The Family Engagement Playbook
The Family Engagement Playbook is a collection of promising research-based approaches to strengthen the competencies of people, groups, and organizations that are dedicated to families. The Playbook offers ideas, models, and tools that can be easily integrated into training, continuing education, and organizational learning opportunities. All of the approaches put families ―especially those that are most marginalized in our society― at the center, and they hold the promise to change mindsets, build relationships, and transform organizational policies and practices to promote co-created family engagement.
Overview
Family engagement is a shared responsibility and a partnership. It is about the many ways families promote their children’s learning: as guides and mentors, co-learners, and advocates for better educational opportunities for all. It is also about schools and community spaces — like early childhood programs, libraries and afterschool programs, to name a few — bolstering these roles and providing opportunities for family engagement in children’s learning both in and out of school. In sum, family engagement is about co-creation — a process of building trust, sharing ideas, and making joint decisions that benefit children’s learning and development.
But for family engagement to be successful we need to build the capacity not only of families but also of the people, groups, and organizations across all learning contexts that are dedicated to working with families.
The Family Engagement Playbook provides people, groups, and organizations with opportunities to explore new possibilities for building capacity to promote co-created family engagement. We developed the Playbook to start a dialogue about a question we raised in our report Joining Together to Create a Bold Vision for Next-Generation Family Engagement:
How do we work with families and communities to co-create the next generation of family and community engagement?
Co-creation implies an important shift in capacity building. It signifies keeping families at the center. It involves opportunities for those who work — or will work — with families to listen, question, share perspectives and partner with families themselves. And it signifies a shift toward simultaneously transforming organizations to create policies and practices that enable families and staff within them to thrive. The Family Engagement Playbook pulls together different methods for achieving these changes and includes approaches shared with us over many years by faculty members, practitioners, community leaders, and researchers.
We acknowledge that it is not the universe of approaches. We also recognize that as a first step, we have chosen to focus on professionals and organizations, while embracing that many parent-facing groups are also working with families to build parent capacity to organize and co-create with schools. You can learn more about our intentions for the playbook in a supporting commentary on our website.
Thus, in the spirit of co-creation and to make this a living document, we encourage you to let us know how you use these approaches in your own work, what happens when you test any of them, and what other approaches you suggest we include.
Explore and search all of the approaches in the playbook.
The Playbook’s Framework
The Playbook is divided into three sections that present a framework to build the capacity of people, groups, and organizations to create meaningful co-created family engagement.
Change Mindsets
Meaningful family engagement necessitates a shift in mindset: from doing to and for families to doing with them; from being the expert to acknowledging parents as experts; from a one-size-fits all approach to personalizing family engagement. A critical component of this process is helping teachers and other who serve families to overcome their own implicit biases, recognizing that stereotypes hurt families. Institutions will also need to acknowledge structural biases and transform how they support family engagement. This calls for a shift from random, uncoordinated, and compliance-driven efforts to systemic processes and practices based on co-creation, meaning bringing family perspectives and experiences into practice.
Explore approaches that change mindsets.
Build Relationships
When relationships with educators are characterized by mutual respect, trust, open communication, and inclusion in decision making, families are more likely to feel confident about their roles as advocates and to become more engaged in their children’s learning. Positive relationships between educators and families benefit children’s health, social and emotional well-being, and cognitive skills. Yet these relationships do not happen overnight, nor do they exist in a vacuum. They are fundamentally shaped by and built upon a community’s culture — its beliefs, goals, social norms, practices, everyday routines, languages, and economic resources.
Explore approaches that build relationships.
Transform Organizations
In order for families to promote their children’s learning and development, it is necessary to change the organizational contexts where families interact with local institutions. Schools, early-childhood centers, libraries and other organizations working with families to support children’s success must remove barriers and create the conditions that enable co-created family engagement. This happens when organizations build relational trust — ties and bonds among all community stakeholders. To do this, organizations must create space for families to take leadership and decision-making roles. And leaders must hire staff who reflect the values and speak the languages of those they serve, provide meaningful supervision and continuing learning opportunities around family engagement topics, create a positive and welcoming climate, and assign manageable workloads. Especially important, organizations commit to using data for continuous learning and improvement.
Explore approaches that transform organizations.
How to Use and Navigate the Playbook:
Each section of the capacity framework within the Playbook — change mindsets, build relationships, transform organizations — includes a set of approaches that bring family voices and perspectives to the learning experience. You can use the blue navigation bar to help you switch between framework sections or look at all approaches at once. Every approach includes:
· a description of the approach
· how it works
· what outcomes it can achieve
· examples of the approach in action
· links to learn more
There is no one right way to use the Playbook. Below we outline a few pathways for its use with a variety of people, groups, and organizations. We encourage you to be creative and take the time to innovate in ways that make sense to you in your context.
· Faculty at institutions of higher education might use the framework to design courses, as a resource for students to better understand the breadth of approaches that exist to family-school-community partnerships, and even as the basis of a final project wherein students choose an approach and do more research on it.
- Principals might adopt one or more of the approaches as the basis of a school-wide capacity building project in line with school-wide family engagement goals.
- Teachers might also choose to learn more about the approaches from the resources found at the end of each description and discuss them in grade-level meetings and try them out in their classrooms.
- Library and afterschool staff might use the Playbook to garner new ideas to incorporate into staff development and continuing education.
- Early-childhood education providers might use the Playbook with parent advisory councils and try out approaches of interest in different ways. They might also use the framework of the Playbook to align family engagement goals (e.g. inclusion and cultural responsiveness, building peer-to-peer connections, promoting family well-being) and capacity building efforts.
- Consultants that offer capacity building services might choose one or more approaches from the Playbook for workshops, mini-courses, and support activities.
Explore and search all of the approaches in the playbook.
Want to learn more about the Playbook? Check out the supporting commentary on our website.
Preferred Citation
Caspe, M., Lopez, M. E. & Hanebutt, R. (2019). The family engagement playbook. Retrieved from: https://medium.com/familyengagementplaybook
