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    Question:
    I am looking forward to so advice from your Advisors. A team of teachers at my school attended the IEL Family and Community Engagement Conference. I ended up with a little flyer from your organization... I just logged into your website and I am excited about all the tools you have available. I work at a diverse urban school district in CT. One of our focus areas are Family and Community engagement. We are honestly floating... our family engagement coordinator is knowledge and working hard but she is one of many people responsible for the interactions with our families and students. We do have a diverse staff population and as it become more diverse, I believe we as educators become more adept at effectively readjusting to situations based on our feedback from adult communication. However, we need to change our parent teacher conferences. When I think about building powerful PARTNERSHIPS with families, I do not see a teacher on one side of a table and family members on the other. Teachers reading information many parents don't understand, then strengths and concerns shared that may not be the same values as the families. We could get really into this!!! But our principal has given us 30 minutes on Dec. 1st for a group of use to support teachers in changing their conferencing practices, building cultural competence, and planning for their next weeks parent communication. PLEASE if you could offer any materials, resources, information that could support us, it would effective the lives of 523 students and a community of 4 times that. I thank you in advance for any advise, direction and "tools" that you can recommend.
    Thank you,
    Kara Levenduski
    -Also wanted to mention we do have a book club of about 13 teachers reading Beyond the Bake Sale. - We are working on things... we need to continue to take relevant steps to improve our school culture.
    Answer:

    Dear Kara,
    I am not an expert on parent-teacher partnership. However, I think the research would suggest developing ownership of the school and the child's education among parents. Racial/ethnic minority parents often view school as a place of authority and are sometimes intimitated by it. It is important to create a culture in which school is open to parents and intentional outreach is important. Some parents can not come to school during the day because of their work schedule. Teachers may have to work around the parent's schedule and understand the importance of compromise. Ask parents what are the barriers to accessing teachers and the school and also ask teachers what are their challenges in developing relationships with parents. Is parent-teacher partnership important to and rewarded by the administration? If it is not, teachers will have little incentive to develop creative strategies to reach out to parents.
    Question Date: Tue, 10/27/2015