This is a guest post written by Jenni Brasington, National Director of F.A.C.E. for Scholastic Education Solutions.
Engaging families in effective partnerships is challenging work for schools. Data is a great tool for navigating the course, and without it, efforts can feel unfocused and purposeless.
Rely on Data, Not Intuition
Educators wouldn’t dream of developing a comprehensive instructional plan for students without conducting a diagnostic assessment first. By the same token, impactful school leaders rely on more than intuition and gut feelings when articulating a comprehensive family engagement strategy.
Understanding the need to assess family engagement practices is step one. Step two is to ensure that the measures assess the right things and that information is distributed to the appropriate stakeholders.
If we believe family engagement is a critical strategy to support student achievement, then what we assess should produce data to indicate how effectively we engage families in the learning process.
While many schools and districts survey families annually, this doesn't paint a complete picture of the quality of their home-school partnerships. Collecting feedback from families is important; however, to measure the effectiveness of the home-school partnership, we must also collect feedback from teachers and administrators since they are critical to the partnership's success. We should also look a bit more closely at the other ways we invite families to engage with us as partners.
Ways to Measure the Effectiveness of Home-School Partnership
Besides surveying families, another way to measure the effectiveness of home-school partnerships is to look at how you welcome families to the school. If families do not feel welcome, engaging them as partners in the learning process is difficult. An onsite physical walk-through assesses the school from the moment families drive into the parking lot. A complete assessment of the physical environment looks at:
- Parking signage
- Availability of visitor parking spots
- Main office signage
- Welcoming signage
- Customer service
- Signs of learning throughout the building
School Website
A campus walk-through is critical, but many families don’t have time to come to the school on a regular basis. The information they find about the school comes from what they read online. A website review looks at the school's online presence from the family’s perspective:
- Is it easy for families to navigate?
- Is the information written in a language and format families can understand?
- Most importantly, can families easily find the information they need to support their child’s learning?
Take, for example, the parent portal. The parent portal is where families stay up to date on their child’s progress. The link for the parent portal should be easy for families to locate and access.
Customer Service
How many times have you visited a restaurant or business only to be ignored, dismissed, or treated rudely? When this occurs, how likely are you to revisit the business?
Customer service is equally important in schools. Each and every contact with a family should make them feel welcomed, valued, and invited to participate in the learning environment. Besides assessing customer service during an on-site review, conducting a mystery shopper phone call is also a smart way to assess how friendly staff is to families when they call the school. These calls are done anonymously and at random times during the school day to assess the level of customer service.
This is what a comprehensive family engagement assessment looks like: it’s not intuition and gut feelings but a comprehensive assessment that provides you with actionable, qualitative, and quantitative data.
Written or Virtual Communication
How well do you communicate with families and caregivers? It is important to remember that no single method of communication will work for all families. Some may prefer a phone call, others may prefer an email or text, and others face-to-face. Home-to-school communication is most successful when schools provide multiple methods of communication to increase the likelihood of reaching all families.
As you increase the number of ways to communicate with families, remember that communication should be easily accessible to all families—available in multiple languages, jargon- and acronym-free, and two-way. Two-way communication allows families and caregivers to share their feedback and ideas and have a greater voice in the partnership.
Connected to Instructional Outcomes
Last but certainly not least, you should look more closely at how you engage families as learning partners. There should be less information on upcoming events, new processes, and fundraisers and more information on how families can be effective partners in their children’s learning.
Families should be able to answer the following three questions:
1. What will their child know and be able to do by the end of the school year?
2. How well is their child doing?
3. How does the school support learning at home?
These three questions should become the yardstick by which you measure what you display around the school, send home to families, or post on the school website and social media.
Great intentions do not always equate to good practices. Connect with us today to get started on your own Family Engagement Assessment and learn more about building effective family, school and community partnerships.
