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.

Educators should take care to make all students, especially immigrant students, feel safe and welcomed in their schools. Garibay outlines several ways that educators can build relationships with their immigrant students and their families, including home visits, informative community talks, providing know-your-rights information, and advocating…

Among the many challenges that students with autism spectrum disorder bring into the learning environment, teachers report one particular difficulty: working with students' parents. As both an autism educator and parent of a child on the spectrum, Barbara Boroson explores some common complexities in parent-teacher relationships. She also offers…

Building partnerships with families can be a challenge, especially in ethnically diverse classrooms. In this article, the authors describe how to create such partnerships with three kinds of classroom events: community-building events that deepen social relationships and make families feel welcome; curriculum showcase events that give families a…

Who benefits from parent-teacher organizations in schools? Which parents are included, and which are excluded? How can school leaders work with them? In this article, an historian and a sociologist review the complex history of parent-teacher organizing and examine current issues in parental efforts to improve schools, including concerns about…

Families of struggling students, this teacher in a high-poverty school knows, feel defensive and hurt when communications with their child's school focus mainly on that child's deficits. This is especially true for families from poverty or immigrant backgrounds--and affirming the latter families is important in the current climate of hostility…

Matthew A. Kraft, an assistant professor of education and economics at Brown University, highlights new research showing that frequent, personalized outreach to parents can boost parent engagement and student achievement. He offers tips on how schools can create infrastructures, including digital technology tools, to better support such…

Students whose parents receive regular and personalized messages with actionable information from teachers are more likely to succeed in school. But effective data-sharing programs require more than simply sending data home. They also encourage educators and families to make connections with each other, sharing observations about how a child…

Most English language learners are from families that have recently immigrated to the United States-and many of those families traveled here at tremendous risk to seek better education for their children. It's important for classroom teachers to make building relationships with the families of ELLs a priority. Breiseth asserts that the most…

"One of the most powerful educational tools available to students and teachers lies hidden in plain sight, in every classroom--conversation," writes Susan Engel. The conversational exchanges that happen naturally between parents and young children are full of questions that can lead to learning. Within the context of these casual…

Stephanie Smith understands why parents in the urban area where she teaches balk when she calls to ask if she can visit them at home to talk about their child and meet the family. Her family would've balked too when Smith was in elementary school. "The abyss between the school's bright lights and the government housing I grew up in…

In Maplewood Richmond Height, Missouri, the Teacher Home Visit Program has become a crucial component of the district's success. At the end of the first semester of the 2010-11 school year, discipline referrals were down 45 percent, and parent attendance at each school's first open house was up by almost 20 percent. Attendance is nudging up as…

Tourette syndrome is a neurodevelopmental disorder believed to be genetic. The most visible symptom is the presence of tics. These involuntary movements or sounds can range from simple (sniffing, throat clearing, blinking) to complex (words or phrases, hopping, body contortions). They may be frequent for a few weeks, then fade away almost…

School truancy--defined by a student's refusal to attend part or all of the school day, along with a defined number of unexcused absences--is an increasingly frustrating and complex problem for teachers and school administrators. Although statistics on the prevalence of truancy in the United States do not exist due to lack of uniformity among…

To learn more about how parents understand the whole child approach to education, ASCD commissioned KRC Research to conduct a study that included parent focus groups in Richmond, Virginia; and Columbus, Ohio, as well as a survey of 800 parents across the United States to identify their perceptions of what a whole child education is, how it is…