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Update: New Skills for New Schools
Since the 1997 publication of New Skills for New Schools by HFRP, the education reform landscape has changed, making it necessary to align teacher preparation and professional learning for family engagement with the goals of a twenty-first century education. Harvard Family Research Project is working to gather information about promising teacher education practices to prepare teachers to partner with families for student success. A preview of these practices—to be published in our forthcoming policy brief—is summarized in this update.
Family Involvement in Elementary School Children's Education
This research brief synthesizes the latest research that demonstrates how family involvement contributes to elementary-school-age children's learning and development. The brief summarizes the latest evidence base on effective involvement—specifically, the research studies that link family involvement during the elementary school years to outcomes and programs that have been evaluated to show what works.
Lessons From Family-Strengthening Interventions: Learning From Evidence-Based Practice
Examine how effective family-strengthening interventions can positively impact families and children in this practitioner-friendly brief from Harvard Family Research Project. Lessons From Family-Strengthening Interventions: Learning From Evidence-Based Practice is based on our review of interventions that have been rigorously evaluated through experimental and quasi-experimental studies. We offer educators, service providers, and evaluators recommendations for creating successful programs and evaluations.
Bilingual Voices and Parent Classroom Choices
Ines, a Spanish speaker feels responsible for her daughter's trouble in an all-English first grade classroom. Based on advice from her daughter's teacher, who believes a bilingual placement might be best, Ines reads with Nina in Spanish, but is uncertain this is the right thing to do. How can parents and teachers reconcile their differences about bilingual education?
Teaching the Teachers: Preparing Educators to Engage Families for Student Achievement
Harvard Family Research Project and the National PTA® have teamed up to bring you the third brief in our ground-breaking series about family engagement policy, highlighting the need for teacher education programs to prepare teachers to better work with families.
Perceived Academic Support From Parents, Teachers, and Peers: Relation to Hong Kong Adolescents' Academic Behavior and Achievement
This study found that perceived academic support from teachers and parents contributes indirectly to the academic achievement of Hong Kong students.
Do Educational Programs Increase Parents' Practices at Home?: Factors Influencing Latino Parent Involvement
Latino parents become more involved in their children's education when they understand the school system and know how to help their children.
Family-School Partnerships for Students' Reading Success
Written by Sandy Christenson for the Minnesota Reading Excellence Act training sessions, the two modules in this workshop focus on home-school strategies to enhance students' reading success.
Book Review: The Influence of Teachers: Reflections on Teaching and Leadership
In this review of The Influence of Teachers: Reflections on Teaching and Leadership, Ashley Chu, an early childhood teacher in Washington, DC and a former research assistant for Harvard Family Research Project, provides her personal reflections on the book's messages and her views on the book's implications for family engagement in education.
Book Review: Inviting Families into the Classroom: Learning from a Life in Teaching
This book by Lynne Yermanock Strieb provides readers with insights on family engagement from the perspective of someone with 31 years of experience teaching kindergarten and first and second grade in Philadelphia public schools. While Inviting Families into the Classroom discusses parent–teacher relationships more broadly, this book review focuses on its valuable lessons on building relationships with families whose children are transitioning into elementary school.
Self, Family, Community, and Schooling
This course, with its fieldwork component, takes gradual and small steps in grappling with the constituent parts of culture. Taking the notion of self as a center of relationship, we adopt a bottom-up approach in tracing how culture dialectically implicates individual mind and selfhood. Forming several research teams, each group will undertake an empirical studies in designated field sites. Each team, using methodological tools available in visual anthropology and video ethnography (with support from the teaching and technical staff), will be required to relate their research findings to one or more theoretical themes covered in this course.
Research and Advocacy Collaboration: A New Jersey Case Study
Too often vital research in the early care and education field does not get used effectively for advocacy purposes. While researchers and advocates often share the same goals, they tend to operate on separate tracks. This brief explores how research and advocacy can be bridged for greater effect using strategic communications. By definition, strategic communications means a deliberate plan or tactics for using communications as a channel for achieving a certain result. Collaborative work in the state of New Jersey around the goal of achieving a comprehensive and quality early care and education system is used as a backdrop for learning about effective practice.
Learning by Listening: A Longitudinal Study of Family Literacy
This study explores the reading concepts held by urban families and how home reading practices intersect with school literacy practices.
Bridging Multiple Worlds: Building Pathways From Childhood to College
Students' pathways through school can be seen as moving through an academic pipeline to adulthood. The Bridging Multiple Worlds model focuses on how diverse youth, beginning in their middle childhood years, navigate across their worlds of families, peers, schools, and communities as they move along their pathways to college, careers, and family roles in adulthood.
“For the first time I understand what it takes for my own child to graduate”: Engaging Immigrant Families around Data
D’Lisa Crain, Grant Administrator for the Nevada State Parent Information & Resource Center and Parent Involvement Coordinator for the Washoe County School District, talks about using case studies to help immigrant families better understand data as well as training parents to use an online data tool to track student learning and attendance.
British Bangladeshi and Pakistani Families and Education Involvement: Barriers and Possibilities
This study explores the experiences of British Bangladeshi and Pakistani parents in their interactions with schools and their involvement in children’s education.
Credentialing Caregivers
This paper describes why family support is essential, given current social and economic trends, and stresses the need to bridge child care and family support. The author underscores the need for accessible family support training curricula that can be adapted to audiences of child care providers.
More Than a Gut Feeling: The Real Value of Family and Community Engagement
Eric Dearing, Associate Professor of Applied Developmental Psychology in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College, discusses the need to use data-based evidence, rather than intuition, to create successful family and community engagement strategies.
Family Involvement in School and Low-Income Children's Literacy Performance
This groundbreaking study demonstrates that when families' involvement in school increases over the elementary years, children's achievement increases. Furthermore, the authors show that family involvement in school matters most for children whose mothers have less education.
The Promotive Effects of Family Educational Involvement for Low-Income Children
Article in the Journal of School Psychology, 42(6), 445–460. In this article the authors longitudinally examined associations between family involvement, children's feelings about literacy, and children's literacy achievement from kindergarten through fifth grade. Children's feelings about literacy mediated associations between family educational involvement and literacy achievement. Also, family involvement was more positively associated with literacy outcomes for children whose mothers were less educated compared with children whose mothers were more educated.
Making a Decision About College: Should I Stay or Should I Go?
Marisela Castillo, a high school senior, looks forward to going to a good college to prepare her for medical studies, but she knows that she will have to leave her family in order for that to happen. Should Marisela forgo her dreams for the sake of a family who depends on her household contributions? Should she leave her family to pursue those dreams?
African-American and Chinese-American Parent Involvement: The Importance of Race, Class, and Culture
African-American and Chinese-American parents use alternative forms of social capital to support their children's education.
Parent Involvement
Research studies show that the level of children's development (especially their cognitive and language development) depends more directly upon their family structure, socioeconomic status, home stimulation, and parental values rather than how much time they spend in a child care or preschool environment, good or poor, and whether their parents are involved or not. The goal of the course is to make the most effective use of ourselves as early childhood teachers in working together with parents to optimize the experiences of the children for whom we share responsibility.
Service is Everything: How Home Visiting Service Delivery Impacts Family Outcomes
Anne Duggan is Professor of Pediatrics and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Duggan reflects on what she has learned from nearly 20 years of evaluative research on home visiting—particularly looking at what factors influence service delivery and family outcomes—and how that research can be applied to practice.