Flow of the Year

Structures for intentional partnership with families can be designed into your school year, so that families have continual opportunities to engage with their children’s school experience. Some of the way-points in the year that can support this kind of ongoing partnership include:

• Welcoming new families

• Learning Conferences

• Family-friendly environments

• Cooperative Assessment

• School operations and governance

As you’re welcoming new families to your school or classroom, think about how your welcoming rituals signal a desire and intention to partner closely, and to get families reflecting with you about the curriculum. You can begin talking about these hopes in casual or group visits before school begins, and describe them in your written welcome information. When you’re reading up on each child’s family and developmental history, you can look for possible points of connection, and opportunities to invite families to share their own interests, holidays, and family traditions. If you teach in a team, you might want to establish a “Primary Contact” educator for each family, so they know they’ll have someone to build a relationship with. If you host a “Family Gathering” or “back-to-school night” early in the year, you can design it to set the stage for partnership and reflecting as a community. For example, you can ensure that:

• the gathering has a clearly defined focus: a research question or discussion topic

• educators facilitate an intentional conversation about children’s work, using a provocative question or activity

• the discussion includes children’s “voices” in the form of drawing, words, photos, or videos

• educators document the gathering and share the documentation back to families

Many schools and educators make sure to offer learning conferences early in the school year, to continue the process of relationship-building, and to mine the wisdom of the adults in each child’s family. If you have a “primary contact educator” model, that person will typically meet with the family members, and then share their notes from the meeting with others on the team. To signal your intention to collaborate in supporting the child’s year in school, you might ask questions like:

• What delights you about your child? What drives you crazy?

• What do you like about being a parent?

• What values and beliefs shape your family?

• Who are your heroes?

• How does your family spend time together?

• What are your hopes and dreams for your child, and for your family?

• What would you like to know about me?

As you’re setting up your classroom for the year, you can think about how family-friendly environments might visually and functionally signal your intention to keep families engaged in your program. We’re great at planning and adjusting our classroom environments to promote inquiry and discovery for children, and we can also think about how they might be welcoming for family members. For example:

• displaying family photos

• inviting children and families to bring décor from home

• offering adult-size seating

• moving sign-in stations “deep” into the classroom space

• displaying interactive documentation of children’s work

Our year with families can have multiple touchpoints for cooperative assessment of children’s learning and growth. Adult family members are quite literally the world’s leading experts on their child, and we’re doing everyone involved a disservice if we don’t include them in our efforts to gauge children’s developmental progress. I want to specifically recommend two practices that have revolutionized how I came to partner with families in understanding their child’s development, and drawing them into my ongoing responsive curriculum planning.

• During my time at Hilltop Children’s Center, we began offering “Developmental Conferences” that parents and family members actively prepared for. This was a dramatic shift from my previous practice of painstakingly preparing a summary of each child’s developmental strengths and struggles, across many developmental domains. Then I would invite the family members to school, sit them down in uncomfortable toddler-size chairs, and read them my views on their child…hoping that I’d come close enough to the mark that they didn’t balk, disagree, or laugh at me. After living “assessment” this way for years, we decided to turn the model on its head. We spent more than a year reviewing our framework and domains for studying children’s development, and re-crafted the domains and questions. Our goal was to come up with a developmental worksheet that both educators and families could complete, in preparation for the Developmental Conference. This switch was simple, but profound. Now, instead of preparing to “report out” on a child’s development, we were in true partnership with the family members, everyone thinking about the child’s growth across multiple domains, and then coming together to paint a picture of their capacities at that moment in time. We’d sit together sharing stories and comparing notes, noticing where we saw parallels and distinctions between their lives at home and at school. Then after that meeting I’d write up the notes from our shared conversation, and that became the summary of the child’s developmental progress at that time.

• Another significant “invention” that unfolded during my time at Hilltop was our practice of offering “Collaborative Conferences” to groups of families, as part of our In-Depth Investigation practice. Whenever a small or large group of children is engaged in an In-Depth Investigation, we host gatherings for their families to explore the ongoing work, and share ideas and feedback with educators. These Collaborative Conferences can take place mid-way through an expanding investigation, or towards the end. Our hope is that these meetings engage families in their children’s work, offer families a perspective on their child in the context of group work, and offer us a window into families’ perspectives on their child and on the work of the group. If we believe that learning happens in relationship for children, why wouldn’t we support that kind of social constructivism for adults? Collaborative Conferences typically include some group discussion of “raw” material from the investigation - inviting families to reflect on children’s work, just the way educators do - as well as some creative and participatory experiences that constitute meaningful contribution to the investigation and/or a gift or response for the children.

ALL of the strategies for family engagement that I’ve described above are supported by and connected to an ongoing commitment to documenting children’s work, through Learning Stories and Pedagogical Narration - which you can read more about on the next page…