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Teaching Cases on Family Involvement
Teaching cases are a valuable tool in preparing teachers and school administrators to engage effectively with families. This handout provides a detailed list of HFRP's teaching cases in family involvement, sorted by topic, gender, and age-group, as well as ethnicity, of the students discussed.
“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.
Making Data Come Alive for Families through Young Children’s Play
Amy Horenbeck, training director from the Tools of the Mind program based at the Center for Improving Early Learning at the Metropolitan State College of Denver in Colorado, discusses a different approach to early childhood education and using children's work as a unique type of student data to track development and share children's progress with parents.
Parent–Teacher Conference Tip Sheets (Hojas de Consejos Para Las Reuniones de Padres y Maestros)
Even with technological advances that allow parents to track their child’s academic progress remotely, and more transparency in student data (such as test scores and attendance rates), face-to-face interaction between parents and teachers is still the cornerstone of school family engagement efforts. These newly revised tip sheets provide key strategies for both parents and teachers to walk into conferences informed and prepared, in order to ensure the most successful outcomes. A tip sheet aimed at school principals also outlines how school administrators can support parents and teachers to that end. Now available in Spanish, this tool is a powerful resource for families and educators alike.
Academic Parent–Teacher Teams: Reorganizing Parent–Teacher Conferences Around Data
Maria C. Paredes, Director of Community Education at Creighton School District in Arizona, discusses one of the district’s family engagement strategies that was developed—in part—from data she collected demonstrating that parents were more interested in attending academically-oriented activities than other types of events such as potlucks or family-fun nights.
Data for Measuring Growth: Poway Unified School District
As told to the FINE team by Linda Foote, Technology Integration Specialist for Poway Unified School District, this article discusses how data helps students create their learning goals and helps parents create family goals to support their children’s learning. The article also shares ideas for how to build community around data.
Data on Data: A Resource Guide to Engaging Families with Student Data
This resource from HFRP offers a compilation of articles on families’ use of data to support, guide, and advocate for student achievement and schoolwide improvement. Resources are grouped into three categories: Perspectives that offer lessons learned from family and community use of data, program examples that illustrate what it takes to make data actionable for families, and tools that help everyone understand how data can be analyzed.
Logged In: Using Technology to Engage Families in Children’s Education
Based on research of promising practices in school districts and communities, Harvard Family Research Project has identified a range of technological innovations that have the potential to boost key dimensions of family engagement: positive parent–child interactions, home–school communication, and parent responsibility for a child’s learning.
Featured Teaching Case: Defining “Fine”—Communicating Academic Progress to Parents
Harvard Family Research Project’s Teaching Cases are designed to support teacher training and professional development by highlighting challenges that schools, families, and communities may encounter in supporting children’s learning. In this month’s newsletter, we feature Defining “Fine”—Communicating Academic Progress to Parents, a case that highlights one elementary school’s efforts to use and understand data about student progress toward state standards and to communicate the meaning of these data clearly to parents.
Breaking New Ground: Data Systems Transform Family Engagement in Education
In this issue’s commentary, Heather Weiss and M. Elena Lopez from Harvard Family Research Project and Deborah Stark, Commissioner of First 5, Alameda County revisit the new definition of family engagement—as a shared responsibility, across multiple settings, from cradle to career—as applied to student data use. They discuss how data can effectively bring families, teachers, and administrators to the table, and engage everyone around student learning and performance.
Family Involvement News: October 2010
We at Harvard Family Research Project are committed to keeping you up to date on what's new in family involvement. This list of links to current reports, articles, events, and opportunities will help you stay on top of research and resources from HFRP and other field leaders.
ARIS Parent Link: Five Lessons in Linking Families to Student Data Systems
In this Voices from the Field article, Shael Polakow-Suransky, the New York City Department of Education's Deputy Chancellor in the Division of Performance & Accountability, discusses five lessons gleaned from the ARIS Parent Link data system, one of the many tools NYC schools employ to help educators and families evaluate student learning and support student achievement.
Webinar Brief: Data Driven—Making Student and School Data Accessible and Meaningful To Families
This is a briefing on the third webinar in the series Achieving Excellence and Innovation in Family, School, and Community Engagement brought to you by the U.S. Department of Education in partnership with United Way Worldwide, National PTA, SEDL, and Harvard Family Research Project. The webinar, which took place on August 10, 2010, featured Kevin Jennings from the U.S. Department of Education and a number of speakers from across the country discussing examples of how data can be used to engage families in programs, schools, and school districts.
Family Engagement for High School Success: Final Grant Report to AT&T
As part of our evaluation work with United Way Worldwide on the Family Engagement for High School Success Initiative, HFRP worked with 15 local United Way chapters and their surrounding communities to develop comprehensive family engagement strategies through partnerships with schools, students and their families, and the local community, in support of boosting high school graduation rates and academic achievement. This grant report details the planning process with the 15 grantees and the lessons learned during the process.
New Visions for Public Schools: Using Data to Engage Families
Barbara Taveras and Caissa Douwes from New Visions for Public Schools and Karen Johnson from BASE High School in New York City share how high schools in New York City have begun to engage families in students’ academic success and college readiness by supporting parents in understanding achievement data. This case study makes clear that supporting parents in grasping and utilizing this information is a shared responsibility among schools, families, and students.
Family Engagement as a Systemic, Sustained, and Integrated Strategy to Promote Student Achievement
This paper offers an expanded definition of family engagement based on research about children’s learning and the relationships among families, schools, and communities in support of such learning. The topics presented in this paper were originally introduced as commentaries in the August 2009, November 2009, and April 2010 issues of the F.I.N.E. Newsletter.
Current Issue - Scaling Impact
This issue of The Evaluation Exchange explores the promising practices and challenges associated with taking an enterprise to scale, along with the role that evaluation can and should play in that process. It is the second in our “hard-to-measure” series, which we inaugurated with our Spring 2007 issue on evaluating advocacy.
Taking Leadership, Innovating Change: Profiles in Family, School, and Community Engagement
This new report from the National Family, School, and Community Engagement Working Group contains twelve examples of leading innovations in family engagement as an integral and effective strategy in systemic education reform.
Reframing Family Involvement in Education: Supporting Families to Support Educational Equity
This research review, part of the Equity Matters research initiative at the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College, Columbia University, argues that family involvement in education is a powerful but neglected tool to support children’s learning and development. Disadvantaged children are both more likely to benefit from increased family involvement and to come from families who face the greatest barriers to such involvement. To reframe public understanding of the benefits of family involvement in children’s education, this paper lays out a research-based definition and more equitable approach to family involvement and positions it as a key cross-cutting component of broader comprehensive or complementary learning systems.
Commentary from Harvard Family Research Project on the Investing in Innovation (i3) Fund
HFRP submitted recommendations to the National Register Notice regarding the i3 fund’s proposed priorities, requirements, definitions, and selection criteria. The recommendation included an endorsement of the comments submitted by the National Family, School, and Community Engagement Working Group, a collaborative of leaders in the family engagement field including HFRP’s Heather Weiss, and emphasized the need to direct development and validation grant funding toward promising family and community engagement initiatives, isolate and recognize the added value of parental involvement in interventions, and take a nuanced view of effect size when selecting innovations for funding.
Commentary from the National Family, School, and Community Engagement Working Group on the Investing in Innovation (i3) Fund
The National Family, School, and Community Engagement Working Group, a collaborative of leaders in the family engagement field including Harvard Family Research Project’s (HFRP) Heather Weiss, submitted recommendations for the Investing in Innovation (i3) Fund’s proposed priorities, requirements, definitions, and selection criteria.The National Working Group’s recommendations provide a framework for the integration of family involvement into how potential recipients of i3 funds are assessed and selected, as well as how initiatives are evaluated.
Preparing Educators to Engage Families: Case Studies Using an Ecological Systems Framework, Second Edition
This book supports teacher training and professional development in the area of family engagement. This volume helps prepare teachers and other professionals to partner with the families of elementary school children for student success and positive development. This second edition pairs child development theory with research-based teaching cases that reflect critical dilemmas in family–school–community relations, especially among families for whom poverty and cultural differences are daily realities.
Valuing Families as Partners
Elena Lopez explores the benefits of creating strong partnerships between early childhood programs and families.
Resource Guide for Family Engagement in Education at the High School Level
A sampling of research reports, best practices, and tools to guide you in conceptualizing and creating effective family engagement strategies for high school students.
Parent-Teacher Conference Tip Sheets for Principals, Teachers, and Parents
Parent–teacher conferences are an important component of ongoing home–school communication and family involvement in children's education. This set of tip sheets—for principals, teachers, and parents—can help ensure that conferences achieve their maximum potential.