School-Led Partnerships Boost Parent Engagement

Family engagement strategies need to be initiated and maintained by schools, both by their leaders and by educators. A school-led framework and practices offer ways to invite, include, and leverage the power of the school and family partnership that lifts learning and achievement for students. Together, schools and families can best support students and be assured of these research based benefits!

Trust Is the Basis For Successful Parent Engagement Strategies  

The partnership between educators and families requires a foundation of trust. Being able to speak openly to each other without fear is critical for both teachers and families. Establishing this trust at the start of the year lays the groundwork for a year-long partnership. 

Begin the School Year Prioritizing Parent Engagement and Partnership  

From the first day of school, procedures need to be welcoming to families. Providing accessible space and a friendly greeting sets the positive tone immediately. The school’s physical facility is one of the ways that schools communicate with families. From parking spaces to guidelines for entry, how they are greeted on the first day sets the tone. 

Beyond an initial welcome meeting or call, consistent two-way communication is vital to establishing and maintaining partnership between schools and families. Ongoing two-way communication will allow educators and families to share, question, listen, and learn. Here are ways that schools can use two-way communication channels to support family and parent engagement. 

Communicate Key Achievement Milestones 

Communicating with families on the key milestones for achievement in each grade level is key to providing a vision of the year’s learning goals that parents can support. Educators should provide families with grade level milestones for the year as well as ways to support and expand the learning. 

Use a Schedule and Structure for Year-Long Family Communication

It’s important for educators and families to continue to communicate throughout the year. A schedule for the timing of the various communications coming from school should be established; parents are more likely to engage if messages don’t come at them all at once and can be anticipated. In response to outgoing communications, ensure that families know how and when to contact the school and their child’s teacher. A little guidance goes a long way when it comes to parent engagement strategies for two-way communication. 

Make the Most of Parent-Teacher Conferences as Engagement Touchpoints

Communicating well can help prepare educators and families for the sometimes-stressful parent-teacher conferences. Parents’ perceptions of their children’s academic standing do not always match reality: nine in ten parents believe their child is at or above grade level, but national data shows significantly fewer students actually are performing at grade level. Teachers can use the opportunity to help families understand their child’s current progress and identify areas where students are achieving, striving, or falling behind.

Offering resources and guidance to families is a parent engagement strategy that builds confidence in a family’s ability to support learning and empowers students to work and learn effectively. Students spend only 12% of their year in school, which means that parents must be partners in their child’s learning to maximize out-of-school learning time and opportunities.

Encouraging Reading is the Ultimate Parent Engagement Strategy

For younger students, family reading sparks a love for books and learning. For older students, benefits include gaining deeper knowledge across various topics. For all students, reading together helps develop a lifelong reading habit. Plus, reading together strengthens the family bond, fosters better communication, and improves focus. By encouraging reading as a regular part of at-home learning, schools help set students—and families—up for long-term success. 

Here are a few impactful ways that schools can encourage reading as a family engagement strategy. 

Build a Family Library

Recommend, or better yet, provide just-right books so that families have access to quality, appropriate reading material at home. Suggest other ways families can access books, too, including your school or local library, book swaps, or shopping for bargain books at sales and shops. 

Let families Know What To Read

Connect book recommendations with the reading skills their children are working towards to help families support grade-level reading goals.

Organize Family Reading

Motivate parents and children to read together, tracking pages read or setting reading goals, and reward participation and commitment with celebrations.

Host Reading Events

Allow parents and children to experience books together in a social setting. Storytelling sessions, book swaps, or author visits can create excitement and make reading a shared experience. 

Offer Strategies

Plan workshops or provide resources to share at-home reading strategies for families, including tips such as how to encourage and make reading enjoyable for kids, how to choose age-appropriate genres and books, and how to support literacy development at home with games and activities. 

The best and most impactful thing parents can do at home with their kids is read—in any language—as a family! 

Practicing Skills at Home With Targeted Family Resources 

Learning new skills happens over time and with practice. Families are key to helping with that extra practice for their children.

Providing family resources that share learning goals and access to skill-building practice is critical. High-quality practice resources for families help ensure that practice can happen at home. Easy, timely access to resources helps both teachers and families. Providing supporting resources as skills are needed keeps learning on track or ensure school readiness. Addressing skills in small milestones makes it easier for families to participate in supporting the learning process without overwhelming them. 

Offering Language Support for Families of English Learners and Newcomers 

Open communication between educators and newcomer families helps bridge cultural and language barriers. Schools and newcomers can and must collaborate to create a supportive learning environment where students can thrive academically and socially. 

Summer learning loss affects many kids, taking up valuable instructional time at the beginning of the year with review. Helping kids read during the summer is another perfect area for the school family partnership. Families can help bridge the gap and stem summer learning loss. A few books can make all the difference for maintaining a student's level and avoiding the summer slide. Schools can help make home an extension of the classroom during the summer or even short-term breaks, with fun activities that sharpen reading, writing, math, and creative thinking skills while students are away from school. 

Everyday summer learning can happen through ordinary family experiences, too. Learning outside of school can be easy. Families can support children's learning and create opportunities to practice skills by building them into everyday activities. Schools can help boost family engagement over the summer by suggesting ways to maximize these opportunities as learning experiences, connecting skills to family activities like grocery shopping, cooking and baking, and encouraging family game nights. 

Social emotional and executive function skills are life skills and key supports to learning. Parents are essential in helping students develop these skills as children’s first and primary teachers in the early years. Schools can help by helping parents understand the importance of these developments and by supporting families with strategies and resources to build social emotional learning, mindfulness, and executive functioning skills at home. 

Building Social-Emotional Learning at Home

Schools can support social-emotional learning at home by providing parents with tools and strategies to create a nurturing environment where children feel safe expressing their emotions. Schools can offer resources to help parents encourage open conversations about feelings, model empathy, and teach problem-solving skills. By offering guidance and support, schools can empower parents to reinforce these essential skills at home, helping children develop emotional intelligence and resilience.

Practicing Mindfulness at Home

Learning can be challenging for everyone, whether in school or at home. Frustration is normal. Mindfulness and self-regulation are key for managing difficulties. If your school is implementing mindfulness practices, share these with families to practice at home. Help parents understand the power of mindfulness in coping with frustration in order for their children to persevere with challenging learning tasks.

Developing Executive Function at Home

Executive function is critical for both learning and life. None of us is born with the skills that compose executive functions, but we all have the potential to learn them. These skills help students succeed and create capable adults. Executive function skills include goal-setting and achievement, planning and executing tasks, multi-step direction following, handling complex instructions, and staying on task despite interruptions. Families and schools can collaborate to help children develop these skills to succeed.