Classroom Family Engagement

• Teachers possess the beliefs and mindsets to effectively engage families.
• Teachers and families have trusting relationships and meaningful two-way communication.
• Teachers engage families in constructing goals together, monitoring progress, and supporting learning.

National Parent Teacher Association's National Standards for Family-School Partnerships

• Standard 1: Welcoming all families into the school community helps families feel welcomed, valued, and connected.
• Standard 2: Communicating effectively helps families and staff engage in regular, two-way, and meaningful communication.
• Standard 3: Supporting student success helps families and staff collaborate to support students' learning and healthy development.
• Standard 4: Speaking up for every child helps empower families to be advocates for children.
• Standard 5: Sharing power helps families and staff be equal partners in creating policies, practices, and programs.
• Standard 6: Collaborating with the community helps families and staff collaborate with community members

Epstein's Framework of Six Types of Involvement

• Parenting: Help families with their parenting skills by providing information on children's developmental stages
• Communicating: Educate families about their children's progress and school services
• Volunteering: Offer parents opportunities to visit their children's schools and find ways to recruit and train parents to work in the schools
• Learning at home: Share ideas to promote at-home learning so parents can monitor and help with homework
• Decision-making: Include families as partners in school organizations, advisory panels, and committees
• Community collaboration: Involve community or business groups in education and schools to encourage family participation in the community

Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)

Parental involvement is one of the founding principles of the Federal IDEA. Parents have the right to participate in all decisions regarding the education of their children with disabilities, including participating in the following:

• Meetings related to the evaluation and identification of needs and the educational placement of their children
• Meetings related to the provision of free, appropriate public education to their children
• The team that develops, reviews, and revises the Individualized Education Programs for their children
• Any group that makes placement decisions for their children

Culturally Responsive Engagement

Successful culturally responsive practices for family engagement must acknowledge the diversity of cultural backgrounds and language, including the engagement practices that are most effective with diverse families.

• Traditional methods of family engagement within schools (e.g., parent-teacher associations, volunteering in classrooms, sending written communication home in backpacks) often are not successful at engaging families from nondominant cultures.
• When traditional forms of engagement fail to reach parents from different cultural backgrounds, school personnel and teachers may mistakenly assume parents are not interested in their children's education.
• These mistaken assumptions often lead to parents feeling unwelcome in schools.
• Families from nondominant cultures are more likely to have a lower socioeconomic status, which can create additional barriers to engagement with the school, such as limited time to engage in their children's education and the inability to pay items or fees that schools may consider nominal.
• In order for school personnel and teachers to recognize the different ways that culturally diverse families may already engage with their children's education, they should undertake the following:
• Build trust and empathize with families
• Provide adequate resources and participate in adequate training to carry out culturally aware family engagement practices
• Recognize and acknowledge practices of "life engagement," such as maintaining knowledge of students' friends, actively teaching morals, and modeling proper behavior
• Practices that effectively engage families from culturally diverse backgrounds include:
• Using a cultural insider. This person goes beyond the traditional role of translator and also helps to bridge cultural gaps in communication.
• Embracing families' individual narratives by creating opportunities for families to share their stories and experiences with various audiences within the school

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) students

LGBTQ students typically experience high rates of harassment at school, as well as higher drop-out rates and lower academic achievement than their non-LGBTQ peers. Therefore, administrators and teachers should make concerted efforts to create a supportive school community and engage LGBTQ youth, their families, and allies, including in the following ways:

• Including sexual identity and gender identity or expression as a protected category in district and school policies
• Educating students and families by including LGBTQ issues and themes in school curricula

Working with children of incarcerated parents

Students with incarcerated parents face particular challenges to family engagement, but teachers can still work to provide a safe, supportive environment that engages the student, the current caregiver, and, at times, the incarcerated parent through the following strategies:

• Share information with caregivers regarding school successes and challenges regarding academic, emotional, and behavioral concerns
• Connect the student and family with community resources and services that address the particular needs of children with incarcerated parents
• Advocate for children with an incarcerated parent with other school support staff
• Collaborate with school-based mental health professionals