Hello everybody and welcome to Learn With The Expert. As we're waiting for everyone to join us, we would love to have you introduce yourself in the chat, share where you're from, your role, and your grade level. The chat is located in the right corner of your screen. If you don't see it, look at the very bottom corner. You'll see a little chat icon.
Just tap on it and that chat will pop right on up. Today we are so excited to have family. engagement and education expert, Dr. Karen Mapp with us today to share how building family partnerships benefits educators, students, and families. Before we dive in, we do have a few housekeeping items that we want to make you aware of.
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This session is being recorded and a link to the recording as well as any other the links to the resources will be shared after the session via email. And let's see who we have with us. So it looks like we have Javier. Hello, welcome, welcome.
Valentina, welcome. Virginia, we have Angelica, welcome. Hi, Martha, welcome, welcome.
Cheryl, hello. Hello, Monica. Hi, Kendra from Virginia.
All right, so excited to have all of these people join us. So now that we know who's in the room, you're probably wondering who I am. I am Mia.
Hello, everybody. I am the training and professional development specialist here at Seesaw. So I support educators, administrators on various ways that Seesaw can be integrated into schools and classrooms.
I'm a former educator, taught kindergarten for 10 years. I'm so excited to be here with you today. Seesaw brings educators, students and families together to create a very powerful learning loop between the classroom and home.
Connecting families on the Seesaw app. allows educators to set up two-way communication, and also invites families to be a part of the learning journey. Here at Seesaw, we really believe family engagement is families feeling welcome and empowered to support their children's education in effective ways. That is why we are so excited to have our expert with us today.
Now, without further ado, let's go ahead and meet our expert, Dr. Karen Mapp. Over the past 20 years, Dr. Karen Mapp has focused her research on cultivating partnerships among families, community members, and educators to support student achievement and school improvement. Currently, Dr. Mapp is a senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the faculty director of Education Policy and Management Master's Program. Dr. Mapp author of several articles and books about the role of families and community members in the work of student achievement and school improvement, including her latest book, which I have right here, and you will have the opportunity to win.
This book is titled Everyone. Let me make sure you can, you can't see it with my background, but you will have an opportunity to win it. It's titled Everyone Wins the Evidence of Family, School Partnerships and Implications for Practice.
So today, Dr. Matt will be showing you how educators can build strong family partnerships by cultivating those trusting and respectful relationships. So thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Matt. Welcome.
So excited to have you here. Thank you so much, Mia. Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. You sound great.
OK, great. Fantastic. And I want to say hello to everyone who's joining us.
And thank you so much for joining us. I did see that there. Some educators from Australia that are joining us today, and I was just saying to Mia, I was just recently in Australia.
with some other Harvard faculty, and we did a professional development training for a week in Sydney for school leaders from Sydney, I'm sorry, from Australia and from New Zealand. So I want to welcome our colleagues from Down Under. I think if I've got my time right, it's morning and it's Saturday there.
So I'm actually very excited to go back next year. I really love the country. So anyway, just want to say hello to everybody else. I hope everyone is is safe and well, and what we're going to do over the course of the next 45 minutes is to talk a little bit about what I've learned over the past 30 years.
I've been doing this work now for 30 years, and what I've learned about the power of partnerships between home and school. And so my colleagues and I, Anne Henderson, Stephanie Cuevas, Martha Franco, and Susanna Ewert, the last three are my former students, we worked on a book this year. where we collected some really interesting research on the power of family engagement.
So that's what I'm going to be sharing with you today. So the book Everyone Wins is actually the fifth installment in the evidence series. Some of you may remember prior publications. One was called A New Wave of Evidence. And this is one that Ann Henderson and I published almost 20 years ago.
And Ann has been very much focused on making sure that you all as practitioners have all of the latest information on family and community engagement. And so we decided we were going to do another version. And what we do is we take research studies, both qualitative and quantitative research studies, and we look at them and we publish summaries of those research studies. So Everyone Wins has about 40 studies in the book.
And then we look at themes. And so the studies that we reviewed this time for the publication of Everyone Wins, which was just published a few months ago in 2022, they span 2002 to 2021. So it's a lot of the latest evidence on the power of partnerships. And so we've got some big headlines from that review of the research.
And there's two big headlines that I want to share with you. The first... is that we learned from this research, and this is what we've learned over the years when we've looked at the research on the power of partnerships, that homeschool partnerships benefit not only our students, but also educators, families, schools, districts, and communities. Now, when we wrote a new wave of evidence back in 2020, was it 20, 2002, We didn't have much evidence on how partnerships impacted families and educators, etc. We had a lot of evidence on how these partnerships affected students, but now the evidence has gone a lot deeper.
So I'll be sharing with you some of what we learned. What we also learned this time from these new sets of studies is a lot more about what high-impact practice looks like. So we know a lot more about what effective practice should look like, the kinds of practice we should be encouraging in our schools and our districts and our states and our ministries of education, we should be supporting this effective practice. Because as you all know, a lot of times we've passed down practices that aren't effective when it comes to engaging families. So now we know a lot more about what is effective, and I'll be sharing some of that with you as well.
So let's talk about what we now know about the impact of this partnership between home and school on our students. So take a look. Those are all the things that we want, especially now post the pandemic.
We're trying to make sure that our students are back on track. And so when we partner with their families, we find that these are students who earn higher grades and test scores. They have better attendance. They're more engaged in class. They have a more positive attitude about school.
They feel better about themselves and have a greater sense of self-esteem and efficacy. And we also see higher graduation rates. So this is big news when it comes to the impact.
And some of you who have seen me do keynotes before or have been at some of my workshops, I always talk about the old commercial. So I'm dating myself. And if you remember this commercial, you're dating yourself too. There's an old commercial for Wendy's where Clara Peller would scream out, where's the beef? And so some of you may remember that commercial.
And what she was saying was that Listen, if I'm going to spend my resources, if I'm going to spend my dollars on your product, I want a good return on investment. And so that's basically what I'm sharing with you here. Where's the beef when it comes to homeschool partnerships? Why are these partnerships important?
Why should we all be engaged in these partnerships? So I've now shared with you what we know about where's to be for our students, but let's talk about... for ourselves as educators and practitioners.
What we now know from this renewed research is that when our educators engage with families in effective partnerships, there's some changes that happen for them too that are positive. First of all, we find that when educators start to engage in trusting relationships with families, their mindsets about families start to shift. So some of you may be familiar with this language, deficit-based or asset-based.
So instead of seeing families through what we call a deficit-based lens, we're basically, we're blaming families for things that are happening and, you know, perhaps they come from communities that are disenfranchised and we say they don't care. We start to change our mindset when we actually are working with families. And I actually saw this happen during the pandemic where The pandemic was sort of a forcing function where educators had to work more directly with families. And we found that educators were saying, you know, I really had misperceptions about my families. Now that I'm getting to know them better, I realize they do care about their kids'education.
They want to be engaged. So that's one of the things that we're seeing when we put families and educators together and we engage them in effective partnership strategies. We also see that our educators gain a better understanding of the cultures and backgrounds of our students, so there's a greater multicultural awareness and appreciation for those differences.
We also see that there's greater success that they have in motivating and engaging their students, because now they're learning a lot from families about what are the child's strengths and challenges. You know, a lot of times we fail to ask the first teachers of our students who are their parents, you know, tell us a little bit about your child. What are the things that you've noticed? What are the things that they like to do?
And I find that educators that do that get a lot of great information, and that information is then used to enhance their own pedagogical strategies. There's more support from families because obviously now you're in a partnership and you find families will say, what do you need from us? And then we also see that in schools where there's strong partnerships between home and school, there's stronger morale among the staff who are working in those schools. There's more professional satisfaction. Many of them don't want to leave that particular school because they have a community that is working with them.
They're not going it alone when it comes to educating the children. So those are the wins for our educators. We also see wins for our families.
So our families also gain something from these partnerships. They find that they have stronger relationships with their children because now they know a little bit more about what the child should know and be able to do in school. And they begin to learn from us.
We start to share best practices and they start to be able to support their children's learning, which then builds a stronger relationship between themselves and their child. And this really goes from pre-K right on up to high school. Of course, better rapport with the children's teachers and the staff, a greater understanding about how to help the child.
As I said a minute ago, they now know more about what their child should know and be able to do and are able to assist in ways that perhaps we share with them. There's more knowledge and skill in advocating for the child in ways that are really focused on what the child needs. And then we see that our families actually increase their own social connections because now they're partnering with staff, maybe meeting and greeting with other families. So this really deepens their social connections in the community. In terms of wins for our schools, so now we're talking about institutional supports, institutional wins, institutional outcomes when it comes to our schools.
As I mentioned to you before. When a school has a strong climate between home and school, everybody wins, everybody's happy, people are much more, the work is much more enjoyable. There's higher morale and retention of teachers, very important when it comes to a return on investment. We know in many cases we lose teachers, but at these schools that have this strong bond between home and school, they find that they have much lower rates of people leaving to go on to other places.
Improved facilities, better curriculum, higher quality programs. The schools, because they're in partnership with families, they have a... ear to the ground as to what's happening in the community so they can be more responsive to community needs. And then, of course, they have a better reputation in the community. And so this is very important if you are in a district where families can choose their schools.
So families like to be at schools where they know they're going to be welcomed. In fact, here in Boston, we have an award that we give to schools called Family Friendly Schools, and that goes on their website. And actually, there was a time I think that there was a poster or a flag that they could post.
And so when families saw that, they said, oh, this is an indicator that this school is really welcoming to families and wants to partner with them. So that made a huge difference for those schools when it was time for the lottery and for them to be chosen by the families. So some of you may be familiar with the research of the Chicago Consortium.
And this is a wonderful organization in Chicago that's done a lot of deep and very, very, very important work on school improvement and why schools improve. And so in 2010, they published a book called Organizing Schools for Improvement, Lessons from Chicago. And what they were trying to figure out was, you know, what are the essential supports for a school to improve? you know, what are the things that you absolutely have to have if your school is going to improve? So they looked at a set of schools that were struggling, some schools that might have been labeled chronically underperforming, and they also looked at schools that started out as chronically underperforming, but were starting now to succeed, and they were trying to figure out, well, what's happening in these two places?
What they found was that there actually are five ingredients. So let's use a cake metaphor here, that there are five ingredients to the cake of school improvement. And what they found was that these five ingredients, if you took one of the ingredients out, just like if you take out a major ingredient in a cake, that you end up with a mess, right? And so the five ingredients are the following.
First, school leadership. Your school leader is very important. So for those of you... who are school leaders on the call. I know sometimes you sometimes might feel invisible, but you're not.
What you do at your school really makes a difference. And so school leadership, that person or persons drive the changes in the school. And we find that a participatory style of leadership where the leader isn't afraid to share power and cultivate power amongst other people in the school is really very beneficial when it comes to a school setting.
But what else? There are four additional supports that are the main ingredients to the improvement of our schools. Professional capacity, meaning that everybody in the building, all the staff, want to be there, want to be a part of a learning community. We have student-centered climate.
And when I was deputy superintendent for family and community engagement in Boston for two years, I could tell you that within five minutes of walking through a school, I could pretty much tell whether it was a student-centered learning climate or an adult-centered learning climate. I could tell by the way people talked about the children. I could tell by the way people talked about the families or how the families were greeted.
I could even tell by what was on the walls or the kind of greeting that was in the hallways before someone really entered the school. So a student-centered learning climate is also a main ingredient. Having strong instructional guidance or professional development is another ingredient. But look at what's there as number three.
Parent and community ties. Their way of saying family and community engagement. The circle isn't smaller than the other four.
What they found was that in order for a school to improve, The school had to have a family and community engagement strategy, and that without that, the school did not improve. What that rectangle is with that triangle inside is your classrooms. And the triangle represents the instructional core, the relationship between the student, the teacher, and the content. And again, what they found was that all five of these supports work together like the ingredients in a cake to make for a successful school.
So... one of the things I would like you to ask yourself is at our school or in our organization or in our program, do we see family and community engagement as an important and essential ingredient to the health and success of our school and our children? Because again, what this particular slide is showing you that it's absolutely essential for this to be here in order for your school to improve.
There's a little bit of a delay when I click this button, so we'll just wait for it to catch up. There we go. So in terms of wins for our districts in our community, so now we're going beyond the school, we're going to the outside community. We see that when you look at all of the data for the schools that might be in that district or that town or that city, you're going to see reduced suspensions, a reduction in high-risk behaviors.
You're going to see increased family and youth involvement in site-based decisions because, again, when we're in a partnership, we're not afraid to have our families and our students be collaborative with us in decisions that we make about the site itself. Expanded mental and physical health resources, higher levels of participation in our after-school programs, and again, I've talked about an increased high school graduation rate. So I think we would all agree that this is really important stuff when it comes to the where's the beef, right? When we want to say that family engagement and community engagement is important, I'm mainly focusing on family engagement today.
I know for a lot of you, sometimes when people ask that question, you need that language, you need the narrative to talk about why it's important. So I'm hoping in the slides I've gone through so far in the presentation, that will give you some data, some evidence. So that when people say, why should we do family engagement? You know, why should I put another thing on my plate?
You can say, well, there's a whole lot of benefits for you if you actually do this. It is a lot of work. It does take time, but the benefits are huge. Okay. So now, you know, we have a lot of data now.
As I mentioned, I've been doing this work for 30 years, and there have been people like Joyce Epstein and others who have been studying the impact of family engagement on students, on families, for a long time. So we actually have about, I'd say collectively, about 50 years of research saying that family engagement is extraordinary and important. And by the way, I did want to say this. I didn't say this at the beginning. family and pretty much all of us now in the family engagement research world, we mean all adult caretakers because we know that our children are being raised by not just mom and dad, biological mom and dad, but grandma, grandpa, auntie, uncle, and the people we call fictive kin, neighbors.
So all of these people are included when we say family. So I've had to ask myself, you know, we... we have a lot of evidence about why family engagement is important.
And so why is it that we're still struggling to convince people that this is something that they should include in their practice? And during COVID, I actually asked educators from all over, I said, you know, why do you think this is still such a struggle, even though we have so much education about it? And many of my educators came back with an answer that had to do with a topic that We have a wonderful educator here, a writer. Her name is Isabel Wilkerson, and she talks about something called the caste system.
And, you know, the caste is part of, unfortunately, part of our lives, regardless where we live. There are different forms of power hierarchies in our societies. And she really feels that that has a real impact on our mindset around and our desire. to engage with families, especially when our families are different than us.
They come from different backgrounds and different experiences. And so she says how these caste systems, of course, have been passed down throughout history, and they sort of invade our thinking and invade our mindset, sometimes without us even knowing it. And she describes this by talking about the way we follow an usher, right?
So she says, as we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats in a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It's really about power, which groups have it and which do not. It's about resources, which caste is seen as worthy of them and which are not. Who gets to acquire them and who does not.
It's about respect, authority, and assumptions of competence. Who is accorded these and who is not. Okay. And it is a great book. Thank you, Paulette.
It's a wonderful book. But it really starts to unpack, like, you know, these systems are all around us and they show up in how we do our policies and what our policies are all about. And so we really kind of have to fight against these systems in order to really be able to lean in and engage our families, particularly when our families are very different from us.
And so I've been working a lot on what I call goodness. I learned this from my mentor and now very close friend, Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot. And Dr. Lightfoot talks about how she studies goodness, and I've sort of followed suit with her. I like to study what works.
I know a lot of people, you know, a lot of research studies sometimes can be very depressing and, you know, talk about all the things that's happening with our kiddos and with our families. But I've spent my career really going around looking at. what works, what actually works when it comes to family and community engagement.
So I've done a lot of work on things that can move us forward to get us better about engaging in these partnerships. And I wrote a piece back in last year for the Carnegie Corporation of New York and was called Embracing the New Normal. And in it, my co-writer and I, Ayah Bergman, talk about how we actually experienced two pandemics. particularly here in the United States, but I think all over the world. And it was the sort of the recognition of the virus, but also the recognition of systemic racism.
And those two things I know here really shook us up, but also caused us to sort of recalibrate in a positive way the relationship between home and school. So people really started to think about, hmm, this is something that... we maybe have been avoiding before this whole homeschool partnership, but because of these pandemics really needs to take a second look and maybe be a little bit more serious about it.
So one of the things, a couple of things we saw emerging out of these pandemics, and we're actually doing some research on trying to see if we can actually collect real-time data on this, is that we started hearing a lot of stories from educators, and some of you may have experienced this yourselves. First of all, we really now understand how important relationships actually are. Because the stories that we started to hear from teachers, from school leaders, from principals, from district leaders, from state leaders, all over the world actually, had a wonderful story being what was told to me by a wonderful researcher from Brazil. And we heard these similar stories. Oh, Dr. Mapp.
Our school did a lot better than other schools did during the pandemic because since we had already spent time building strong relationships with our families, when we had to pivot, so when we had to pivot to sort of online learning, when we had to get devices to families, when we, you know, were trying to support our family's needs that were food insecure, and then when we came back from the pandemic and we were in hybrid, we were able to do that smoothly. because of our strong relationships with our families. So a lot of people are saying that, boy, those relationships really mattered. And in terms of learning interruption, we've also had a lot of these same places say, you know, our kiddos didn't go down as much as other places.
Why? Because we were in constant communication with their families. There was a smooth transition in terms of getting resources to them. So.
We're really trying through a study that's going to be sponsored by Learning Heroes to see if we can capture some of these stories, because that's going to be a really important big headline. to be able to say that these relationships actually make your schools more resilient to any kinds of crises. Okay.
We also learned that families know more than we thought they did. A lot of our families knew a lot more about teaching and learning than we gave them credit for. And so we've also known now that a lot of educators are saying, you know, we really need to learn more about engaging our families.
Many of you know the research. and writings of Pedro Noguera. And, you know, Pedro said during the pandemic, nothing happened without our families.
We had to go through our families to get to the kiddos in many cases. And like I said, I want to underscore that families could be any adult caretaker. So I think people now are more ready to embrace this concept of engaging families.
And so this is the article that I mentioned to you. And it was called Embracing a New Normal. And when I wrote the piece with Ayal, I said to him, you know, I want to use language in this piece that doesn't mess around.
You know, a lot of times when you write, you want to write for, you know, a diverse audience and you sometimes will hold back on saying, you know, using the language you really want to use. And I decided I want to use language that was provocative and to get people really thinking about what do we mean by the kind of practice. that we need to bring into our work now. So people talk about the new normal. And so the new normal of family engagement is liberatory.
So what do we mean by liberatory? When I say liberatory, I mean free, that we can bring our whole self to the work, that there's not all of these confines and rules and regulations, that it's a free, that we feel like we can be our whole selves when we do this work of engaging families. And we recognize all the wonderful things about our families. And that's a liberatory feeling.
Solidarity driven. We're doing this work together in fellowship, working together in fellowship, not us, them, not combative, that we're really working collaboratively. That means that we're going to have to link arms.
That means that, yes, we're going to have to sometimes compromise, but it's not like we're looking at the other person as this bad person. We're working together. And then equity focus is where we make sure that all of our families and all of our kids have what they need to survive and thrive. So if that means we need to go the extra mile, if that means we need to meet families where they are, we're willing to do that and provide the resources to do that.
So this is the dual capacity framework for family school partnerships. Some of you may be familiar with this. This is the version two of the framework. I wrote the first version in 2010 with collaboration of the U.S. Department of Education.
They had asked me to come in as a consultant when Arne Duncan was the Secretary of Education and Barack Obama was president. And they said, you know, we don't think we're using the right language when it comes to really describing best practice around family engagement. Can you help us with that?
And so I went in as a consultant and I designed the first dual capacity framework, which looked very different from this one. It was more of a vertical orientation. And as soon as it was published, it was actually published in around 2013, I started to do research on, okay, does this work for people? And I started asking people questions about if you were to change it, How would you change it?
Had a large group of people who had helped me with it in the first place, because I, again, I study goodness. I go to places and say, what does best practice really look like? And I try to incorporate that into the framework. And also it's a research-based framework. But I then started to say, and it's going to be bigger, okay, in a second.
I started to ask people, how would you like me to change this? And So I did. So in 2019, I came up with a brand new framework.
Now, what ended up happening was that, again, this came out in 2019. And what happened in 2020? We had the two pandemics. And people said to me, oh, Dr. Mapp, are you going to have to change the framework again? And I thought about it. And I said, you know, I don't think so.
Because I think that Instead of the framework having to meet the moment, the moment has finally met the framework. People are now more willing to talk about family and community engagement because of the pandemics. And now instead of resisting.
what's in the dual capacity framework, maybe they'll start to embrace it. And that's exactly what's happened. So I'm just going to quickly review the framework. We only have a short time together today, so I won't be able to go to it in depth.
I actually teach a 13 week course on family and community engagement here at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. So you can imagine I can't squeeze a whole semester's worth of work. into a 45-minute presentation, but I'm going to try to give you a summary of the framework. So it's loosely like a logic model.
And again, if some of you want to follow along, if you want to look at the framework while I'm talking, you can find it at www.dualcapacity.org because I know that this screen is small and unfortunately, I don't think I can zoom it from my end. But if you want to take a look at it while I'm describing, that might be a way that you can take a look. So it's loosely framed like a logic model.
So it goes from the challenges and then over to the actual outcomes. So this is the challenge section. It identifies what the challenges have been to strong partnerships. So many of you educators, I'm sure you haven't had an opportunity to have a full course on family and community engagement. And so.
if you've not been exposed to strong examples, I don't know how people can be expected to actually put this into their practice. And because you haven't had training, a lot of times you end up trying things that don't work. And what happens is that sometimes we feel like, well, we tried something, it didn't work.
So maybe it's the family's fault. Maybe they don't care. And so you start to develop these deficit mindsets when things don't work. And I understand that, you know, a lot of us good intentions, well-meaning. But, you know, sometimes when we fail, you know, we're looking for somebody to point the finger at, especially when we feel we've tried our best.
This is some of the things that can happen. On the side of the families, they also have been exposed to strong examples of partnership. And many of them, you know, have history with our schools.
One of my colleagues, Su Hong, talks that sometimes they feel like they've been respected for a long time. So she calls it generational disrespect, right? Where, you know, a lot of our indigenous families, a lot of our families who are immigrants coming from other countries, a lot of families who may not have the educational background that we have.
And in some cases, it's the reverse. Families who, you know, may come from means. We still may have biases about them as well.
And so consequently, a lot of times people will say, you know, I'm good. I went to that school. I remember how I was treated there. I don't want to be engaged with the school.
So we've got to overcome some of those mindsets as well. So in the framework, we talk about conditions. And these are the conditions, the purple area of the framework are actually the conditions that we have researched and have found really represent best practice, high impact strategies. And there are two types of conditions.
We call these the essential conditions. So I want you to think again about, you know, the foundations to your good family engagement practice. Okay. These are the conditions that you want to put in place. There's the process conditions.
And these are things that you all can do, that you can all incorporate into your practice. But then there's the organizational conditions. And that, those are the systems and structures that have to be in place to support this work.
I know a lot of teachers, in fact, yesterday, one of my teachers in the class said, you know, I incorporate the process conditions into my practice, but I'm pretty much the only one in my school who has this real dedication to and real intention around strong partnerships with families. It's not coming from the top. It's not supported by our district. I'm doing a lot of this on my own.
I feel like it's important, but I don't feel like it's... it's getting the support of my school leader. And then consequently, it's not systemic.
It's just one person here or one person there or one school here or one school there. So if we really want this to work well, the organizational conditions are important because then our leaders see this as a systemic part of the work of schools, going back to that organizing schools for improvement chart, which show that family and community ties are key. to the improvement of our schools. Well, in this case, everybody in the district knows that. Everybody knows, everybody in the state knows that, and everybody's trying to work towards this type of new normal around family engagement.
So one of the things I do want to double click on here is this whole piece around relationships, because one of the things that we did was we tried to move this up in this framework versus the last one. And that is where we want you to understand how important it is for you to develop relationships of trust with your families. And I just want you to think for a moment about what do you do when you're trying to cultivate trust with another person? A lot of times what you do is you listen to them, you empathize with them, you treat them with respect and kindness, you make sure that they feel seen and heard, you tell maybe your own story. There's a number of things that we do when we want to build trust with that person.
But what I find a lot of times is that we, our institutions, skip over that step. They go right to the programming, they go right to the... open houses and they go right to the family teacher nights and they don't spend time on this key piece and that is building relationships of trust with your families and your communities. So again, out of Chicago, there's a wonderful book called Trust in Schools and they talk about you've got to build relational trust because relational trust is the glue that holds everything else together.
And they say the elements of relational trust are respect, competence, integrity, and personal regard. And Eyal Bergman, my student that I was telling you about, he actually came up with this little checklist for himself. And he talks about, okay, if I'm trying to develop trust with another person, let's see, in terms of respect, why know people feel respected when they feel listened to? And when we ask them for their feedback. So am I really seeking input and listening to my families without bias?
Then people want to feel like they're seen as competent, but they also want to know that we're competent. So he asks himself, am I demonstrating to families that I'm competent, but also that I'm honoring their role as valued and competent caretakers? Here's a big one.
Integrity. Right. I know when I was deputy superintendent and my families were mad at me and they would come at me. Right. Which they do, which is fine.
I like that energy. Sometimes I'd be tempted to say, okay, I'll take care of it when I knew I couldn't. And that's the worst thing you can do because families are a lot more comfortable with you being transparent and saying, you know, I don't think I'm going to be able to do this.
Let's work together and see if we can come up with a solution. Okay. And then finally, do I show families that I value and care about them as people or am I treating them as objects. And when we label certain groups of families a certain way, when we define them in a certain way, that's treating them as objects.
Every person is different. So you want to treat them as a valued human being. So I wanted to double click on the relational trust piece because it really is a very important part that I often see is skipped over in a lot of our work. So when we talk about this new practice that I want you to think about, I really want you to think about how serious are we about building relationships of trust with our families? Because, see, if you skip over that step, then you end up in these situations where there's anger and there's distrust.
And a lot of times it's very difficult then to build partnership because you've already got this platform where there's anger and distrust. And sometimes you have to step back and say, OK, everybody. Let's start over. Let's start with a meet and greet where all we do is tell stories about our families.
Or maybe we have a time where we just share the origins of our names. You know, something like an icebreaker where we just get the chance to just be real people. The other parts of the framework have to do with process conditions around making sure your practice is linked to learning and development. I often repeat the wonderful phrase by my colleague, Kathy Hoover Dempsey. I'm sorry.
No, it was, oh, I'm not going to remember her name now. It just went in and out of our head. Kate Gilchristley. There we go. She talks about a lot of times we do what she called random acts of family engagement.
We just do anything, right? Whatever we've done for the last 50 years, that's what we do. Not connected to what our students should know and be able to do.
So our practice should be linked to learning and development. Our families would like to know. What are our goals? Where should my student be by the end of the year or the end of the month or the end of the week? We want to see our families again through an asset-based lens.
We want our practice, again, to be culturally responsive and respectful to our families. There's that word collaborative, right? And there's a word inside of collaborative, and that's labor. And I often joke, you know, collaborations are hard work, but they're worth it.
And then we want our practice to be interactive. We want people to be able to roll up their sleeves and practice. I've already made mention of what we need in terms of the supports.
So I've talked a little bit about the organizational conditions. We want to make sure we're providing those supports for the process conditions. When we start doing this work well, we start really engaging the essential conditions. The first output that we see, our first outcome actually, is with the adults.
the adults start acting differently, the families and the educators, because this is when we talk about the dual capacity framework. These are the capacities that we see that get built in both the educators and the families. We see their capabilities increase, their skills and their knowledge. And that's the one we focus on a lot. But we also know that the capacity gets built in terms of their connections, their social networks, their beliefs begin to shift.
We talked about that earlier. and their confidence in doing this work. Now we've got educators and families working together and they're working together to support school and student improvement. So I think here what I want to do is to show you a quick video because I want you to hear some school staff talk about what happens when you actually engage in partnership with families and how their beliefs actually shifted.
because of that engagement. With the teachers that I've interacted with, I've seen them grow a lot since I first came to the school. I don't even think I even knew what family engagement kind of even was until that PD session that kind of just not only changed my whole life, but changed the whole school, changed the way that we see things, where we spend our money, what we choose to do.
What really wins my heart is when... And when your parents feel like they trust you enough that you can bring things to you and ask for help, I think that's one of the most awesome things about this partnership. It is work, but it's worth it.
It is absolutely worth it, and it's life-changing. I mean, it will invest you as a teacher in a way that you weren't before. You know, all teachers were invested in our kids, of course, but I think when you really become a part of that family, you're not going to fail that kid. Like, you are going to fight that much harder to get them what they need and to keep that promise to that mother or to that father or grandmother that I'm here for you, I'm here for your family, I'm going to do what it takes so that your child is successful. Even when I have to have, you know, tough conversations with parents and I don't get the response that I want, it's never a, oh, I'm judging you right now.
Now I don't have love for you. Now I don't like you. Now I'm not going to work as hard for you. It's, man, I wonder what's going on.
Like, hey, there's something going on and you need some help. Like, let me know. Because I actually know you care about your kid, right? I automatically now always come from a place of care and of love.
And I'm not selfish with my love anymore. In the beginning, I was very selfish with it. I decided who I was going to do what with.
But now it's just made me just a better human being. Because I just think in general, I always think not to judge, but first to ask questions and try to figure out what to do. And I was never like that before.
Everybody says, well, Johnson, if you're going to be a principal somewhere else, where are you going to go? And I'm like, I don't want to go anywhere else because this is family. When you engage families in the way that we have, you feel like you're leaving your brothers, your sisters, your cousins. I feel a responsibility. to these kids and to these parents.
After teaching sibling after sibling, I can't imagine the day I say I'm not coming back to Stanton next year because I would never hear the end of it. I mean, that's a huge reason why I think a lot of us stay is because we love these kids and we love these families. So we love these kids and we love these families, right?
So, you know, one of the things I say to my students is that wherever you go, you know, this is love work. And I know a lot of times we shy away from that, that, that, that word. But being an educator is, is, is doing love work. And so consequently, I talk to them a lot about if you don't think that you can love the kids and their families, the kids are part of an ecosystem.
So when they come to you, they come with their entire ecosystem. You can't just say, well. I love kids, but not say I love kids and families and the community, because you're working with the entire ecosystem.
And so what I want to do is just quickly show you some additional supports and resources. These are some things. The book signing today obviously isn't happening. This is a leftover slide, but I wanted you to also see you.
I've told you about the dualcapacity.org website. And there we have a big conference on family and community engagement in June of 2023. This is going to be in Philadelphia. I have an institute that I do in the summers, and so that's an open, the enrollment has been open on that. I suggest that you sign up to be a member of NAVSCI because it's got wonderful resources about family engagement. They do wonderful webinars.
And then Scholastic also does a workshop series for district and school teams, and they've done them all over the world. Actually done some in Australia, in Mexico. as well as here in the United States. So I am going to entertain questions that you may have in the last sort of 10 minutes that we have for the webinar. I hope this was helpful.
Dr. Mapp, I am in the background taking notes. It was extremely helpful. Thank you so much for joining us.
Love that piece about relational trust and really like breaking that down and what it means. and how that impacts your relationship with families. That was good stuff. Thank you all for being here. So if you do have any questions, we are going to take those now.
Okay, so Don has a question. If we can pull up that graphic with the circles and the triangles, can you go over that quickly and explain that triangle portion of the graphic? Yeah, that triangle is something that's talked about by a colleague of mine named Richard Elmore, and it's called the instructional core. And it's the relationship between the student, the teacher and the content. So if you look up the instructor, there you go.
If you look up the instructional core in Google somewhere, I'm sure it's going to come up. But it and as you can see, all five of these. supports impact what happens in that classroom and that relationship between the student, the teacher, and the content. Thank you so much for clarifying that. Let's see, we have another question.
What does family engagement look like? Well, this is a good one. At a virtual school, we often have families that do not respond to calls, emails, or texts, and sometimes coming to the home can come across as threatening.
Well, like I said, my question would be, what kind of relational trust practices did you do before you started sending stuff home that had to do with teaching and learning or anything else? Because unfortunately, the trend is that schools, even whether they're virtual or other types of schools, when they reach out to families, it's with bad news. And I know that. My parents in Boston used to tell me that as soon as they saw the, you know, 635, because that was the first three numbers of the school system, when they saw that, they wouldn't answer the text, they wouldn't answer the phone because they figured it was the school.
And they didn't want to talk to the school because they didn't want to hear bad news. But when you start with a routine that it's good news and it's relational, the opposite happens. As soon as families see the number, they pick up immediately, you know. Tell me the good news or tell me what's happened or how are you? So you've really got to build that relationship of trust first, because if that's not there, then your text, your email is like another institution, a very impersonal institution calling me and I'm not interested.
Okay. So I say you have to start with that trust building first. You know, one of the things that I do.
even in the beginning of my class, we always do icebreakers and we do fun things. And, you know, because I know that it's so hard when it's two-dimensional, you want to try to build relationships over a two-dimensional platform. It's hard, but it's not impossible.
So I hope that was helpful, Sarah. Thank you so much. I think we have a couple other questions. How do you recommend approaching leadership? directors, administrators about creating that effective homeschool connection and engaging families?
Well, I think part of it is that you all probably learn about what sort of floats the boat of your administrator, right? Like what are the things that you know your administrator or your director leans into? So, for example, if you know that they're really interested in data, then I would bring a copy of Everyone Wins or, you know, the Everyone Wins is designed so that you can rip pages out.
I know people sometimes get upset when people do that. But but if you needed to, you know, some people need evidence. They need data.
Some people need stories. So sometimes I've had teachers who have decided that they're going to do a pilot and then they have the families. And this is one thing sometimes they do virtually.
They have them record stories about how great this relationship that they built with their teacher and what it's meant to them. And then they compile those stories into a video and they use it as a tool to try to encourage others, particularly their school leaders, to engage in family engagement. So you sort of have to figure out, OK, what do I know this person is going to respond to?
And then maybe develop some kind of package. Where you're able to present it. I often say that don't just present it yourself.
You know, you always want to maybe have a little posse of people doing it with you, whether that's families, students, sometimes high school students. When you really ask them, they'll tell you that they really want their families engaged. Not the same way the families were engaged when they were in elementary school. They still want families to have a presence.
So again, I think you have to craft the message based on the person. But. There's so much out there now, the data, the stories that you can share with somebody to try to, especially when they see the where's the beef part.
If you can say, well, we did this and this happened, that's when people have a tendency to respond best. Yes, I love that idea of bringing in families and students as well. All right. Let's see what other questions we have.
What are the. Oh, OK. So what are some things that you have done in terms of family engagement? Which one of these things have worked the best for you?
See, again, context really, really matters. You know, when I work for the Boston Public Schools, I would get this question all the time or I would get people from all over the world saying because we were very successful in our family engagement strategies district wide. They'd say, what was the best thing you did? And I said, well, the best thing that I did might not be what's right for you.
So I do think that the relationship building activities really work the best. If you start out with those, that really gives you traction through everything else. That's why it's at the top of the list with the process conditions, because if you spend those time on relational activities, then you find that the rest of the conditions start to fall into place.
If you don't do those first, the rest of it just doesn't stick. Thank you. I think we have time for maybe one last question.
If there is another one, then we'll go ahead and wrap up. These are great questions. I like this platform where I can actually see the question. Yes, this is great.
And any other questions that we have that don't go answered, we will make sure to reach out via email and answer those. May have been the last one. Okay, one last one. How can educators use digital communication tools like Seesaw to help develop effective partnerships with families? That sounds like a question for you, Mia.
Yes, yes, definitely. So, you know, the powerful thing about Seesaw is that, you know, families can be connected to their child's work. So they can not only see the learning and the thinking and learning that is happening in the classroom, but there's also another piece, a messages piece.
that allows you to communicate with families and build those relationships and share and connect that learning to the content, like Dr. Mapp was saying. So, you know, sharing this is what this is, a new unit that we're doing. These are some strategies we're learning in class.
These are some things that you can support. Do the support your child at home. And if you have any questions, you know, you can reach out to me via this platform, via messages to to so I can support you.
But, yes, we could definitely share. some more information about using Seesaw for family engagement as well. Yeah, but don't forget the relational part, folks. Yes. Because these tools are fabulous, but you've got to make sure you build that relationship first.
Yes. Well, thank you so much, everyone, for joining us. And we will be giving away five copies of Dr. Mapp's book, Everybody Wins the Evidence of for families, school partnerships, and implications for practice. So please complete the feedback form to qualify to win.
So we're going to drop that form in the chat. It's also linked in your handouts tab. And when you log off of this webinar, it will pop up as well. So make sure you complete that in order to win a copy of this book.
And we want to just thank you again, Dr. Matt, for joining us today and sharing all of your wisdom with us. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. And we hope to see you again soon here at CESA.
Have a good one, everybody.