Designing Tools to Strengthen Communication and Relationships Between Families and Schools

For families with elementary school children, life can feel hectic. And for educators managing classrooms of dozens of young students, the same feeling can apply. With so many expectations and so much to communicate on both sides, it isn’t always easy to build relationships, let alone create the sense that schools and parents are working in partnership to help young students learn.

This challenge was met head-on this year by the latest cohort of the Learning Sciences Exchange (LSX), a fellowship and problem-solving platform in New America’s Education Policy Program. Over the past school year, seven LSX Fellows—three school leaders, one learning scientist, one social entrepreneur, one journalist, and one children’s book author—have been building collaborative projects designed to deepen family engagement.

Their work this year had the benefit of two unconventional approaches: First, it used the cross-sector LSX approach, which brings together talented individuals from typically siloed fields to build education solutions. Second, these projects were grounded in ideas raised by parents and caregivers from each of the three target schools who had critiques and suggestions for improving communication and relationships. LSX fellows worked on designs for new communications tools and relationship-building programs, and brought them back to the families for multiple cycles of feedback, ensuring that their voices were heard throughout.

The projects and the unusual process behind them will be featured at the next LSX Summit, June 24 at 12:30 pm ET, a virtual event this year, in partnership with the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading. The event is designed as a peer-learning conversation to inspire education and family-engagement leaders anywhere in the country to consider how they might be able to use similar models and approaches to benefit the families in their school community.

The fellows’ projects were built over ten months, as the fellows met online and in person, in Washington, D.C. and in the Pittsburgh area, where each of the school leaders hailed from. Fellows focused on specific challenges identified by their fellow school leaders at Duquesne Elementary School, New Castle Area School District (specifically the Harry W. Lockley Early Learning Center) and Avonworth Primary Center. Fortunately, each of the school leaders had already been well-versed in family engagement by participating in Parents as Allies, a Pittsburgh-based initiative that brings parents and educators together in teams and puts a premium on empathy interviews (teachers and principals interviewing parents and vice versa) to get to know each other.

The Duquesne project was created in response to the wide range of needs raised by parents in anonymous questionnaires and one-on-one empathy interviews with the principal, Erica Slobodnik. At this school, in which 100 percent of students are eligible for free and reduced price lunch, and in which many newcomers speak a language other than English, families requested support finding a range of community resources including housing, child care, mental health services, transportation, internet access, and food pantries.

Through a series of design-thinking workshops in Washington, DC in September, and online in the fall, biweekly Zoom meetings in the winter and the spring, and ongoing asynchronous communication, our fellows designed an interactive map to address this need. They worked with the school resource team to identify local organizations, and created a map available both on paper and online, integrated into common online mapping tools. Keeping in mind the community’s language and literacy needs, they translated the map into three of the school’s most commonly spoken languages and used icons that ensure the map will be usable regardless of literacy level.

The fellows gathered in Southwestern, Pennsylvania in March to test the usability of their map with parents at Duquesne Elementary, catching them for brief moments on the sidewalk after they dropped their kids off at school to show them the first drafts and elicit their reactions. Fellows also spoke with parent leaders and parent-support groups inside the school. The parents’ feedback was then used to further refine the design and the content, and this month, the map was finalized. Each of the schools’ 446 students and their families will be receiving it in the coming fall.

The projects at Lockley and Avonworth followed the same process, starting first by examining feedback from empathy interviews to understand what aspects of engagement that parents viewed as most needing improvement. All seven of the fellows attended each of the workshops, calls, and school visits, allowing the three school leaders to contribute ideas to one another’s projects, while leading their projects’ implementation in their own schools. The non-school based fellows designed graphics and used coding and software tools to insert interactive features, figured out how to monitor use of the tools via analytics, dug into and communicated the research on effective family engagement, and interviewed parents and caregivers. The whole team worked on writing and editing to jettison jargon and ensure ideas were written clearly.

At Harry W. Lockley Early Learning Center, a K-2 school in New Castle, PA, assistant superintendent Tabitha Marino and her staff conducted interviews and gathered survey data to understand the biggest challenges that parents faced. This is a school that also includes many families in dire financial situations, with 100 percent of students eligible for free and reduced price lunch. The interviews showed that while parents appreciated the abundance of options for communication, they felt that there were too many platforms. They also described the district’s website as difficult to navigate, especially when accessed on their mobile devices.

In response to this challenge, the fellows developed a streamlined website using flexible and adaptable Padlet software and made it very specific to Lockley Elementary School, with contact information for school staff, videos to help parents with new software, school calendars, and other resources families might seek. The team also designed a flyer with a QR code, which links to the Padlet website, designed to be easier to view on mobile phones. The flyer will be inserted into the transparent front sleeve on the front of students’ red “take home” folders, going back and forth each day with the school’s 778 children beginning this September.

At Avonworth Primary Center, a K-2 school in Avonworth, PA, principal Scott Miller first hosted a dinner with a roundtable discussion for a subset of families at his school—specifically, families who had moved to the school district in the middle of the school year—to better understand their experience. This is a school of middle-income families, where 15 percent of students receive free and reduced price lunch. Contrary to Miller’s initial assumptions, parents felt well-connected with the school and their child’s teacher, but they expressed regret at not having any connection with the families of other Avonworth students in their new neighborhood.

To this end, the fellows designed a program they call the BRIDGE Builders—Building Relationships, Inspiring Dialogue, Growing Education—connecting families who transition mid-year to family representatives from each of Avonworth’s five neighborhoods. Moving forward, when new families arrive, they will receive a flyer with the names and contact information of their local family representatives who can help them find the bus stop, child care, and family-oriented programs in their neighborhood. Miller and others are establishing training sessions to make sure the BRIDGE Builders have what they need to support their neighborhood’s families.

To learn more about the research, people, and processes behind each of these projects, and the potential for engaging families in new ways in your school, register here for the LSX Summit on Tuesday, June 24 at 12:30 pm ET and stay tuned for our video story and upcoming brief, which will dive deeper into the the learning sciences supporting this unique family engagement strategy and the policy environment that makes this type of collaboration possible.