Modern Family Engagement

Hands: How often have you experienced "random acts" of family engagement at your child's school, those one-off events to count heads in the building toward the school's family engagement plan?

Research demonstrates that when families are engaged in children's education, student achievement and graduation rates increase. Also? Studies show that effectively engaging families is cost effective, so much so that schools would have to spend more than $1,000 per pupil to get the same results.

So, it's clear that schools need families to help close learning gaps, but few know what good family engagement looks like, and fewer are willing to take the risk.

It's been observed that, in the homes of high-achieving children, the academic climate is in-sync with the academic climate of their schools. Together they generate a series of beliefs, attitudes, skills, and motivations that lead to higher achievement of many kinds.

Modern families play critical roles for student success, raising their children in multiple settings and across time, in collaboration with many others:

• Modern family engagement is a shared responsibility in which schools and other community agencies and organizations are committed to engaging families in meaningful and culturally respectful ways - and families are committed to actively supporting their children's learning and development --> where families and schools co-create responsibilities and roles for student success

• Modern family engagement is continuous across a child's life --> where schools and communities provide opportunities for family engagement

• Modern family engagement is carried out everywhere children learn - at home, in pre-K programs, in school, in after-school programs, faith-based institutions, and community programs and activities --> where families, schools, and communities take stock to learn and improve

It's important for schools to be intentional in their approaches to build relationships with families, yet many teacher preparation programs provide very little preparation on how to work constructively with families. As the Lead Learner in a school building, Principals set the tone, co-constructing roles based on a shared responsibility and their understanding of complimentary responsibilities.

How family friendly is your school? How do you know? One way to find out is through a welcoming school walk-through. Invite some families, some community members, teachers, and support staff, including custodians, cafeteria workers, and school secretaries. Walk through the building and ask them to look at your school as a new visitor would see it:

• How inviting is the entrance?

• Are signs clear and in the languages represented by families whose children attend the school?

• How welcoming is the front office?

Consider using a guide like this checklist from Beyond the Bake Sale.*

All parents have the capacity to support their children's learning and there are many different kinds of learning. Many times, educators don't understand how they intimidate families, especially those whose first language isn't English. How can you shift culture in a school?

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* Beyond the Bake Sale is a great book for the whole school to read together, but it's even more effective to read it in mixed teams of educators and parents. I've read it several ways and one of the most powerfully engaging was as a virtual book study across 10 time zones using blogs, twitter, and voxer to share learning and challenge thinking.

Too Small to Fail is an initiative of the Clinton Foundation and The Opportunity Institute to empower all parents with tools to talk, read, and sing with their young children from birth. Check out their Programs & Partnerships to see how they are shifting awareness in the media, in laundromats, on the playground and more.

Harvard Family Research Project helps stakeholders develop and evaluate strategies to promote the well-being of children, youth, families, and their communities.

Parents as Partners in Shared School Decision Making

I truly believe that when parents are fully respected and engaged as partners with schools, schools do better. When our youngest was in elementary school I served on the school's Site Council for two years (2006-2008), elected through a representative process. Site councils give parents the opportunity to shape school policy by giving them an equal voice in school decision making, along with teachers, principals, and community partners. Serving on the Site Council was an engaging, pragmatic way to partner with the school in students' academic and social-emotional life.

Our Site Council was comprised of four parents whose children attended the school; each parent served overlapping terms of two years each, with two parents elected each year. Three school staff members were elected by staff. Then, one parent was nominated by members of the council to serve as Co-Chair; the principal served as the other Co-Chair and also appointed one member from the community at large.

We met monthly in a conference room at the school, before the start of the school day, and for about an hour. The issues we took up had an impact on the annual school improvement plan:

• the impact of class size on student performance;

• school safety and discipline;

• the school handbook;

• family engagement;

• enhancing the school grounds, and more.

HERE's what's on the DESE website about Site Councils. Among other things, the Massachusetts Education Reform law requires School Site Councils to:

• adopt educational goals for the school;

• review the annual school building budget;

• develop a school improvement plan which must correspond to the district improvement plan.

The relationship between School Committees and school Site Councils provides for a unique opportunity to improve and strengthen community engagement within public education governance. The law provides an oversight role for School Committees and further states that elected School Committees at the district level may grant additional authority to School Councils in the area of educational policy. During my years on the Lexington School Committee, and in partnership with MASC, we met with representatives from the Town's 9 School Site Councils twice a year to strengthen their awareness of their roles and responsibilities.

The most important work of the school Site Council is the development of the School Improvement Plan (SIP). In this work the entire school community develops goals and plans strategies to address identified needs. Parents can have an important impact in this process by making sure that issues important to them and their children are addressed. These might include:

• establish a welcoming school environment;

• training to help school staff work effectively with families;

• class size, its impact on student learning, and a plan to reduce class size;

• design and implement parent/family engagement activities;

• meeting the learning needs of diverse students, including students with disabilities and students who are English language learners.

Once developed (annually), a Site Council submits their SIP to the School Committee.

I learned a lot about our school during my time on the Site Council. I found it an informative and empowering way to take part in a collaborative process that had a positive impact on the students and school culture. The experience led to my running for Town Meeting, then the School Committee, where I ultimately advocated for all of the Town's public school children. 

If you're still with me here, having read this far, and it sounds even a tiny bit interesting, I encourage you to look into the process for serving on a local Site Council.

Back to School

#My3Words

I'll admit to being more than a little misty-eyed when I saw our youngest head off for the first day of school for this year. She works hard and has faced many academic challenges in her K-12 experience thus far, showing resilience and strength of character in facing them. She follows two older brothers, now college grads, and though she is still on the journey, in many ways just beginning, I couldn't be more proud.

We know families play essential roles in student success, beginning with their critical role in children's school readiness. Children depend on all of us to support their development everywhere they learn: at home, in PreK programs, in school, afterschool programs, in faith-based institutions, in community-based programs and activities. Engagement is continuous across a child’s life and entails enduring commitment -- but changing parent roles -- as children mature into young adulthood.

Researchers describe effective family involvement as a shared responsibility, meaning that schools and other community agencies and organizations are committed to reaching out to engage families in meaningful ways in which families are committed to actively supporting their child's learning and development. The strongest research evidence indicates that parental beliefs, attitudes, values, and child-rearing practices, as well as home–school communication, are linked to student success.

The Parent and Community Education and Involvement Advisory Council (PCEI) to the Commissioner and Board of Elementary and Secondary Education has created a set of Family, School, and Community Partnership Fundamentals in Massachusetts. The Fundamentals describe six guidelines schools can use to plan, benchmark, and calculate effective school, family, and community involvement policies and practices. They support high expectations for such partnerships with the goal that coordinated, comprehensive, and systematic supports will create opportunities for all students to achieve academic proficiency and beyond.

The Department's 2015 Strategic Plan includes a goal for supporting students' social-emotional health through the use of the Fundamentals incorporating "engagement strategies into ESE grants, policies, services, and resources from across state agencies and stakeholders, and to strengthen and expand the Department's capacity of educators to support family and community engagement."

Engagement is intentional and integral when it acknowledges the child at the center of schools, families, and communities, and is focused on student learning and development that impact student skills, grades, achievement, health, safety, discipline, and other attitudes and behaviors, as well as to develop students' talent in art, music, technology, and other areas. 

Families not only play a critical role in a child's school readiness but in their decision to pursue higher education. Effective partnership is essential regardless of parents' level of education, country of origin, or socioeconomic status. It's a complementary role through collaboration with schools, educators, and community organizations that establish meaningful relationships 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!