Coaching Teachers for Family Engagement

Strong family engagement is not just about communicating TO families, but about building relationships WITH families.

While coaches are often removed from parent engagement because they typically don’t teach students directly, coaches can play a powerful role in the overall effectiveness and quality of family engagement in schools. Years of research has shown that as parents are more engaged in school, students are more successful.  

Once I became a parent of school-aged children, my thinking about family engagement was rocked.  I thought I was doing pretty good as a teacher by hosting report card conferences and making the occasional phone call home.  But as a parent, I was shocked by how little communication and connection there was between our family and the school.  Like many parents I talk to, I am surprised by how little I know about what happens during the school day. 

Strong family engagement is not just about communicating to families, but about building relationships with families. (I use “parent” and “family” interchangeably in this post to mean any adult caregiver.)

How can coaches support teachers in building more robust relationships with families in order to support the well-being of the children in their class

Start with a self-reflection

For teachers who want or need support with engaging with families more effectively, start your conversation with them by asking them to do a self-reflection on a few questions.  These can get you started, but feel free to add other questions depending on your school setting: 

  • How often do you communicate with families?

  • What type of communication do you do? When and why?

  • How have families enhanced the learning in your classroom in the last month?

  • How has your family engagement helped you know more about a student, support them academically or socio-emotionally, or grow as an educator?

Do some research and reading

In order to deepen both your own and your teacher’s thinking about parent engagement, consider reading an article together or doing some research around a particular aspect of parent engagement.  

Here are a few resources to get started:

Coaching to Build Parent Partnerships

Ideally, our coaching support around family engagement should help teachers make a shift from just sending out the occasional information to parents, and instead see themselves in partnership with parents. Here are a few strategies for teachers to help them make this shift practically:

  • Parent conferences: Often parent conferences involve the teacher telling the parent how the child is doing, and then asking if they have any questions.  Instead, teachers could include intentionally planned questions to ask parents about ways they’ve seen their child grow, and how they’d like them to keep growing.  Teachers should walk away from these meetings having learned something new that will help them be a more effective teacher for each student. 

  • Text with specific academic info:  Teachers are now using any number of texting apps consistently (Remind, Dojo, etc.), but predominantly with reminders about school events.  Teachers could transform this tool by sending weekly or biweekly individualized texts to parents with one academic “glow” and one academic “grow” for the week.  For example, “Alegria successfully counted 5 by 5 to 100 this week!  Please work with her on addition facts from 1 - 5.” Invite parent feedback, and celebrate with parents when their support of students academically at home pays off in the classroom.

  • Empower parents to connect with one another:  While I did appreciate the increased communication from my children’s school during the pandemic, what helped us stay engaged with school during this challenging season, both academically and emotionally, was our relationships with other parents.  Teachers and schools should engage parents in building relationships and networks with each other so that students benefit from the connection and community.  This includes something as simple as giving parents time to introduce themselves to one another during school events, or empowering one parent to be the class or school parent for planning family social events.

  • Parent workshops: Depending on grade level and subject taught, teachers can organize a parent workshop on a given topic to help teachers grow their skills and knowledge to effectively support students at home.  When possible, these workshops should be led by or co-led with parents. One example that I’ve seen do this well is the Read by 4th initiative that trains parents to be workshop facilitators for other parents about early reading skills. 

Teachers often struggle to effectively engage parents because they have so many other things on their plates and few schools prioritize parent engagement well. Your support as a coach can help teachers shift from sending occasional messages to parents to really seeing families as invaluable partners in supporting students thriving in school.

Coaching ContentLauren Vargasfamily engagement, coaching beliefsComment