For Families 

U.S. Department of Education: Raise the Bar: Resources for Parents and Families - Sample Questions for Parents and Families to Help Build Strong Partnerships with Schools and Family Engagement   

Institute of Education Sciences: Supporting Your Student at Home: Tips for Families with Students in Elementary Grades

Peace at Home: helping parents raise confident, resilient children from prenatal development through young adulthood.

• Parenting classes, free monthly classes, recordings, and handouts

For Educators 

Institute of Education Sciences: What Are Academic Parent-Teacher Teams:  Fact sheet of this model and how it serves as a bridge connecting educators and families to support student academic success and well-being.

Family Leadership Design Collaborative, Cultivating Community Wellbeing and Educational Justice (FLDC): is a national network of scholars, practitioners, and family and community leaders who work to center racial equity in family engagement by reimagining how families and communities can create more equitable schools and educational systems. 

• Library, publications, tools, and other resources from FLDC projects and members 

• Cultivating Community Wellbeing and Educational Justice – Family Leadership Design Collaborative (FLDC) - FLDC members share how they are looking to radically change the old model of education by redesigning family engagement. (video) 

EdSurge: 11 Ways Schools Can - and Should - Involve Families in SEL Programming. Enhancing social-emotional learning with a whole-school, whole-family, whole-day approach, by Leah Shafer (article) 

Panorama: Why Your District Needs to Administer a Family Engagement Survey—and 21 Questions You Can Ask

• Family-School Relationship Survey: A survey tool to help educators gather feedback and engage families in their school communities. In it, you’ll find over 100 questions that elevate family voice in their child’s educational journey. Developed at the Harvard Graduate School of Education  

Learning for Justice: Partnering With Families to Support Black Girls, by Adam Alvarez, and Eshe Price (article with links and questions for reflection). Educators can take specific actions to make schools more supportive spaces for Black girls, whose trauma is often overlooked.

SWIFT education center is a national technical assistance center that builds whole system - state, district, school and community - capacity to provide academic and behavioral social, and emotional support to improve outcomes for students, especially those who are marginalized.   

• Equity by Design, Supporting Student Success through Authentic Partnerships: Reflection from Parents and Caregivers, by Crystal Morton (article) 

• Trusting Family Partnerships: Video and Discussion Guide, Introduction and Steps to Get You Started  

• Trusting Community Partnerships: Video and Discussion Guide, Introduction and Steps to Get You Started   

• Community Asset Mapping and   

• Community Resources Assessment 

Becoming an Ally: Partnering with Immigrant Families to Promote Student Success: Carnegie Corporation of New York’s latest education report offers specific recommendations to guide educators in overcoming barriers that have prevented them from engaging immigrant families as true partners in supporting their children’s learning. Includes  

• challenges Immigrant Families Experience Engaging with Schools and Communities   
• revisiting Family Engagement Frameworks   
• recommendations: Best Practices for Partnering with Immigrant Families  

Joining Together to Create a Bold Vision for Next Generation Family Engagement Engaging Families to Transform Education, by the Global Family Research Project for Carnegie Corporation of New York.

• Identified are five promising, high-leverage areas that can serve as “building blocks” for the next generation of family engagement strategies: reducing chronic absenteeism, data sharing about student and school climate indicators, the academic and social development of youth in and out of school, digital media, and the critical transition periods in children’s learning pathways.
• Suggestions on where to concentrate efforts to move the field of family and community engagement ahead— local community initiatives, capacity building and professional development, data pathways, public policy change, and public communication and engagement strategies.
  • Executive Summary: Joining Together to Create a Bold Vision for Next-Generation Family Engagement

ParentPowered Ready4K programs deliver evidence-based family engagement activities into parents' hands, for families with children birth - grade 8. Available in multiple languages. 

Text4Family Services, The National Center on Parent, Family, and Community Engagement (NCPFCE). A text messaging service for family services professionals, supervisors, and other staff who work directly with families is tailored to support and enhance the vital work you do every day.

When you sign up, you will receive free text messages, including:

• Two to three texts messages per month with information and links to helpful resources to strengthen your practice with families
• Additional messages about:
  • Upcoming parent, family, and community engagement (PFCE) professional development opportunities and new resources
  • Office of Head Start campaigns and initiatives

Engaging Families in Out-of-School Time Programs Toolkit, by the Build the Out-of-School Time Network (BOSTnet). Best practice tools and strategies to strengthen after school and youth programs by increasing family engagement.

Harvard Graduate School of Education, Family Engagement in Education: Creating Effective Home and School Partnerships for Student Success, a four-day institute that explores best practices in family engagement and identify engagement strategies you can use to promote student learning and improve educational outcomes. This professional learning prepares you to increase your capacity to engage staff, families, and your community to create a school culture that honors and respects the knowledge that families bring to the learning process.  

Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family-School and Partnership (version 2), designed to support the development of family engagement strategies, policies, and programs.

Resources National Family Support Network - Standards of Quality for Family Strengthening and Support:

• The Standards address five areas of practice important for any Program or individual working with families through 17 standards, each with Foundational and High-Quality Indicators and implementation.
• Tools designed for effective implementation of the Standards
• Standards Certification Training opportunity

Family Engagement Learning Series, a six-part webinar series hosted by U.S. Department of Education, aims to bridge the gap between home and school and support the success of family engagement practices. The conversations brought together education together education leaders and practitioners from across the United States to share resources and evidence-based strategies. 

• Family Engagement Learning Series Briefs: summaries of the six-part webinar series of conversations designed to Raise the Bar for family engagement practices between school and home. 

Educational Justice Starts with Equitable Family Engagement: Riddhi Divanji, Ella Shahn, and Sydney Parker, Foundry10 (article)
Key takeaways for family engagement and equitable survey design collaborations with families and communities to help build equitable family engagement into their professional practice.

• Designing surveys and sharing data with a wide range of stakeholders results in a deeper understanding of the data from multiple perspectives

• Strategies such as:

  • use the computer lab and help families complete surveys

  • engage community organizations to connect with families

  • hold focus groups to explain survey to families

A Family Friendly Partnership School presents 100 Ways to Make Your School Family Friendly (virtual tour - 9:48 min) including 16 different locations: parking lots, signage, gyms, maps, and welcome areas--and more.  

Creating Authentic Partnerships with Historically Marginalized Families and Other Stakeholders: Embracing an Equity Mindset: Alexandria Harvey, WestEd, National Center for Systemic Improvement (ncsi) (article)  

• This resource can be used to think about what changes are needed to create authentic opportunities for partnership that can improve learning conditions and outcomes for historically marginalized populations.  
• Formed Families Forward, a family-led nonprofit, in conjunction with the Virginia Tiered Systems of Supports project, presents Equity in Education Through Family Engagement. (video - 10 mins) 
  • This video features family and educator voice and offers schools and families strategies for increasing educational equity through strong family engagement. Video is captioned in Spanish and an accompanying fact sheet is available too.  
• Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) resources: 
  • Creating the Conditions for Family-School-Community Partnerships: Margaret Caspe (article)  
    • In this blog, National Association for Family, School and Community Engagement’s (NAFSCE) research consultant, discusses the importance of creating opportunities and pathways for educators to learn about and practice family engagement on an ongoing basis throughout their careers.  
  • Last Year Was a Wake-Up Call: Family Engagement After COVID-19: Kate Stolzfus, ASCD, interviews Karen L. Mapp, a senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. (article) 

Embracing a New Normal: Toward a More Liberatory Approach to Family Engagement by Karen Mapp and Eyal Bergman. This report calls for embracing the “new normal” of the post-pandemic school-family dynamic, and for seizing the moment to build a “family engagement that is liberatory (free of dominance), solidarity-driven (in union and fellowship), and equity-focused (fair and just).” (report)  

Global Family Research Project: A new tool from the Global Family Research Project (GRFP) and the National PTA’s Center for Family Engagement that gives families, schools, and parent leaders simple, proven strategies for creating ongoing relationships to support student success. The tool is based on “Joining Together to Create a Bold Vision for Next-Generation Family Engagement,” GFRP’s paper summarizing important findings on why family members are important to children’s learning.

Return to Parent, Family and Community Engagement Home.