Create a Culture
Create a culture where every family feels a sense of belonging to the school. Communicate what the student is learning and offer ongoing training to support families’ efforts to extend learning from school to home.
Learning Heroes Roadmap offers parents a variety of ways to keep their child on track.
Communicate Effectively
Create a welcoming, respectful environment that employs strategies to develop trusting relationships. Compare the relationships and communication you have had with the five highest performers versus the five lowest. Set up a schedule to communicate positively with families on a regular basis.
Google Voice allows teachers to make and receive phone calls using a work number on any device without using a personal phone number.
Build Efficacy
Families who believe they make a difference see challenges as opportunities. They are a valuable resource for schools. Promote parent-child communication by designing assignments that allow them to work together. Provide instruction in the content or the technology you expect parents to teach and use.
Tech Toolkit for Families and Guardians is a set of video tutorials to help families use Google tools.
Engage Families in Decisions
Give families opportunities to participate in decisions that impact their children’s educational experiences. Family involvement also facilitates children’s cognitive, social, and emotional functioning and has been linked to increased self- esteem, improved behavior, and more positive attitudes toward school.
CASEL’s guide, School-Family Partnership Strategies to Enhance Children’s Social, Emotional, and Academic Growth, offers strategies to promote children’s social, emotional, and academic development using school-family partnerships.
Engage the Community
One advantage of engaging the school community is improved attendance. Schools are more likely to reduce chronic absenteeism when they take a comprehensive approach.
Community Asset Mapping Activity is a guide to help a school map the resources in the school neighborhood around a vision or a plan.
Three downloadable staff activities from Corwin that accompany Engage Every Family, designed to get them thinking, collect data, and measure progress. Check out Steven Constantino’s new book from our TTAC ODU lending library!
Constantino, S. M. (2021). Engage every family: Five simple principles. Thousand Oaks: Corwin.
Virginia Department of Education Resources for Families
- Parent Engagement Practices Improve Outcomes for Preschool Children
- Supporting Students with Disabilities at School and Home: A Guide for Teachers to Support Families and Students
- Formed Families Forward Trauma Fact Sheet & Video Collection
