For new teachers, engaging with families can be one of the most rewarding—or intimidating—parts of the job. It’s also one many new teachers don’t feel prepared for before entering the classroom.
“I had just heard so many horror stories about how different parents react, and so I was really anxious” when first asked to contact parents, said Kara Watral, now in her first year as a 5th grade teacher at Hortons Creek Elementary in Wake County, N.C., public schools. “The experience of reaching out to parents, that’s not something that you can necessarily teach in a class.”
That’s why Watral spent last year working with special education teams and meeting with parent and advocate groups as part of a student-teaching program intended to teach how to connect with students’ parents. It’s one of a handful of new teacher-preparation programs leveraging community schools, which incorporate broader health and social services for families, to give aspiring teachers hands-on experience discussing student learning and making decisions with families.
From ensuring regular attendance and good behavior to study support for homework, family engagement can make or break a teacher’s effectiveness and morale. Yet despite a plethora of outreach tools, young teachers often report building meaningful partnerships with families as one of their top challenges.
The Maryland Center for Community Schools at Towson University launched one such program at the university five years ago, after realizing student-teachers had become highly anxious about working with families.
“They didn’t want to call parents, meet with them; they felt very overwhelmed by the whole thing,” said Jessica Shiller, the director of the center. “And that is, more than ever, an essential part of their work as teachers.”
Like Towson, Elon University in North Carolina partners with local community schools for student teaching focused on family engagement. In both programs, teachers receive formal training on setting learning goals, responding to cultural differences, engaging families in home learning, and resolving conflicts. Then, over roughly 80 hours of student-teaching, the aspiring educators work with mentor teachers and parent and community liaisons during parent meetings and community events such as literacy nights and health fairs.
“Doing this service in the school gives that interplay between that learning and what’s going on on the ground in the classroom, so [student-teachers] can see it in action,” Shiller said.
Many teaching programs lack a core focus on families
This kind of experience is often thin in teacher preparation. The National Association for Family, School, and Community Engagement finds a little over half of teacher-preparation programs include a class on parent and family engagement.
However, less than a third of program heads reported that aspiring teachers learned key competencies in creating a welcoming environment and building partnerships with families, and a majority of the program leaders said their graduating teachers were less prepared for family engagement than other teaching duties.
And in a nationally representative survey of more than 5,800 teachers by the EdWeek Research Center, part of our State of Teaching Project, a majority of new and veteran educators reported better coordination with—and less interference from—parents are among the most favored ways to improve student behavior and classroom management.
Technological solutions haven’t entirely solved the problem. In the last decade, teachers have gained a much wider array of interfaces and translation tools for updating parents on student progress, said Margaret Caspe, a senior researcher for NAFSCE. But, she said, “nothing replaces true, genuine conversations where you feel comfortable not only giving families access to children’s growth and progress in comparison to different standards and benchmarks, … but also giving families actionable tools that fit into their everyday lives to help grow students’ abilities.”
When she first started participating in parent-teacher conferences, Watral focused mainly on preparing data on students’ reading and math progress and identifying ways parents could help their children with homework.
“Obviously grades were on their radar,” she said, “but for the most part, they were concerned about how their kid was doing socially, if they had a good group of friends, and how they were acting in class. Going into parent-teacher conferences at first, I didn’t even think about that aspect of it.”
Working with parents to plan activities and services for the school helped her get to know her students’ background culture and their families’ concerns, she said.
Providing new perspective on families
Underestimating families is the “No. 1 mistake” new teachers make, according to Bertha Knight, a 30-year veteran teacher, curriculum specialist, and gifted education director in the Baltimore district. After retiring from the district, Knight coordinated family engagement at community schools for Child First Authority, an enrichment provider for the schools, and mentored student-teachers at Robert Coleman Elementary through the Towson University program.
“Many new teachers feel that they are the ones with all the resources, and that the parents come with very little,” Knight said. “Some [early-career teachers] think that all of these children come from homes where it’s just a single parent, and that there are drugs in the house. I have to teach that even parents from low-economic neighborhoods are valuable; they come with their own set of values and their own culture, and it’s a valuable resource for a teacher.”
Mia Glickman, now a 3rd grade teacher in the Alamance-Burlington district in North Carolina, said working with parents in the Elon University program built her confidence about having tense parent conversations.
“With student misbehavior … sometimes the parent isn’t super supportive, and they blame the teacher,” Glickman said. She learned to push past her own discomfort in delivering bad news to families with help from her mentors.
“If I’m having a hard time with a child, I will now cold-call families out of the blue to say, ‘Hey, this is what’s going on. Can we work on something?’” Glickman said. “It really helped with communication and trust.”
Helping teachers keep work-life balance
Alec Greenwald, an education research associate at Duke University, who studies parent engagement with the North Carolina Community Schools Coalition, said managing parents also can be key to preventing burnout among younger teachers.
“A lot of our younger teachers feel like they lack the skill to talk back to a parent when you’re only a 23-year-old,” Greenwald said.
Preservice experience with families also helped Glickman learn how to set healthier professional boundaries. As part of the Elon University program, Glickman heard from panels of parents about their expectations for teachers, and worked with her mentors to plan how to give parents the updates and tools they need, without becoming on-call 24/7.
She’s learned to provide substantive updates about how students have learned or behaved in school, but won’t take parent calls at 10 p.m. “Obviously I could easily pick up for a five- to 10-minute phone call, but it’s about setting boundaries,” she said. “I need to be asleep. It’s important not to let that become your identity.”
