End-of-year celebrations and holiday performances can be a tremendous source of joy and accomplishment for a dance studio or school dance program. It can also be a source of anxiety for students, teachers, and families navigating time pressures and expectations. The author provides some guidelines for moving through the holiday season with a…

Home visiting has proven to be an effective tool in supporting children's school readiness, health, and socioemotional development. For newcomer, immigrant, and refugee families, home visiting can also offer integration-related supports, such as helping parents navigate unfamiliar early childhood, elementary and secondary education, health, and…

Educators have long agreed that parents have a role to play in furthering their children's education, but they have not always agreed about what the nature of that role should be or about how schools can develop more productive relationships with parents. In this monthly column, Teresa Preston traces how that debate has played out in Kappan.…

Preservice educators' attitudes and beliefs towards families can have a profound impact on family-centered practices (FCPs) and family-professional partnerships (FPPs); unfortunately, negative beliefs about families can surface during preservice early childhood preparation and can be a challenge for faculty in higher education to address. This…

Children from Latinx families bring rich and varied literacy practices and cultural models to their classrooms. When teachers are able to recognize these assets, they have opportunities to make their teaching more responsive and engaging. One way to learn about these assets is through relationship-building, assets-framed home visits. In this…

Many early educators struggle with how to address challenging behaviors that they feel are persistent, and in fact, challenging behavior is identified as teachers' most pressing training need. Feeling unprepared to prevent and intervene on challenging behavior can lead to increased teacher stress, burnout, and turnover. In the most extreme…

Reading is arguably the most important skill that children learn in school--and yet many children struggle to become strong readers. This is especially true of African American children. Children growing up in low-income, under-resourced neighborhoods often struggle with reading. But even among Black children in wealthier neighborhoods, learning…

Teachers play a key role in communicating with parents to support student learning. One of the more challenging aspects of this role for teachers is having a difficult conversation with a parent about their child. Difficult conversations, when needed, are best accomplished face-to-face incorporating effective communication skills to promote a…

Questions that challenge the curriculum can put educators on the defensive. Lauren Porosoff discusses helpful ways that educators can be proactive about creating productive and meaningful conversations with parents and community members about curriculum choices and the reasons behind them.

Teacher preparation programs have acknowledged the need to address the topic of collaboration in coursework; however, few educator preparation programs require collaboration courses or address the interpersonal aspects involved in teaching in other required courses. Working with families is essential in the field of special education, and…

This Data Point uses data from the Parent and Family Involvement in Education Survey of the National Household Education Surveys Program (PFI-NHES: 1999-2019). The survey collects data about students in kindergarten through grade 12 and asks about ways parents are involved in their child's education, such as helping with homework, family…

Early childhood researchers from across the U.S. came together to form the Early Learning Network (ELN) in 2016 with the mission to identify policies and practices that narrow opportunity gaps and help children maintain early learning success. Early Learning Network teams share what they have learned--and what it means for early childhood…

Salim is the father of a young girl who attends Small Fortune Preschool located in the suburb of Detroit. Although he would like to regularly participate in his child's school events, his beliefs restrain him from helping in the classrooms headed by female teachers, unless his wife is present. This case demonstrates some of the challenges that…

The purpose of this article is to share a family literacy activity geared particularly for the K-6 level in which parents share with teachers valuable knowledge about their children's cultural backgrounds. This multicultural bookmaking activity, a family literacy approach, builds critical cultural understandings between parents, teachers, and…

This contribution begins by reviewing a widespread inherited idea in Western civilisations: that education is an undertaking to be controlled, at least in all essentials, by some superior body; not by educational practitioners. As a subordinate practice then, and depending on the political, religious or ideological colour of the controlling body's…