Create a plan to connect with every family! Connecting with parents of various ethnic, socioeconomic, or cultural backgrounds can be challenging for educators. This invaluable book offers strategies that will transform the experience for your students and their families, and lead to sustainable success. Through the author’s perspective as a parent, counselor, and advisor to families at risk, readers will discover A step-by-step approach to family engagement developed for K-12 educators working in high-poverty schools with diverse populations Complete how-to’s for creating and carrying out a family engagement plan Tools including a Parent Meeting Agenda, a Parent Empathy Map, an Educator Needs Assessment, and more

Learn how to work with and relate to the family of each child in an early childhood education program. Includes ideas about transforming the way schools and programs relate to families - each one according to their unique assets and needs with the goal of enriching and enlivening the school community and ensuring better outcomes for each child and the entire program. It will emphasize strategies for getting to know each family the way you get to know an individual person, and learn about their interests, their strengths, their style of interacting and their needs/challenges to encourage programs to move away from one-size-fits-all approaches to family engagement.

School leaders are increasingly called upon to pursue meaningful partnerships with families and community groups, yet many leaders are unprepared to meet the challenges of family and community partnerships, to cross cultural boundaries, or to be accountable to the community. This book brings together research perspectives that intersect the fields of leadership and partnerships to inform and inspire new approaches that strive toward more authentic collaboration.

Wherever you are in your family engagement journey, the values, research, testimonials, and perspectives collected here can provide invaluable guidance and inspiration as you continue to dig deep into engaging every family. You'll find examples of successes and challenges from families and educators, as well as reflection questions to support your own journey in evaluating and developing new strategies. This Parents as Teachers publication provides a framework for staff and administration in home-visiting, early care and education, and schools to examine and build family engagement initiatives based on 10 foundational values that drive authentic partnership.

Home, School, and Community Collaboration uses the culturally responsive family support model as a framework to prepare teachers to work effectively with children from diverse families. Authors Kathy B. Grant and Julie A. Ray skillfully incorporate numerous real-life vignettes and case studies to show readers the practical application of culturally responsive family engagement. The Fourth Edition contains additional content that enhances the already relevant text, including: a new section titled “Perspectives on Poverty” acknowledging the deep levels of poverty in the United States and the impact on family-school relations; increased coverage of Latino/Latina family connections; and updated demographics focusing on the issues impacting same-sex families, families experiencing divorce, children and family members with chronic illnesses, military families, and grandparents raising children. With contributions from more than 22 experts in the field offering a wide range of perspectives, this book will help readers understand, appreciate, and support diverse families.

Strengthen programs of family and community engagement to promote equity and increase student success! When schools, families, and communities collaborate and share responsibility for students′ education, more students succeed in school. Based on 30 years of research and fieldwork, the fourth edition of the bestseller School, Family, and Community Partnerships: Your Handbook for Action, presents tools and guidelines to help develop more effective and more equitable programs of family and community engagement. Written by a team of well-known experts, it provides a theory and framework of six types of involvement for action; up-to-date research on school, family, and community collaboration; and new materials for professional development and on-going technical assistance. Readers also will find: Examples of best practices on the six types of involvement from preschools, and elementary, middle, and high schools Checklists, templates, and evaluations to plan goal-linked partnership programs and assess progress CD-ROM with slides and notes for two presentations: A new awareness session to orient colleagues on the major components of a research-based partnership program, and a full One-Day Team Training Workshop to prepare school teams to develop their partnership programs. As a foundational text, this handbook demonstrates a proven approach to implement and sustain inclusive, goal-linked programs of partnership. It shows how a good partnership program is an essential component of good school organization and school improvement for student success. This book will help every district and all schools strengthen and continually improve their programs of family and community engagement.