Video: Popping the question: How can schools engage families in education?
HGSE Lecturer Karen Mapp

Video Clip (Part 1)

Karen Mapp: I'd like you to think about this. When you are baking a cake and you look in the recipe book - and all those of you who bake you all know this - flour is usually the most prominent ingredient in a cake. It takes two or three cups, the most volume in the cake as compared to the other ingredients.

I see good instruction - teaching and learning - as the flour in the cake of achievement. Right? But if you have ever baked a cake and forgotten the baking powder, you all know what happens, right? It doesn't rise. I'm sure there are some of you out there whose families tried to pass off a cake that didn't have baking powder in it on you. And you know what it is like - it's tough and chewy, it tastes like a sponge, right.

I like to think of family and community engagement as the baking powder in a cake. It may not be the ingredient that takes up the most volume, but boy if you don't include it, you're not going to rise. And if we want to rise to get to those achievement levels, we cannot do it without families and communities. It has to be a team.

So let's talk about the what. We've talked about the why, so we know that family engagement, community engagement, working with schools has a wonderful effect on our children, and also helps us as educators get some of the things that we need as resources. So now let's talk a little bit about the what. What types of programs work best to achieve positive student outcomes? Let me share with you what we now know from the research, and it may surprise you a little bit. One of the things that Ann and I saw when we looked at the studies about intervention - we began to see that programs that really had an impact on how families could support their children's learning at home or in the community really showed the greatest effects on achievement.

Now why is that such a surprise? Well, because I think that what we have done in our schools is, when we think about family involvement, we really sometimes focus on what I call head count family involvement. That is, we judge success of our family involvement programs by the number of people who show up at performances, and at teacher parent conferences, and at open houses. Now that's ok, but sometimes we don't take advantage of the fact that we got parents there as a captive audience, and really what they want is information about how to support their children. We don't really give our parents a lot of information or a lot of guidance as to how to make that learning experience at home aligned with what's happening at school.

So we know now that the kinds of initiatives that schools really should be focused on supply parents with information about how they can help their children when they are not in school. And guess what? Children are out of school more than they're in school. So again we want to make sure that we support parents, because a lot of parents - when you ask them, and we will be talking about the importance of asking parents what they need, and also what they can offer -  when you ask parents they want to know, how can I help support my child's learning? I don't understand how to do this homework. And in many cases that's not really the most important thing. It's also supplying them with information about how to encourage your children, how to supply them with a supportive environment. But that is what we really need to be doing when we plan our programs is thinking, how can we share our tools? How can we share information with families so they can support their child's learning when they are not with us in school?

We also know from the research that family involvement has what we call a "protective effect." I like to visualize it as a blanket that sort of wraps itself around our children. We know that the more families can support their children's progress, that their children do better in school and their children stay in school longer.

Now this may seem like a no brainer. When we looked at the research we found that parent and community involvement that is linked to improving student learning has a greater effect than more general forms of involvement. Now you might say well, duh, that seems to make sense. So if we have an intervention that really focuses on learning, literacy or math, then we should expect to see some positive results on our kids in those areas. But I can tell you, I have visited hundreds and hundreds of schools, and a lot of times the family involvement program consists of having parents involved in fundraising, and that's it. Especially in the more middle class wealthy communities, it's you know, our parent involvement program is - get them to give us a few dollars for the curtains for the theater group, or new uniforms, or the band instruments. I'm not saying that that is not important, because it is. But again when you ask parents what they want, they want more help in supporting their child's learning. So what Ann and I have been saying to districts all around the country is that your family and community involvement programs need to be linked to learning.

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Video Clip (Part 2)
Popping the question: How can schools engage families in education?
Harvard Graduate School of Education Lecturer Karen Mapp

Karen Mapp: You should really do what we call a needs and assets inventory. And there are a lot of good books out there about doing asset mapping. There is one by John Kretzmann. If you go on the web you can find lots of different inventories for parents, in fact the Institute for Responsive Education has some sample parent surveys. Also in that book, Including Every Parent, there are some sample surveys.

You want to ask your parents, how can we be helpful to you? And I've seen a lot of parent surveys that only ask for contact information and what times are best to call you, and maybe, maybe they'll ask parents, "Would you like to be involved in different kinds of volunteer activities?" But they very rarely say, you know, we want to partner with you in helping you be able to support your child's learning. And how can we be helpful?

The survey that we used in Boston we actually asked parents, you know, do you need help with, helping with your child's reading, helping with homework, helping with time management at home? If you've got a high school student - do you want some help on how to figure out financial aid for college, or this whole concept of college or career planning? And we had a wonderful response. Parents said, "Oh wow, they are finally asking us what we need."

The asset mapping piece, both with your community asset mapping and again around the parent, ask your parents, "Are there hobbies that you have or stories that you might want to tell our school?" And again this is great because then you can move beyond what I call feast and festivals. Right, we do our Cinco De Mayo, our black history month, and then we call it a day. If you really want to be culturally respective and have culturally responsive pedagogy, asking parents about themselves, you might be able to incorporate some of those ideas into your classroom practice. So here is why it's important to do a needs and assets inventory.

So now that you have that information, what you want to do, is you want to link the data that you've collected from your community and from your parents, and also from students by the way, don't leave them out. You then want to take that data, and you want to align it with your whole schools performance goals.

So, for example, if your school has identified literacy - that this year we are really concentrating on literacy - we have reading times in schools where everybody reads. There is a way that you can incorporate families and communities into that. So say that your families have said you know we really need help around reading and literacy, and now you've got this literacy initiative at your school, well bingo. All of your initiatives, all of your programs - remember what I said earlier on - link to learning. So when you have that school play, when you have that talent show or you have that ice cream social, you are going to want to weave something about literacy into that work.

When I was in Iowa City the other day, we had an exercise where I asked people to design an open house and then figure out how you are going to have that open house linked to learning. And there were a couple of teachers who came up with a wonderful idea to have some kind of cultural dinner, but not just the regular cultural dinner where that's it. But to have parents write down their recipes and create a cookbook, and have this be a writing workshop. And have the parents talk about the recipes and maybe have the child write it down. So they were really thinking. They said they were going to do some role plays where they were going to dress up as vegetables and have conversations about the ingredients, and really show parents how to ask open ended questions. So they were being really smart. They were putting their Coke and Pepsi hats on and figuring out - how do we take this event that we usually already have and turn it into something that's linked to learning?

So again you want to take the data you get from your families and your community and link it and align it with your whole school goals.

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