Three Pillars of Effective Family Engagement
Educator InsightsDate July 29, 2024
Est. Reading Time 3 mins
Family engagement, the involvement of families to actively support their children’s learning and development, is essential to maximizing student outcomes.
In our white paper, “Promoting Family Engagement and Student Success Through Invention Education,” we explore how family engagement can reverse absenteeism trends and analyze what it looks like at its most effective.
Read below for an excerpt from this report!
Reaching Beyond the Classroom
When it comes to maximizing students’ social and academic growth, support outside the classroom is crucial. To promote the essential role of families in helping maintain and grow students’ progress over time, educators and policymakers have increasingly emphasized the importance of family engagement.
While there are many definitions of this term, one of the most respected comes from the National Family, School and Community Engagement Working Group (now called the NAFSCE Policy Council). The organization highlights three distinct pillars of effective family engagement:
The Components of Effective Family Engagement
Family engagement is a shared responsibility in which schools and other community agencies and organizations are committed to reaching out to engage families in meaningful ways, and in which families are committed to actively supporting their children’s learning and development
Family engagement is continuous across a child’s life and entails enduring commitment but changing parent roles as children mature into young adulthood
Effective family engagement cuts across and reinforces learning in the multiple settings where children learn — at home, in prekindergarten programs, in school, in afterschool programs, in faith-based institutions and in the community
Though the importance of family and community involvement in a child’s education is a topic that has been historically promoted and well researched, decreasing public school enrollment and startling nationwide increases in chronic absenteeism have brought this topic into further national prominence.
Fortunately, recently published research conducted by Learning Heroes and TNTP, in partnership with researchers Karen Mapp, professor of practice at Harvard University Graduate School of Education, and Todd Rogers, Weatherhead Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, supports the idea that strong family engagement can mitigate both troubling trends.
The report, “Investigating the Relationship Between Pre-pandemic Family Engagement and Student and School Outcomes,” found that schools that had strong family engagement prior to the COVID-19 pandemic “experienced better-than-expected attendance, achievement, and school climate outcomes post-pandemic.”
In an article published in Education Week, Eyal Bergman, senior vice president of Learning Heroes, spoke about how the report’s findings give schools a tangible strategy to address chronic absenteeism.
“What this data reveals is that there are ways to mitigate [chronic absenteeism],” Bergman said. “Schools that actually have invested in building strong family engagement are seeing improvements in their chronic absenteeism. This data actually gives us an answer about what to do about it.” Perhaps the most significant finding from the report was that among the 3,000 schools that were surveyed, those with strong family engagement had student attendance rates that were 25% better compared to those with weaker engagement.
Read the Full White Paper Today
To read this report in its entirety, we invite you to visit our website.