MODULE 5

Our students’ identities start with their families. It’s our job to ensure that families are valued, engaged, and represented in our classrooms. In this session, we revisit the four constants of an equity-centered, trauma-informed classroom — predictability, flexibility, connection, and student empowerment. These constants help guide our engagement with families to build trust and transparency. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that families want to be part of their children’s education. We’ll explore how to involve and engage with them throughout the rest of this module.

Our families know our students best. If we want to move from family involvement to family engagement, we need to engage in genuine two-way communication, break down implicit bias, and recognize families as partners in supporting learning. This session challenges us to break away from a deficit-based view of parent involvement and move toward building trust, transparency, and capacity. We explore each of these outcomes in detail and examine how each relates to effective school-family partnerships that support school improvement and boost student achievement.

The pandemic brought the undeniable socioeconomic and racial inequities highlighted by the digital divide into sharp and glaring focus across New York State. This session explores our role in ensuring families have everything they need to participate in their child’s education, including navigating the difficulties of the digital divide. We look at three ways to leverage what we learned during the pandemic to help our families stay involved and engaged, as well as resources we can share with families to help bridge the divide.

Effective, two-way communication is essential to building our capacity around family engagement while honoring our own self-efficacy. This session explores strategies for communicating with our students’ families, moving us from one-way communication practices to two-way communication activities that foster engagement. We review collaborative scheduling, partnership-building techniques, and ideas that foster active meeting engagement with families.

Our students’ families are rich in funds of knowledge that are an asset to our classrooms. We learn in this session that seeking out this cultural capital can deepen our relationships with families and help us develop our own cultural competence. We can take this one step further to embrace cultural humility and strive for self-awareness, empathy, and mutual understanding to work collaboratively to address inequalities. This session concludes by introducing four teacher practices that leverage our students’ funds of knowledge across learning environments.

In order for our families to stay connected and involved with our schools, they must feel welcome and respected. This session explores the family-school partnership, including common barriers to engagement and ways we can build up our connections to reimagine the role families can play in our classrooms. Strategies introduced in this session related to building family partnerships include cultural reciprocity and shared decision-making.

This session begins with a checklist for equitable student learning in digital spaces, including four leverage points that increase equity while supporting families as co-teachers across learning environments. To build capacity for families as learning partners, we need to focus on the 3 “R” Framework: relationships, routines, and resources. We conclude with digital resources to share with our families to help them embrace their role as learning partners in their child’s education.

Symbiosis isn’t limited to nature; it’s a strategy to bring together our students, their families, and our community to create and foster mutually beneficial partnerships. After conducting a comparison of needs and resources, we can leverage service-learning projects to elevate student voice; engage students in self-management, self-motivation, and social skills; and empower students' with responsible decision-making and problem-solving skills. The session concludes with examples of service-learning projects we can adapt for our own classrooms and communities.