might support their children’s schooling: (a) providing the basic necessities to their children, such as food, clothing, and shelter; (b) communicating with the school; (c) involving themselves at school; and (d) involving themselves in learning activities in the home. More recently, Epstein (
2010
) expanded this typology by proposing six types of school-related opportunities for parent involvement in their children’s learning: (a) assisting parents in child-rearing skills, (b) communicating school information to parents, (c) involving parents in school volunteer opportunities, (d) involving parents in home-based learning, (e) involving parents in school decision making, and (f) involving parents in school–community activities.
As a result of these role expectations, educators who embrace the remediation paradigm perceive that their job is to tell parents what they must do at home to support their children’s learning. Henderson, Jones, and Raimondo (
1999
) refer to this philosophy of family–school relations as the come when called model. Educators expect that parents will fulfill two very important roles: First, parents are expected to endorse the importance of schooling with their child, ensure that the child meets the minimum academic and behavioral requirements (e.g., attending school on time, making sure child completes homework), reinforce the educators’ expectations for desirable social and academic behavior, and follow through in changing any home conditions that educators deem necessary. Second, educators expect parents to spend enough time with their children to transfer to them what has come to be known as cultural capital—that is, the ways of being, knowing, writing, talking, and thinking that characterize those who succeed in this culture (Delpit, 2006). A minimum version of this hope/expectation is that parents will read to their children and listen to their children read to them. Ideally, by spending time with their parents, children will extend and enrich what they learn at school.
In contrast to the separation paradigm, the family remediation paradigm explicitly assumes that there should be an interchange between home and school. However, the home is to take a subordinate role to the expertise of educators. In this paradigm, the parents are assumed to have the significant responsibility of helping their children succeed within the guidelines specified by the school culture. According to Swap (
1993
), “The parent role includes preparing their children to begin school, encouraging them to succeed in school, and transmitting values, attitudes, and skills that characterize those who succeed” (p. 30). Students do not have an active role in the interaction between home and schools in this paradigm. The educator’s role is to define the goals, values, and programs in which parents are to participate. Neither two-way communication with parents nor student inclusion is viewed as necessary or sought out, because the goal is for the parents to understand and support the school’s objectives.
Figure 2.5
illustrates the nature of the remediation paradigm of family–school relations as a drawbridge. The control of the drawbridge connecting the worlds of school is exclusively in the hands of the school staff.
This perspective is clearly depicted in the words of a teacher working in an urban school who explained her concept of desirable parent involvement:
Parents should be trained to parent, talk to their kids more—interact with children and take them places. (By desirable parent involvement, I mean) parents cooperating with homework, looking at it, reading notices, coming to school when called, taking an interest in their child’s education. (
Swap, 1993
, p. 31)
Figure 2.5
The One-Way Drawbridge of the Remediation Paradigm of Family–School Relations
In this perspective, if educators invite parents into the school, they are asking parents to support the teacher’s plan and routine, not to contribute to it. Parents may be asked to perform a myriad of tasks at the school or for the school (e.g., helping in the library, preparing food for school parties, building playgrounds, raising money, serving on advisory boards or in parent–teacher associations), but in each of these they are expected to play a subordinate role.
Many parent involvement programs now being developed in school are based on this philosophy. One advantage of the remediation paradigm of family–school relations is that parents receive a very clear message from the school about the social and academic skills that children need to succeed in school and about their role in helping their children succeed. A second advantage noted by Swap (
1993
) is that, because this paradigm maintains educators’ control over parent involvement, it can provide a framework for a transition from an isolating separate spheres mentality of the separation paradigm to a co-expert/collaborative paradigm. If the teacher and parents begin to develop trust and comfort with each other, it might lead to a more comfortable and mutual exchange of ideas and joint planning between adults at home and at school.
However, Swap (
1993
) notes some distinct hazards that are inherent in the use of this paradigm. First, because this paradigm is organized around developing the parents’ expertise, it is grounded in a mindset of perceived parental deficits. Educators often describe parents or caregivers—especially members of immigrant, low-income, or culturally diverse families—in terms of their deficiencies. For example, describing their conversations with the principal and other school staff as they prepared to set up interviews with parents in an elementary school in Northern California, Smrekar and Cohen-Vogel (
2001
) wrote:
These officials suggested that most of the parents in the school were lazy, irresponsible, and apathetic when it came to school involvement and that these attitudes were inextricably linked to the low performance of their children…. School officials warned that it was unsafe and unwise to enter the school neighborhood and conduct interviews at parents’ homes. Teachers warned that we would be lucky to get one-third of the initially contacted parents to participate…. Contrary to expectations of the school staff, all but one of the 15 parents we contacted were willing to participate in their interviews, and the parents welcomed us warmly and politely into their homes. (p. 85)
As a result, strategies built on this paradigm often reveal an inherent resistance to considering the parent on an equal footing with educators. For example, parents may receive a contract from the school about what the school considers are their obligations with little to no appreciation of the parents’ constraints. Workshops or activities may be designed to make parents more effective in their role, implying that parents are deficient and that educators know more than parents about how to parent.
Second, all parents may not be able to devote sufficient time and energy to the level of parent involvement expected by the educators if faced with certain life conditions that command their attention (e.g., hazardous living conditions, unstable employment, chronic illness). Moreover, parents may be asked to teach children certain skills despite the emotional and financial costs to the family and then blamed if these interventions fail. However, if educators could recognize these constraints and provide a link to resources that would address them, they might be able to build community and school programs that would be stronger safety nets for families.
Third, there is a danger of demeaning the value and importance of the family’s culture in an effort to transmit the values and culture of the school. This becomes increasingly important as we think about the growing diversity of the student body and growing homogeneity of the teaching profession. Teachers who operate from the remediation paradigm think in terms of identifying the needs or deficits of parents and develop an experience to direct/train them to be better parents. Parents are told how they are expected to carry out their role; they are expected to cooperate with educators and follow directions. Many parents do just that. Some reluctantly go along with these mandates. However, many parents resist these directives, are labeled unmotivated or resistant, and judged as minimizing their deficiencies and refusing to own up to their problems.
REFLECTIVE EXERCISE 2.2
What might your back-to-school orientation activities look like if you adopted an approach to family–school relating shaped by a remediation paradigm? For example, how would you structure your role and the roles of students’ families? Who would be involved in planning and decision making about the orientation?
What would be the purpose of the orientation? What would you do (and have caregivers do) in this activity? How does the process of thinking how you would plan such a required activity reveal the advantages and disadvantages of using a remediation paradigm of family–school relating?
The Collaboration Paradigm
In the 1980s, a third paradigm shift began to emerge in the thinking of many educators and social scientists. Educators began to realize that their own beliefs about children’s development and learning not only influence how they teach students and structure their relationships with students’ families, but that these beliefs also had a reciprocal influence on how students’ families responded to them. This realization contributed to a shift in philosophy of working jointly toward a common goal with families and sharing power.
Two theories—Bronfenbrenner’s (
1979
;
1997
) ecological systems theory of child development and Vygotsky’s (
1978
) theory of learning and teaching—strongly influenced the development of this paradigm. According to the ecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner
1979
;
1997
), a child’s development is influenced either directly (e.g., through daily routines and interactions that occur in the child’s immediate context) or indirectly (e.g., through more distant factors with an impact on those routines and interactions). A primary idea of ecological systems theory is that every level of the ecological system (e.g., the child’s home or classroom, the caregiver’s workplace, the family’s and school’s neighborhood) is interconnected and thus can influence all other levels of the system. Thus, persons across each system level reciprocally influence persons at other levels. For example, the way that teachers and other school staff structure their classroom routines and interactions and school routines and interactions with family members affects what happens in the child’s home, and vice versa. Moreover, larger social and economic policies and resources (considered distant from a child’s everyday experience) also influence the routines and interactions that occur in the child’s immediate contexts of the home and classroom. For example, the revision of federal welfare laws mandating the training and employment of poverty-level parents significantly affected their available time for teaching and socializing their children.
Thus, rather than focus only on how families influence their children, educators who embrace this theory began to “hold a mirror up” to examine the ways that their interactions with families may affect how families interact with them or with children. This led many researchers to examine what school staffs believe about teaching and learning and interaction with low-income/low-status families and how that influences educators’ behavior with students’ families. For example, Davies (
1988
) interviewed 150 teachers and administrators who worked with poor children in Boston, Massachusetts; Liverpool, England; and Portugal and who “thought of low-income/low-status families as being deficient and dwelled on family problems while ignoring family strengths” (p. 53). Interestingly, the educators’ convictions about the apathy of “hard-to-reach” parents were not supported by data from the parents. Davies (
1988
) found that despite teachers’ negative attitudes toward parents, parents in all three cultures expressed active interest in their child’s progress at school and in getting involved in school; they admitted that they just did not know how to get involved. Lott (
2001
) examined the research literature to determine whether educators held stereotypes about low-income adults that influenced their responses to poor parents. She reported that, in numerous research studies, researchers discovered that the beliefs about low-income children and adults held by many teachers and administrators are negative, discouraging, and exclusionary and are communicated to parents in myriad ways. For example, as compared to middle-class parents, low-income and working-class parents receive fewer warm welcomes in their children’s schools; their interventions and suggestions are less respected and attended to; and they are less able to influence the education of their children. Epstein’s (
1987
) research adds another interesting wrinkle to this discovery of the educators’ influence on parents. In her survey of 3,700 teachers in Maryland, she discovered that “Teachers who used parent involvement frequently rated all parents higher in helpfulness and follow-through with learning activities at home, including parents with more or less education and single and married parents” (p. 128).
Second, Vygtosky’s (1978) work provided an additional theoretical tool that allowed educators to recognize that many of their current instructional practices were based exclusively on transmitting middle-class funds of knowledge and ignoring the existing funds of knowledge that low-income children bring to school. Vygotsky devoted his career to studying how children learn, and describes learning as a process that involves social as well as cognitive transformations. His writings emphasize how interactions between people are central to the ways in which individual learning and development occur. He argued that children internalize the kind of help they receive from others and eventually come to use it independently to direct their own problem solving. For Vygotsky, the shift from needing help to accomplish a task to accomplishing it independently constitutes learning. Central to his theory is the belief that children learn best when parents and teachers create instructional activities that use what children already know as resources for learning new knowledge and practices.
These two theoretical traditions—Ecological System Theory and Vygotsky’s learning theory—influenced the thinking of many educators who recognized that they needed to work in a different fashion with all students’ families and, particularly, those families who were culturally and economically diverse. Envisioning that the goals of educating all children could only occur if families and community members were involved as equals, these educators proposed a fundamental restructuring of educators’ attitudes and roles. Rather than involve parents only when there was a crisis or problem to be solved or telling them how to parent their children, these educators created opportunities to collaborate with families on a regular basis.
But what exactly is collaboration? According to Merriam-Webster’s (
1985
) definition, collaboration means “to work jointly with others or together… to cooperate with an agency or instrumentality with which one is not immediately connected” (p. 259). This definition seems simple and straightforward, yet most individuals believe collaboration is difficult to define. Seeley (
1985
) offers an elegantly simple definition: “Collaboration is a common effort toward a common goal by participants who share power” (p. 65). Describing how collaboration would look in a family–school context, Weiss and Edwards (
1992
) define it “as a cooperative process of planning and problem solving that involves school staff, parents, children, and significant others so as to maximize resources for students’ academic achievement and social–emotional development” (p. 215).
Implicit in all of these definitions is not only the recognition of common goals, but also the assumption that power—the ability and intention to use authority, influence, or control over others—and responsibility for children’s school success should be shared. For example, in a U.S. Department of Education publication, Moles (
1993
) proposed that family–school roles should be conceptualized as a shared responsibility and specified five distinctive roles shared by families and school personnel: co-communicators, co-supporters, co-learners, co-teachers, and co-decision-makers.
Christenson and Sheridan (
2001
) illustrate the specific actions that characterize each of these five co-roles. The shared role of family and school as co-communicators can be implemented as both family and school address the need to exchange information to assist children’s learning. A variety of techniques, including written, face-to-face, telephone, and formal and informal meetings, can be used to increase the shared meaning and understanding about students’ performance. The shared role of family and school as co-supporters addresses not only the needs of the partners to support the child, but also to support each other. Families can show support to children by providing positive encouragement for learning, and to schools by attending back-to-school nights and student performances. Schools can support families by being responsive to their questions and providing a welcoming climate. Teachers can support families by calling at the first sign of concern and inviting them to visit the classroom or school. The role of families and schools as co-learners entails providing opportunities for educators (e.g., administrators, teachers, support personnel) and families to learn about each other and how to work together to support student learning. For example, families may want information about school policies and practices, whereas school staff may need opportunities to learn about the cultural knowledge in the home and community so as to enhance instructional effectiveness. The shared role of family and school as co-teachers recognizes the formal teaching of students in school settings and the ways families teach, support, and encourage learning at home and in the community. Finally, the shared role of home and school as co-decision-makers, advocates, and advisors focuses on participation in formal organizations and committees.
Viewing parents and families as co-experts challenges the established ways in which power has been distributed in most schools in the past. Recall that in the separation and remediation models, educators are placed at the top of the relationship and families at the bottom. The use of hierarchies and professional dominance represents how power is distributed within these relationships. Educators (and parents) in this sense hold very narrow conceptions about the roles that parents can play in the school or in their child’s learning. More often than not, parents are relegated to the passive roles of audience members or supporters, and teachers are the isolated and overburdened experts who are expected to have all the answers.
Collaborative educators view these traditional role conceptions as unnecessarily limited. As a result, these educators are now designing family–school activities in which parents have meaningful and active roles. They are also routinely involving families in planning and decision making about their children’s educational experience. These more meaningful role expectations fit with the role that researchers report parents prefer to have with their children’s school. For example, in a major review of the research on low-income parents’ preferences for involvement with their children’s schools, Lott (
2001
) reports that low-income parents describe their involvement with the school as meaningful when (a) they have opportunities for informal communications with school staff and feel “invited in,” (b) they have a meaningful role in school activities other than that of consent-giver or signing of notes, (c) they can rely on teachers and administrators to bridge the gap between themselves and school staff, (d) they can sense that teachers and administrators value their role in their child’s learning, and (e) they believe that their involvement makes a difference in their child’s educational experience and can see the direct benefits of their involvement for their children.
Hence, rather than assume that families are deficient, educators who operate within the collaboration paradigm assume that families may already have their own ways of teaching their children important social and cognitive skills (such as how to set a goal or define a problem, how to set priorities for action, and how to design solutions).
Consequently, these educators believe that they share common goals and roles with parents, have a reason to work together with them, and draw the boundaries of their role with families quite differently from those who view their roles as separate or as needing to educate or remediate families. Rather than exclude families or control all communication and interactions to protect their autonomy, collaborative educators look for ways to include families to maximize resources for children’s learning. Hence, communication between educators and parents is explicit, regular, and directive. Decision making about children is based on negotiation, open communication and consensus, when group problem solving is actively promoted, and when students are included in problem solving. Lewis and Forman (
2002
) describe the parent conferences in an elementary school guided by such a collaborative paradigm:
Parent conferences were not viewed as a time for teachers to report to parents about a child’s academic progress, but as a way for the important adults in a child’s life to share not only academic information but also social and emotional information. Expert status was understood not as the sole purview of school staff but as something shared with and encouraged in parents…. Parents were rarely called upon to be fundraisers, bakers, or room moms. Instead, they were involved as members of a community as educational collaborators with important information about their children and as comrades in struggles related to keeping the school functioning. (pp. 77, 78)
As a result of such new ways of working, parents and students come to view themselves as co-experts with the school (
Hoover-Dempsey, Walker, Sandler, Whetsel, Green, Wilkins, & Closson, 2005
;
Lareau & Horvat, 1999
). They see themselves as having an integral role together with the school in educating their children. Parents pride themselves on using their own home learning activities (e.g., cooking together, attending church events) to facilitate their children’s academic and social learning and to monitor their child’s progress. They expect to be informed about their child’s progress by the school, and might say, “I really need to know what is happening in school to help my child.” They also expect to be involved in decisions that the school makes concerning their children’s educational progress and to exert control over those decisions.
The collaborative paradigm of family–school relations can be contrasted with the separation and remediation paradigms in which the authority (e.g., teacher) identifies the concern or problem that merits attention, decides what type of solution is necessary, and decides how the clients (i.e., student and family) should be involved with a philosophy of “doing to” or “doing for” the client. In both the separation and remediation paradigms, educators assume unilateral or dominant roles in educational decision making and action. In contrast, in the collaborative paradigm, educators interact with students and their families to identify together those resources that exist in the family and school for taking action to solve children’s problems or to celebrate their learning. Many other differences exist between the remediation and the collaboration paradigms (see
Table 2.1
).
These differences are significant and have to do with the focus of the relationship; the roles of the educator, student, and parents/caregivers; the nature of the relationship, including the goal toward which it is directed; the nature of the activities and the expected outcome; the assumptions about the roles and responsibilities of educator, student, and parent; the purposes and styles of communication and decision making; and the structure of power relations.
TABLE 2.1 Comparison of Role Expectations and Power Relations in the Remediation and Collaboration Paradigms
Focus
Diagnose and treat the academic/social problem of the student.
Foster a process of cooperative planning and problem-solving between the family and school to maximize the resources for children’s learning and socioemotional development.
Educator’s Role Expert who does “to” or “with” the family; serving as the central decision maker or problem solver.
Professional working “with,” not doing “to”; resource person who shares leadership and power with family.
Student’s Role
Often is excluded from family–school interaction or has a passive role; assumed not to know their own needs.
Has active role in all family–school activities in determining own progress, problems, and solutions.
Parent/Caregiver’s Role
Often passive recipient of “service/activity” that is defined by school professional.
Has active role in all family–school activities; seen as capable and competent in deciding how to contribute to student’s learning or to solving student problems.
Nature of the Relationship
Distant, sometimes adversarial; frequently characterized by overt or covert blaming by each party. Roles are set: Educator is to lead; parent is to follow.
Cooperative, nonblaming atmosphere created to promote problem solving. Roles are flexible and change according to situational demands; educators and parents defer to each other in their respective domains; reciprocity is valued.
Goal
To have contact between the two parties only when there is a problem to be resolved and need information from parents that would help educator solve the problem.
To design opportunities to get to know one another and establish a partnership to prepare the child for learning and success in school.
Nature of the Activities
School staff communicate with parents only when they need to assess a problem and prescribe the necessary cure. Parents are expected to be compliant with the school’s decisions.
Parents and students are seen as important resources for problem solving and learning, so there is a regular communication between home and schools to routinely share information on issues of mutual concern.
Expected Outcomes
Crisis or problem is resolved.
Increased family involvement in the student’s school experience; improved academic performance; fewer “insoluble” discipline problems.
Assumptions Regarding Power and Politics
Schools know best what a child needs. Do not need to consider possible differences between home and school.
Adults at school and at home have different kinds of information useful in helping a child learn and succeed, which are shared openly and directly.
Contact is limited to very structured, ritualized events; each expects to be blamed or manipulated by the other.
Time is taken to build trust and engage in regular communication. Educator and caregiver share information and communicate openly about concerns, expectations for child, and so on.
Therefore, educators and caregivers adopt blaming, deficit-labeling attitude with each other, focusing on who caused the problem.
Educators and caregivers adopt a troubleshooting attitude, looking for what might solve the problem, assuming responsibility for discovering possible solutions without being blamed for causing the problem.
Emphasis is placed on protecting the autonomy of the educator by not giving caregivers too much information or control. “Either/or thinking”–either preserve autonomy or submit to control by family; either school has responsibility or home.
A shared belief that teacher autonomy and family interests are interdependent and reciprocal; both individual teacher and family interests can be met.
Problem solving is imposed by the educator.
Problem solving grows out of a consensus facilitated by the educator.
Power for others or against them.
Power with others.
Win/lose orientation.
Win/win orientation.
Differential power; aggressive educators, passive family members.
Shared power; educator does not express superiority of expertise or knowledge, views family and school as being in a reciprocal relationship, each affecting the other.
Preserving the family–school relationship is sacrificed in the service of the school’s own interests. Only do as much as other does.
Initiate and engage in behaviors to build the relationship and advance the interests of both parties.
Figure 2.6
illustrates the nature of family–school relations in the collaboration paradigm as a stationary bridge. Why is a bridge an appropriate illustration of the ways of interacting between educators and families? The answer lies in the purpose that the bridge serves. On one side of the bridge is the child’s life at school; on the other side of the bridge is the child’s life at home and in their community. The purpose of the bridge is to form a stable and connecting path between the worlds of home and school that students traverse each day.
The bridge denotes the quality of the home–school relationship. In a solid bridge that parents trust to have their child cross, the family–school relationship is strong, predictable, and positive. If the family–school relationship is weak, the bridge offers no predictable support to the child traversing the path between home and school. Hence, the child cannot depend on it as a trustworthy resource.
Figure 2.6
The Permanent Two-Way Bridge Depicting the Collaboration Paradigm of Family–School Relations
How are schools translating the collaborative paradigm into practice? One set of principles, developed by the staff at Ackerman Institute’s Family School Collaboration Project (
Weiss & Edwards, 1992
) provides a clear template for changing family–school relations. Successfully tested in schools in the United States and Canada over a 15-year period, this set of principles helps school faculties successfully transform their current family–school activities to “connect the two key systems in a child’s life—the home and the school—in ways which create a shared commitment to children’s learning” (
Weiss & Edwards, 1992
, p. 215).
The first principle is that the school commits to building relationships with all parents whether or not the parents can come to school. To do this, educators must make clear to parents how their active participation in their children’s educational experience directly enhances their children’s achievement and development. In addition, the educator must look for ways to communicate a genuine interest in connecting with the parents of all of the students to ensure these outcomes. Consequently, if some parents are not able to come to the school because of work or family demands, the school staff signals their belief that these parents still care deeply about their child’s learning by providing them with the means to understand and keep up with what is happening in school (e.g., through use of summary letters describing an event they missed, regular newsletters, and homework assignments).
A second principle is that all family–school activities are planned to maximize student learning. Rather than simply trying to get parents involved, school staff use the family–school relationship to meet specific educational goals, solve problems, and celebrate the children and their achievements. Rather than be organized only around discussion of problems, the school maintains a dialogue about learning and about the school’s interest in each child. Consequently, the school staff looks for opportunities for parents, students, and staff to interact with one another in ways that emphasize family involvement in children’s planning, decision making, problem solving, and learning. To do this, the staff examines the various aspects of the school experience (e.g., curriculum, administrative and communication procedures, special programs, after-school activities, assessment and evaluation programs, health programs) to design opportunities for families and school staff to experience each other differently.
In keeping with this emphasis on maximizing student learning, the third principle is that the child is included as an active participant in virtually all family–school interactions. To do this, children of all ages are taught to function as active participants in family–teacher (i.e., the old parent–teacher) conferences. Because it is their life at school that is to be discussed, they come to such meetings as “experts on themselves” who must be there to describe their own experience, thoughts, and feelings. As the children contribute to the solution of their problems and the improvement of their own school experience, they gain confidence and a sense of efficacy. Family–school interactions that involve the children are embedded in orientations, classroom instruction, homework routines, celebrations, presentations of new curriculum, transitions to new grade levels and programs, procedures for home–school communication, and for resolving difficulties.
A fourth principle is that parents should be actively involved in all family–school events, not as an audience, but as full participants. Rather than unnecessarily restrict the role that parents can play to that of classroom volunteer, instructional support person, or audience member, family–school events are designed to underscore the role of parents as active co-decision-makers and illustrate the belief that everyone—parents, teachers, and students—has a job to do to ensure the students’ educational success. Reflective Exercise 2.3 provides an illustration of one parent’s account of how a routine school orientation was redesigned with these collaborative principles in mind.
REFLECTIVE EXERCISE 2.3 A Parent’s View of a “Collaborative” Fall Orientation
Read the following parent’s reaction to a fall orientation designed in terms of the collaborative principles and then contrast how this orientation compared with the previous two orientations that you planned.
• Discuss how the role of the teacher and the care-giver and student were structured, what you think was the purpose of the orientation, and how activities were planned to meet this purpose.
• How does this example of a back-to-school orientation reveal the advantages and disadvantages of using a collaboration paradigm of family–school relating?
Dear Sis,
Do I have news for you! After years of dutifully attending school “open house” events at Tim and Stephen’s schools, I thought I had them all figured out. Was I ever surprised by the back-to-school night put on by Stephen’s teacher and school! I had expected for this fall orientation to be like every other one I had attended. I would sit in a large auditorium, listen to a parade of speakers talk to a huge audience of parents and a few wiggly children (whose parents had not been able to get baby-sitters), and then “race” to each teacher’s classroom in which I had a child. My purpose for going was to, at least, show my face and let these teachers know that I was interested in meeting them.
This orientation night was far different. First, Stephen was invited to come with me (as a matter of fact, he invited me to accompany him to the orientation). Second, Stephen and I spent the evening just with his teacher, classmates, and their parents. (The school had organized a schedule in which the grade levels met on different evenings so that parents would not feel rushed to get to every child’s room in the same evening!) Third, his teacher had organized an activity in which, after greeting us and giving us a preview of the evening’s activities, she asked each parent and child to talk together privately for a few minutes about what their goals were for the student’s learning this year and what the parent might do to help their child accomplish these goals. After Stephen and I talked, we had a chance to share our ideas and to hear the ideas of his classmates and their parents. The teacher listed all these ideas up on the board and then talked about how our ideas fit with her goals and plans for the year. It was obvious, when all those ideas got written on the board, that we shared many of the same goals and concerns about the new school year!
Not only was this activity useful for showing us as parents what we have in common, but also it provided me with an experience interacting with my child at school, which I had never had before. Usually, parents expect to come to these types of events and be quiet and listen; if a parent has to bring his or her child (due to not getting baby-sitting), the parent is expected to be quiet and entertain the child. This time it was different; we were asked to talk with each other during a school event. I was surprised by how seriously Stephen took what I had to say to heart about him doing his homework without me having to nag him to get down to work. (Of course, we’ll have to see just how much he follows through on this!) I think that he liked being treated and talked to as a grown-up. I certainly liked my opinion being asked for too!
More important, this activity gave me an opportunity to see up close how Stephen’s teacher relates to him and to the other children. It is obvious that she cares about each one of them. It showed in the way she solicited their participation in the discussion and took their answers seriously. So, I’m relieved that he’s got such a caring teacher. What’s more, I’m amazed that with just this one orientation night, I’ve gotten a very different view of what this year may have in store for me as well as for Stephen!
Love,
Anne
Another major effort to create more collaborative partnerships between schools and families is Comer’s School Development Program (SDP). Created by James Comer (
1980
;
1991
;
Comer & Haynes, 1996
;
Comer, Haynes, Joyner, & Ben-Avie, 2004
), this program illustrates how some schools are changing their social psychological climate so as to be more inviting to low-income and culturally diverse families. Comer and Haynes (
1991
) developed an approach in which teachers, administrators, and other school personnel make decisions about the school. Parents also participate in this decision-making process. The goal of this process is “the creation of a sense of community and direction for parents, school staff, and students alike” (
Comer, 1991
, p. 271). A recent description about the Comer process emphasizes the importance of all adults working together to improve the schools:
The key to the Comer process is that schools must make adjustments to bring all adults in the community together in a supportive way—to create an ethos, tone, feeling—that is supportive of children…. An additional key aspect of the Comer process is the inclusion of parents in all levels of school activities: SPMT, volunteers, conferencing, “make and takes,” PTA, PTO, special programs, subcommittee, etc. Parents are truly welcome and home–school relationships are fostered. (
Comer, 2004
, p. 45)
The SDP is designed for whole-school implementation, with the goal of improving the ecology of the school by improving the school governance system, the functioning of the mental health team, and the development of a parent program that allows parental participation in school governance and school activities. Started in New Haven, Connecticut, Comer’s program is now being implemented in a number of other U.S. cities. (We describe this program in more detail in
Chapter 7
.)
These types of collaborative interactions transform the way families and schools experience each other. As parents learn they can make a difference in their child’s learning, they invest in school. As staff learns to build on the strengths of children and families and to block blaming from undermining the collaborative process, they create a shared vested interest in the child that brings the family and school closer together. When each person feels known, understood, and cared about by the other parties, a sense of community and common purpose unites the classroom and school with the families of school-age children.
2.4 Implications for Your Professional Practice
As in any change effort, it is important to recognize that personal change does not happen overnight. Instead, for change to be lasting, we often go through a series of stages. The first stage is that of recognizing an area of your life in which you wish to change, while a second stage consists of assessing where you are, where you want to be, and what will be the costs and benefits of getting from where you are to where you want to be. A third stage emphasizes preparing yourself for the change effort by getting concrete ideas about how you might change, whereas the fourth stage involves trying out these ideas, gathering feedback to learn how they work, and then deciding what to modify or continue doing.
Where are you now in your thinking about family–school relating? A growing body of research on pre-service teachers reveals that most teachers in training embrace a traditional way of thinking about family–school roles that has, in all likelihood, been shaped by their own early experiences of education. For example, Graue and Brown (
2003
) interviewed teachers in training and report that most expected to assume an “expert” role with parents rather than a collaborative one, and viewed the ideal parent as someone who “knows her place, who is supportive but recognizes that she does not have the professional knowledge held by the teacher and thus does not have knowledge that counts in educational decision making” (p. 727). Moreover, the pre-service teachers in their study expected their interactions with students’ caregivers would consist of families responding to the teachers’ needs rather than the other way around.
We strongly believe that one can only change their preferred ideas for family–school relating when one can imagine different possibilities for how family–teacher relationships might be structured. We hope that by introducing you to the distinctive paradigms of family–school relationships that are dominant in the field, you can gain a clearer picture of both where you are now in terms of your current thinking and where you might want to go or change in terms of how you structure your relationships with the caregivers/families of your students. At this point, you may be tempted first to look outward at what you see and hear as the expectations for how parents and educators should relate in your professional training context or in the schools with which you are familiar. However, we believe it is critical first to look inward to consider which paradigm is most prominent in your thinking about your relationships with students and their families. What do you notice in your own thinking about the kinds of relationships and style of contact you expect to have with the parents/ caregivers of your students? Use Reflective Exercise 2.4 for questions to guide you in this self-assessment process.
REFLECTIVE EXERCISE 2.4 Assessing Your Current Thinking about Family–School Relations
What do you notice in your own thinking about the style of contact and the decision-making power you expect to have with the parents/caregivers of your students? How do you envision interactions with your students’ families?
For example, under what circumstances would you prefer parents/caregivers to contact you or visit your classroom?
Who do you think has the necessary knowledge and expertise to determine what and how to plan students’ learning experiences?
Who should have the decision-making power in planning what is learned or in resolving your students’ academic and behavioral difficulties?
What do these answers reveal about the paradigm which is most prominent in your thinking about the relationships you expect to have with your students’ families/caregivers?
As you think back on your first exercise in
Chapter 1
in which we asked you to describe your future vision of yourself teaching, which of the three mental models/paradigms seems to most closely reflect the thinking about relationships with families that you depicted in your vision?
Where did your expectations and paradigm preferences come from?
What types of family–school paradigm did you see modeled by teachers during your schooling?
What type of paradigm do you think your parents and grandparents experienced in their schooling?
How did your parents’ interactions with your teachers influence the development of your current mental model/paradigm of family–school relations?
Given that our first paradigms are very influential, what evidence or experience would you need to decide to shift your mental model/paradigm?
What do you think would be the hardest shift for you? Why would this be the hardest shift for you?
Once you have some clarity about your own paradigm, you may want to listen to the language and observe the everyday interactions of educators in your training program or at the schools in which you work to discern in which paradigm(s) they seem to be operating. To assist you in this task, consider the following questions:
■ What language is used by the professors in your training program or by the principals and teachers in the schools you visit or work in when they talk about parents? Does their language reflect high or low expectations for parents’ positive influence on their children’s academic success?
■ Are there different expectations for parents marginalized by poverty or language differences?
■ Is an adversarial or a collaborative style of interaction anticipated in contacts with parents?
■ What kinds of implicit and explicit cues do educators give parents about their “proper” role in the school? Do they expect parents to be passive recipients of knowledge from them, the “experts,” or do they expect parents to have knowledge about their children and their children’s worlds that would facilitate the learning process?
■ Do the staff expect that they alone define the priorities of the school, or do they expect parents to help define the priorities and issues the school needs to address to improve?
■ Do teachers and other staff members regularly collaborate by making joint decisions and plans, or do they operate separately from one another?
■ Are there times and places during the workday where school staff talk with each other about their hopes and concerns for the school as a whole as well as for their classrooms? Is there time for conversation with parents not only about their children but also about the school as a whole?
Obviously, the paradigm shift from separation or remediation to one of collaboration represents a change in power dynamics between parents and educators. The usual power arrangement in most public schools (particularly those that serve the urban poor) excludes parents from knowledge about the school’s functioning and from important decision making about their children, much less about the school as a whole. As a result, educators may have strong reactions to requests to treat parents as co-experts on their children. Instead, some teachers view parents as needing instruction or guidance in parenting and believe that their role as teachers is to provide expert guidance or advice. Other teachers will view their role with parents as an expert/advice-giving role and see it as an additional burden to an already over-demanding instructional role with students. Still others who view that their role should be a parent educator or advice-giver feel inadequately prepared to function as parenting experts with parents and thus avoid interaction with them. (See
Reflective Exercise 2.5
for samples of the varying attitudes and styles that teachers may demonstrate as they interact with their students’ families.)
REFLECTIVE EXERCISE 2.5 Assessing Other Educators’ Attitudes Toward Students’ Families
What do you notice in the thinking of the school staff discussed here about the kinds of relationships and style of contact they expect to have with their students’ parents or caregivers? Given the paradigm they are operating under, what could you expect from this teacher if you were a parent of a student in their class?
TEACHER 1: |
Why should I worry about making connections with my students’ parents? It’s not my responsibility to teach parents how to raise their children or help them figure out how to help their child. They need to learn how to raise their children on their own. I think we do too much for parents as it is, like providing public housing and welfare for many of these parents. How will parents learn to be responsible, with us doing for them every step of the way? My parents raised four children without any teacher working with them and telling them how to do it. |
TEACHER 2: |
I’ve been teaching elementary students for twelve years now, and believe me, the majority of parents don’t seem to care. I’ve knocked myself out planning meetings to teach them the things they should do with their children. Most of them never show up, and those who do, don’t change. You tell them what they should do and they keep on doing what they were doing before. I find myself saying, “Why bother? I have better things to do with my time!” |
TEACHER 3: |
I already spend a lot of my free time trying to figure out how to teach my students and run my classroom. Now you want me to think up things to do with parents. I have enough to do as it is. Besides, I wasn’t trained to work with parents. I am really much more comfortable working with children than talking with their parents. I don’t know what I would tell parents to do, and I’m not sure what I have to offer them. What’s more, I don’t want parents asking a lot of questions about what I am doing or why I am doing it. |
TEACHER 4: |
I have discovered that if I ask parents, they can give me a real head start in getting to know their children. I used to think that I was the one who had to “have it all together” and that I shouldn’t contact them until I could show them that I knew their child and knew what to do to help their child. But I am learning that parents and families can teach me a lot, not only about their particular children, but they can also help me be more effective in solving children’s problems and making my teaching more relevant. |
TEACHER 5: |
Over the years, I have come to realize that I not only depend on students’ families to deliver their children to school, fed and cared for, but also I depend on them to help their children want to learn and succeed in school. So I now think of them as vital working partners in my job of educating children. Without them, I can’t succeed. |
Once you develop a sense of your current mental model/paradigm, you can decide whether and how you might want to work toward changing both your beliefs and your professional practice. Obviously, having concrete examples of different ways of relating to parents and students and recognizing that acquiring new ways of thinking and working take time, persistence, and the cooperation of others are important resources in this change effort. Often, however, there is a need to discover how this change in thinking might benefit them personally. In the following vignette, two students describe the “aha” paradigm-shifting moments they experienced in discovering the personal benefit that resulted from thinking about how they might relate differently to the families of their students.
It was only when I started to look at how I expected to make all the decisions about what my students needed and how I expected to teach them that I realized how limiting was my thinking about parent knowledge. When I began to consider that I will probably teach children who have very different life experiences from mine, and that I never expected to consult with parents or consider any real input from parents in planning how I would teach their children, I realized that I had overlooked a very important resource for my learning that could make my job a lot easier!
As a young teacher who wasn’t married and had no children of her own, I was really anxious about interacting with parents, and was afraid that they would not see me as competent. So I was planning to keep them at a distance and call on them only when I had tried everything else to handle their children’s difficulties. Yet the idea of “building a relationship with them before I needed it” by conveying that I cared for them like I cared for their children has helped me get past the fear I had about interacting with them.
In the following chapters, you will see a chronology of other stories by educators who decided to change their ways of working with students and their families and made the change. In each of these stories, you will hear showcased the thoughts and feelings of the educators as they experimented with making these changes, their specific changes in practice, and the thoughts and reactions of parents and students as they experienced these different ways of working.
Summary
In this chapter, we described a typology of mental models/paradigms of family–school relationships that can provide a framework that can be used to reflect on the nature of your own beliefs as well as to locate in which paradigm other educators operate. Two out of the three paradigms—the separation/separate spheres paradigm and the remediation paradigm—locate parents in more limited and passive roles, whereas the other—the collaboration paradigm—offers opportunities for both parents and educators to take on active roles in which all parties can bring their knowledge and strengths to improving students’ academic achievement and social and emotional competence. We end this chapter with a discussion of the change process you may experience as you experiment with ways of thinking and working with families that may be new to you.
Activities and Questions
1. Imagine that you have been asked to create an advertisement to “sell” one of the three family–school relationship paradigms to a group of parents and community members. Develop a specific advertisement and accompanying jingle to sell this audience on the benefits of this approach to family–school relating.
2. What impact do our lived experiences have on the development of our thinking about family–school relating? What types of experiences should we create for ourselves to develop more comfort with the collaboration paradigm?
3. Discuss three assumptions about family–school relating that undergird the separation paradigm, then do the same for the remediation paradigm.
4. Describe some benefits of relating to families using the collaboration paradigm.
Resources
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) U.S. Department of Education
400 Maryland Avenue SW
Washington, DC 20202
Phone 800-USA-LEARN (1-800-872-5327)
www.ed.gov/nclb/landing.jhtml
Provides information on NCLB’s key principles. It also has a teacher’s toolkit and parents’ guide as well as opportunities to sign up to receive email updates.
National Head Start Association
1651 Prince Street Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone: 703-739-0875
www.nhsa.org
Comer School Development Program (SDP)
55 College Street New Haven, CT 06510 Phone: 203-737-1020
www.info.med.yale.edu/comer
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 | |
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.