Strong Families, Strong Schools

Based on my keynote at the Family Leadership Conference, Saturday, May 21, 2016.

When our eldest entered school, I wanted to know his teachers, the principal, and other families* in our neighborhood. I'm on the state Board of Ed now as the Parent Representative and I'm there with no particular education expertise to speak of, but by virtue of having a child in the public schools at the time I was appointed by Governor Deval L. Patrick in August 2014.

I've learned quite a lot about our children and our schools over the years as a parent, as a former Lexington School Committee Member and Chair, and as a past state PTA president. I want to share some of what I've learned about what it means - and why it's important - for modern families to be engaged in their child's education.

Over forty years of research demonstrates that when families are engaged in their children's education, student achievement and graduation rates increase and this holds true regardless of a parent's level of education, country of origin, or socio-economic status.

Schools need families to help close learning gaps, and we all need to work together to help our schools fulfill the promise that public education holds for every child, but what is it supposed to look like?

I attended a conference a while back that was focused on helping families help their children succeed at school. I didn't write down who the speaker was, but I did write what was said, and it reveals some profound indicators for families and schools:

In the homes of high-achieving children, the academic climate is in sync with the academic climate found in their schools. And together, they generate a series of attitudes and beliefs, skills and motivations that lead to higher achievement of many kinds.

With the federal update of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the language for families has been sharpened from "family involvement" to "family engagement". It's a challenging provision because we all know how busy families are these days.

Modern family engagement is not a checklist; it's about building relationships with families for student success no matter the family's culture, language, or socio-economic status. It's about understanding and co-constructing complementary roles, but before you can get there, you have to establish some core beliefs. This is what the book Beyond the Bake Sale is all about.

In Bake Sale, the authors share 4 Core Beliefs which are the four corners of family-school partnerships. I highly recommend reading and discussing the book in mixed teams: of parents, teachers, building leaders, custodians, secretaries, school committee members, selectmen, faith-based and community-base leaders, etc., because the whole community shares a role in student success.

Sharing responsibility means families become full partners with schools in an integrated, strategic way for students, not as a stand alone event, or a thing that a school or individual does. Effective family engagement is woven into everything the school does.

Approaching relationships with families in this way is to focus on a strength-based model, wherein family engagement is systemic and integrated, not something added to an already full plate; it's the sauce that brings everything together.

Shared responsibility is continuous across a child's life - from birth through adult - and it happens everywhere children learn: at home, in pre-kindergarten programs, before- and after-school programs, in school, and in faith-based and community-based programs and activities. Shared responsibility is identified as having three dimensions:

1. Opportunities: where schools and communities provide opportunities for family engagement;
2. Roles: where families, schools, and communities co-create responsibilities for student success;
3. Learning: where families, schools, and communities take stock to learn and improve practice.

Modern families engage with schools and communities to support children's learning, guide them through a complex school system, advocate for more and improved learning opportunities, and collaborate and communicate effectively with school and community partners.

Modern schools engage with families and communities in order to build relationships, communicate effectively, provide activities that link to learning and address differences, and support advocacy and share power.

* * *

* "Parent" or "family" refers to the adult/s who serve a care-giving role in a child's life.

ADDITIONAL SELECTED RESOURCES

1. 1647: 1647families.org 
2. Building Capacity for Family Engagement: http://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/14/11/building-capacity-family-engagement 
3. Family Engagement in Anytime, Anywhere Learning: http://www.hfrp.org/var/hfrp/storage/fckeditor/File/Family%20Engagement%20in%20Anywhere%20Anytime%20Learning_HarvardFamilyResProj.pdf  
4. Harvard Family Research Project: hfrp.org
5. Massachusetts Parent and Community Education and Involvement Advisory Council: http://www.doe.mass.edu/boe/sac/parent/ (See Family, School, and Community Partnership Fundamentals: http://www.doe.mass.edu/boe/sac/parent/FSCPfundamentals.pdf)
6. National Association for Family and Community Education (NAFCE): nafce.org
7. National Parent Teacher Association (National PTA): pta.org
8. The Equity and Excellence Commission Report to Education Secretary Arne Duncan: http://www2.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/eec/equity-excellence-commission-report.pdf

Crossposted to MAStewartMA.wordpress.com

How do you know if your school is "family friendly" and why does it matter?

How family friendly is your school? How do you know?

Sometimes it's really easy to overlook things that may be unintended barriers to family engagement because seeing them day after day can make them invisible to you. One way to address this is to have a welcoming walk-through of the building. How will families and community members engage with school leaders and staff in the process?

Henderson, Mapp, Johnson, & Davies suggest that even before families enter the school building, they're looking for signs that they will be welcomed:

• friendly signs (in all major languages spoken by families at the school) point out the entrance and say that families and visitors are welcome;

• parking spots for parents and visitors are clearly marked and are near (or at least not very far from) the entrance;

• school staff and parents greet visitors in a friendly way and ask if they can help;

• teachers, administrators, and other school staff go outside the building to greet and talk with parents.

Once inside the building, how welcoming is it? What do you see? What impressions do you come away with? And, once you have identified barriers, what's the process for removing them?

Remembering Summer Learning

This year, and summer especially, will remain in my memory as one where I explored new methods of learning.

I had already discovered the power of twitter as a personal and professional learning tool, what with various twitter chats in which I began participating in 2011.

Last Spring, I signed up for my first MOOC with coursera. I logged in for the first few days, then, never again. Failure to continue the course was a combination of being somewhat disoriented there, not being as interested in the course as I thought I would be, and a general lack of time.

Undaunted, in July I signed up for an EDx course: The Future of Learning with Professor Richard Elmore. Happily, I found this one to be a topic in which I was not only interested, but engaged in right from the start.

Professor Richard Elmore,
June 2014 (Photo credit: mas)

I had been fortunate to attend an introduction to the MOOC on the Harvard campus with Prof Elmore in June. In the course we explored modes of individual and distributed learning and leading through exploration and understanding of our own theories of learning and leadership. This course provided me with tools to imagine and contribute to the future of learning. More on this to come in future posts!

So, I've experienced two MOOCs to date. Both were designed with participatory interaction occurring primarily through the course website, with expanded conversation happening on discussion platforms within the site (which I found to be extremely chaotic in both cases...), as well as through social media (a facebook page and twitter). Connections to others for both were based on platforms for writing and reading.

Another summer learning experience was reading "Beyond the Bake Sale" as a #PTcamp bookchat with over 100 educators and parents spanning 10 time zones. We used digital tools including Voxer, twitter (#ptcamp), ApprenNet, and blogs to discuss a couple of chapters each week.

Most striking about this experience were the visual (ApprenNet) and aural (Voxer) aspects of connecting and sharing. The group was certainly much smaller than a MOOC but much bigger than a typical book group. The digital tools enabled us to connect and challenge each other through voice and video.

Bake Sale was a stand out experience that continues to have ripples! Out of that bookchat experience came material for an MTA ED Talk to be given at their summer conference in Williamstown last August. Unfortunately, I was unable to give my ED Talk due to illness, but no good work is ever wasted! Themes and examples from my Talk have been used in various ways since, including on this blog. The bookchat had also enabled the ability to establish relationships - connecting through voice and video makes quick colleagues! I maintain a personal and professional learning network with members of the #ptcamp group who inspire me daily.

For those interested: Here's a Harvard Graduate School of Education video of Dr. Karen Mapp (one of the Bake Sale authors) describing her work on the Dual Capacity-Building Framework recently released by the US Department of Education: http://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/14/11/building-capacity-family-engagement

Family-School Partnership Models

In thinking about the type of partnership your school culture embraces, consider how well it engages families and the greater community in:

• Building Relationships
• Linking to Learning
• Addressing Differences
• Supporting Advocacy and
• Sharing Power

Bake Sale authors point the way with these four partnership models:

The Partnership School

This school's culture holds that all families and communities have something great to offer and the school will do whatever it takes to work closely with all stakeholders to make sure every single student succeeds. Home visits are common with new families. The building is open to community use and social services are available to families at all times. All family activities connect to student learning and parents and teachers look at student work and test results together. The parent group includes all families and there's a clear, open process for resolving problems. Student-led Parent-Teacher conferences are held three times a year for 30-minutes. In a Partnership School, the PTA is focused on improving student achievement and families are involved in all major decisions.

The Open Door School

Partnership is improving here: families can be involved in many ways and they're working hard to get an even bigger turnout for activities. Teachers explain test scores, if asked, and folders of student work go home occasionally. The school holds curriculum nights three or four times a year and families are knowledgeable of out-of-school classes in the community. Minority families have their own group and multicultural nights are held once a year. Regular progress reports go to parents, but test data can be hard to understand. Parent-Teacher conferences are held twice a year. Parents can raise issues at PTA meetings, as well as set its own agenda and raise money for the school. And, a Community Representative sits on the school-based site council.

The Come-if-We-Call School

The phone is used as a hotline by staff to invite parents in - but only when there are problems, because the school thinks there's only so much families can really offer. The school is the expert here and families are told what students will be learning at the Fall Open House. The school can't address differences when it's overwhelmed with more than twenty different languages, because they think immigrant families don't have time to come in or care to contribute. The principal sets the agenda for parent meetings - and the PTA gets the school's message out! If community groups have concerns, they are more than welcome to take them up ... with the School Committee.

The Fortress School 
By its very nature, a fortress is most difficult to access. There's a whole community up there behind those walls, but unless you work here, or go to school here, you are not welcome - and you will be seldom invited in. The school thinks that if students don't do well here, it's because their families aren't giving them enough support - because the school is already doing all it can. The principal will select a few "cooperative parents" to help out at times. And families are afraid to complain fearing reprisals on their child.

 A key to understanding partnership, is to see it along a continuum. Some schools may be Open Door Schools, yet still have some Fortress classrooms. How will you ensure your school's culture is open to embracing true partnership with families and the community?

As a first step, take a welcoming walk-through of your building with an eye for any unintentional barriers; consider how you will engage your families in that process. And then, once you identify barriers, what's your process for removing them?

In education, what will be effective depends on your goal and how it's measured. Schools cannot do this work alone - it's a shared responsibility of schools, families, and communities to ensure all students succeed. This means looking beyond parent volunteer and fundraising stereotypes to build inclusive and effective partnerships for student success.

Intro to What I Learned at #PTcamp

Sometimes we forget. We don't mean to, but we forget that our children are whole children who come to and from school from families and communities.

But what if we didn't forget? And what if we engaged parents as partners, allies, and advocates in children's education at home and at school?

Because more than 40 years of research shows that when families are engaged in their child's learning, that child does better. And this holds true regardless of a parent's level of education, country of origin, or socio-economic status.

So, why do so many schools struggle to engage families? And does it really matter how family-friendly your schools are?

These were some of the questions I had in mind this summer when I participated in #PTcamp: a free and open, virtual bookchat spanning 10 time zones and involving more than 100 educators and parents. Together we read Beyond the Bake Sale: the essential guide to family-school partnerships. Each week we read a couple of chapters, then using some digital tools (including blogs, Twitter, Voxer, and ApprenNet), we engaged, reflected, challenged, and provoked each other's thinking - for learning.

Bake Sale not only connected all of us globally, it got us thinking about the best ways to authentically engage families for student success. By placing family engagement at the heart of school partnerships, the authors promote these 4 Core Beliefs:

1. All parents have dreams for their children and want the best for them;
2. All parents have the capacity for supporting their children's learning;
3. Parents and schools should be equal partners;
4. Responsibility for building these partnerships rests primarily with school staff, especially school leaders.

Then, the authors point the way through an analysis of four partnership models, using five essential metrics by which to gauge how well schools:

• Build Relationships
• Link to Learning
• Address Differences
• Support Advocacy
• and Share Power

My next blog posts will outline the four partnership models discussed in the book - I am so curious to know what will look familiar to you!

Core Beliefs

Change is easy. You go first. ~ Wisdom of Anonymous

If we are serious about engaging families for student success, and if we do not take our families' involvement for granted, we will want to improve family engagement practice in the most authentic ways. When schools work with and engage families, those families become powerful partners, allies, and advocates. Family engagement matters.

These 4 Core Beliefs are found in Chapter 3 of Beyond the Bake Sale; by placing them at the heart of family-school partnerships, the authors promote and affirm the valuable role of families, so necessary for all students to achieve academic proficiency - and beyond.

Core Belief 1: All parents have dreams for their children and want the best for them. When we take the time to hear from parents directly about their hopes and dreams for their children, it deepens the relationship. How often do schools take the time to hear  directly from parents about the dreams for their children? How do teachers adjust their practice to accommodate student/family goals each day? Each week? Month? Year? Schools must be intentional in their approach to building relationships with families. 

Core Belief 2: All parents have the capacity to support their children's learning. Do we believe this? Or do we think families do not have time to come in or care to contribute? If all parents have the capacity to support their children's learning, and we support parents, children's learning will improve.

Core Belief 3: Parents and school staff should be equal partners. When you think about it, schools belong to the community and families. Schools must tap into parents' expertise of their children. True partnership is essential. Achieving student and school success will be impossible unless all stakeholders are valued for their contributions, and schools make themselves available and are willing to commit to that goal.

Core Belief 4: The responsibility for building partnerships between school and home rests primarily with school staff, especially school leaders. Of course. Principals set the tone in the school, co-constructing roles based on shared responsibility and understanding of the complementary roles of families and communities.

Family engagement is the third leg of the stool that holds the child in the center and lifts her up (family, school, community). If families do not know what their child is learning and doing in class, and the school is unaware of the family's hopes and dreams for their child, how will they be able to help her achieve her vision of success? Families, communities, and schools must acknowledge their shared responsibility for every child's success—and it is up to the school to lead the way.
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Image credit: Ground-breaking workbook for families and school leaders to read together by Anne T. Henderson, Karen L. Mapp, Vivian R. Johnson, and Don Davies.