Grantmaking to School Districts: Lessons for Foundations
This brief offers lessons and best practices from foundations across the country on grantmaking to school districts. It offers advice to foundations that are considering school district investments for the first time. It also offers a useful "check" to more experienced foundations that want to examine their thinking and approaches against the lessons and practices of other foundations.
Free. Available online only.
Advocating for the Rights of Undocumented Families
Moria Cappio and Melanie Reyes from The Children’s Aid Society share their experiences reinventing family engagement strategies in their East Harlem Early Head Start/Head Start program to reach out to immigrant families by including parent civic advocacy. Cappio and Reyes also describe how using an advocacy evaluation tool helped them navigate these uncharted waters.
Featured Teaching Case: "Daddy Says This New Math Is Crazy"
Harvard Family Research Project’s Teaching Cases support teacher training and professional development by highlighting challenges that schools, families, and communities may encounter in supporting children’s learning. In this issue, we feature "Daddy Says This New Math Is Crazy," which highlights the dilemmas that arise when innovations in teaching methods and curriculum are neither developed in collaboration with families and communities nor well-communicated to these critical stakeholders.
Creating Environments to Promote Innovation
For this issue's FINE Newsletter commentary , HFRP consultant Margaret Caspe talks with Heather Weiss, Sherry Cleary, and Jane Quinn about innovation in their respective disciplines. Caspe, who is also Associate Director of Early Childhood Programs at the Children's Aid Society, presents the central themes through a framework designed to help schools and organizations move beyond typical problem solving to discover new ways of thinking.
Family Involvement News: May 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.
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.
Free. Available online only.
Engaging Older Youth: Program and City-level Strategies to Support Sustained Participation in Out-of-School Time (RESEARCH SYNOPSIS)
This research synopsis summarizes the findings from Engaging Older Youth, a new report from Harvard Family Research Project and Private/Public Ventures that highlights key strategies to promote out-of-school-time program participation among older youth.
Engaging Older Youth: Program and City-level Strategies to Support Sustained Participation in Out-of-School Time
This new report from Harvard Family Research Project and Private/Public Ventures highlights key strategies to promote out-of-school-time program participation among older youth.
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.
Family Involvement News: April 2010
We at Harvard Family Research Project are committed to keeping you up-to-date on what's new in family involvement. View our list of links to upcoming and current reports, articles, events, and funding opportunities in the family involvement field.
Family Engagement from Cradle to Career
Family engagement supports children’s learning and growth across the developmental continuum—from birth through young adulthood. Harvard Family Research Project’s Heidi Rosenberg and Elena Lopez discuss how effective family engagement strategies evolve over time to reflect children’s changing developmental needs.
Resource Guide for Family Engagement Across the Developmental Pathway
This bibliographic resource builds on the work presented in the Family Involvement Makes a Difference series to provide a selected listing of recent publications across the full developmental spectrum.
Free. Available online only.
Featured Teaching Case: Making a Decision About College: Should I Stay or Should I Go?
Harvard Family Research Project’s Teaching Cases 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 Making a Decision About College: Should I Stay or Should I Go?, which considers the ways in which schools can support students who have significant family obligations to make an appropriate choice about where to attend college.
Building a Cradle to Career Pathway in Cincinnati, Ohio
The Cincinnati, Ohio-based Strive initiative has taken a complementary learning approach to scaffolding children’s educational growth to ensure a comprehensive, cradle-to-career system of support that includes family and community engagement. Harvard Family Research Project spoke with Jeff Edmondson, executive director of Strive, as well as two of Strive’s partners in the community, Liz Blume of the Community Building Institute, and Rolanda Smith of Parents for Public Schools of Greater Cincinnati, to find out more about Strive’s philosophy, successes, and challenges.
Partnerships for Learning: Promising Practices in Integrating School and Out-of-School Time Program Supports
This new report from HFRP is aimed to help out-of-school time (OST) program leaders, decision-makers, and funders to understand and implement effective OST–school partnerships for learning.
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.
Free. Available online only.
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.
Free. Available online only.
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.
Free. Available online only.
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.
Free. Available online only.
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.
Free. Available online only.
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.
Free. Available online only.
Family Involvement News: November 2009
We at Harvard Family Research Project are committed to keeping you up-to-date on what's new in family involvement. View our list of links to upcoming and current reports, articles, events, and funding opportunities in the family involvement field.