Foundations of Effective School-Wide Family Engagement

This session addresses how to use family engagement as a powerful strategy for increasing student achievement and school improvement. We will review the basic concepts underlying family engagement at the school level, with an emphasis on adapting and implementing the five core strategies in the SC Framework: Building  Relationships/Welcoming Schools, Communication, Linking to Learning, Collaboration, and Community  Partnerships.  Examples of innovative practices from the field will be presented.

Length: 90 minutes. 

Audience: All K–12 school personnel.

Facilitator and Contact: Karen Utter, CFEC Project Director

Renewal credits: 1.

Foundations of Effective Family Engagement at the District Level

This session will focus on key steps that districts can take to support schools in developing the type of family-school partnerships that can have a positive impact on student outcomes and school performance indicators. We will also review  how districts can help schools transform federal and state family engagement mandates from items on their compliance check-off list to meaningful opportunities to engage families.

Length: 90 minutes. 

Audience: All district personnel.

Facilitator and Contact: Karen Utter, CFEC Project Director

Renewal credits: 1

Evaluating Family Engagement: It’s About More than Counting the Bodies in the Building

In the past, districts and schools have tended to use attendance at events as their measure of family engagement success. The numbers don’t tell us, however, whether an activity or program has successfully built parents’ capacities to engage in their child’s learning and development, led parents to adopt new practices, or strengthened family-school-community partnerships. This session is designed to 
strengthen the abilities of district and school personnel to articulate and measure meaningful goals and desired outcomes for their family engagement work, evaluate their results, and engage in a process of systematic continuous improvement using evaluation data. Participants will be asked to bring an example of a family engagement activity or program that they want to evaluate.

Length: 2 hours. 

Audience:  District and school personnel with responsibility for family engagement planning, implementation, and evaluation.

Facilitator and Contact: Karen Utter, CFEC Project Director

Renewal credits: 2

The Essential Role of the Principal in Engaging All Families

While a principal alone cannot create a school that successfully engages families, a school cannot achieve this goal without the principal’s leadership and buy-in. This half-day workshop meets principals where they are in terms of the current levels of engagement at their school. In advance of the session date, participants will be asked to provide the facilitator with a list of one or two of their biggest fears, challenges, frustrations, or doubts about family engagement as well as one or two strengths that could help them address those issues. With this information to provide context, we will design interactive workshop components that (1) encourage principals to examine how they currently define and measure “success” in family engagement; (2) give principals an opportunity to practice using tools that can help them identify their school’s strengths and challenges in family engagement and identify strategies that are most likely to result in improvement; (3) guide principals in writing one or two personal goals for strengthening family engagement at their school over the next 12-18 months; and (4) prepare principals to use their “bully pulpit” to champion family engagement at their school. 

Length: 3 hours. 

Audience: Up to 15 school principals per workshop. 

Facilitator and Contact: Karen Utter, CFEC Project Director

Renewal credits: 3 *in person only

Taking a More Inclusive Approach to Family Engagement – Building Blocks for Principals

This session was developed and is delivered jointly by CFEC and Family Connection SC, South Carolina’s Parent Training and Information Center under the IDEA. It is intended to assist schools in taking an inclusive approach to engaging all families. Together, we will examine three strategies that are essential to engaging all families: building trusting relationships, creating welcoming schools, and engaging in ongoing two-way communication. We will then explore how schools can adapt each strategy to better meet the unique needs of families of students with disabilities. This session is available in both a shorter presentation-type format and a longer workshop format. Both include opportunities for interactive work. Length: Available as a 1.5-hour presentation or a 3-hour workshop.

Length: Available as a 1.5-hour presentation or a 3-hour workshop. 

Audience:  K-12 principals. Can be customized for school faculty and staff including parent liaisons. 

Facilitator:  Melissa Sanders, Director of Training, Family Connection SC and Karen Utter, CFEC Project Director.

Renewal credits: 1 for presentation / 3 for workshop *Workshop in person only

Family Engagement for Student Success at the Classroom Level

This interactive session is intended to strengthen teacher capacity to apply the SC Framework in the context of their individual classrooms to help meet key classroom academic and climate goals. We will discuss some of the most impactful parent engagement strategies according to the research and share resources and lessons learned from CFEC’s work in the field with classroom teachers from across the state. We will also reviewthe process conditions in the Dual Capacity-Building Framework and how teachers can use these to increase the effectiveness of capacity-building opportunities. Finally, teachers will be introduced to a template for family engagement planning that CFEC developed and used successfully with our classroom teacher partners. 

Length: 2 hours. 

Audience: School classroom teachers

Facilitator and Contact: Karen Utter, CFEC Project Director

Renewal credits: 2

Family-School Communication Hamburger: Effective Strategies for Communication between School and Home

Using a hamburger analogy, CFEC Family Engagement Liaison and Project Lead for the Lowcountry Claressa Hinton Thompson will show how the layers of communication are like building a hamburger that lays a foundation for communication between school and home. The goals for this presentation include the following: (a) increase awareness of strategies for effective and efficient family-school communication, (b) illustrate the importance and process of communication techniques that school personnel can use with families of school-aged children using a multi-method “hamburger approach,” (c) share practical examples and resources, such as communication worksheets and checklists, that can be used by audience members in developing their own effective communication plan while considering the specific needs and resources of their school and families.

Length: 90 minutes

Audience: All school level personnel

Facilitator:  Claressa Hinton Thompson, MHA, CFEC Liaison and Project Lead for the Lowcountry.

Renewal credits: 1

Language Simulation: Enhancing Communication with Multilingual Families and Learners

This session was developed to help strengthen the abilities of all K-12 school personnel who come into direct contact with families to interact and with parents who speak different languages or come from different cultures. Session developer and facilitator Lydia Carnesale uses a combination of exercises and discussion questions to introduce basic concepts related to language, communication, and culture and their impact on schools’ efforts to develop effective partnerships with all parents. 

Length: 30 minutes *in person only

Audience: All school personnel who interact directly with families, including front office staff

Facilitator:  Lydia Carnesale

Listening to and Learning from South Carolina Families

Dr. Catherine Compton-Lilly, Dr. Julia López-Robertson, and Dr. Yasha Becton, faculty at the College of Education at the University of South Carolina, have developed this session to support educators in learning about funds of knowledge and cultural wealth in African American and Latinx families and communities. This presentation highlights how cultural and experiential assets can be used to support children's learning. We provide participants with strategies that they can use to learn from families, children and community members and give suggestions for translating those assets into instructional activities that can be used in classrooms, homes, and community spaces.

Length: 60-90 minutes 

Audience: All K-6 educators

Facilitator:  Catherine Compton-Lilly, Ph.D., Julia López-Robertson, Ph.D., and Yasha Becton, Ph.D.

Renewal Credits: 1

Linking Family Engagement to Student Learning and Development: Strategies and Resources

This one-hour session will focus on specific family engagement strategies that support student success generally and in the specific areas of literacy, math, and science, and how schools can create effective capacity-building opportunities to encourage families to utilize these strategies with their children. Information about relevant community resources will also be included.

Length: 1 hour 

Audience: All K-12 administrators and educators

Facilitator and Contact: Karen Utter, CFEC Project Director

Renewal Credits: 1

Engaging Families to Support Student Mental Health and Wellbeing

This session will provide an engaging and accessible overview of social and emotional learning’s role in parenting children of all ages and backgrounds. Participants will learn effective practices for engaging families to support their child’s mental health and wellbeing at home. Takeaways include a toolkit of strategies for engaging families 
and resources for families to deepen their connection with their children and build social and emotional skills of everyone in the home.

Length: 60 minutes

Audience: All K-12 administrators and educators

Facilitator and Contact: Karen Utter, CFEC Project Director

Renewal Credits: 1

Building Trusting Relationships with Families

This session will address the process of building trusting, reciprocal relationships with families as described in the National Association for Family, School, and Community Engagement’s (NAFSCE’s) Family Engagement Core Competencies: A Body of Knowledge, Skills, and Dispositions for Family-Facing Professionals (2022). We will consider together what it means to (1) cultivate mutual trust; (2) communicate effectively, (3) create welcoming environments, and (4) reach out actively to families, especially those who are most underserved. 

Length: 2 hours

Audience: All district and school personnel

Facilitator and Contact: Karen Utter, CFEC Project Director

Renewal Credits: 2

Using the Dual Capacity-Building Framework to Strengthen Family Engagement

This session will provide educators with guidance in using the Dual Capacity-Building Framework to create family engagement programs, activities, and practices that are effective in building the capacity of both parents and educators. Included will be a review of the types of capacities that parents and educators need to partner effectively and the process conditions that make for an effective capacity-building opportunity. Participants will have an opportunity to work in small groups to apply the concepts in the framework to real-world examples. 

Length: 2 hours

Audience: All district and school personnel with responsibility for designing and planning family engagement programs and activities.

Facilitator and Contact: Karen Utter, CFEC Project Director

Renewal Credits: 2

Transforming "Problem Parents" into "Parent Partners"

In the classic family engagement text, Beyond the Bake Sale (A. Henderson, K. Mapp et al. (2007), the authors address the common fear many schools have of the “problem parent” – the parent who is angry or who takes an adversarial rather than collaborative approach to problem-solving. The authors posit that, in many cases, these individuals are just trying to help, protect, or get the best for their child but don’t know how to advocate in a way that is most likely to achieve a positive outcome. We will share examples of different kinds of strategies from Beyond the Bake Sale and other sources that can (1) help you help parents gain the knowledge and skills they need to become successful advocates for their child and (2) create a culture of transparency and open communication within the school that lessens the likelihood of parents feeling surprised or misunderstood.

Length: 90 minutes

Audience: All district and school personnel 

Facilitator and Contact: Karen Utter, CFEC Project Director

Renewal Credits: 1

Effective Strategies for Gathering Parent Input and Feedback

 Parent input and feedback is essential to the success of any family engagement program, event, or activity. We will use this time together to review the different reasons a school or district may need to collect input and feedback (e.g. to assess which strategies are working for your families, to find out what types of assistance parents want to receive from the school, to decide when and where to host events, etc.) We will review different types of strategies for collecting this information (including samples of different types of family surveys and strategies for getting a good response rate) and how to use this data to inform your work. 

Length: 1 hour

Audience: All district and school personnel 

Facilitator and Contact: Karen Utter, CFEC Project Director

Renewal Credits: 1

Coordinating the Family Engagement-Related Requirements of Title I, Read to Succeed, and SC School Improvement Council

We will briefly review the family engagement-related requirements in each of these areas and then discuss coordinated approaches that districts and schools can use to comply with all these requirements while eliminating duplication of efforts where possible. For those schools/districts using the National Network of Partnership Schools (NNPS) Action Team model, we will incorporate that model into the coordinated approach as well. We want to help districts and schools ensure that they are in compliance AND that their family engagement activities and events are working together to achieve common goals for improved student achievement and development.

Length: 2 hours

Audience:  Intended primarily for district and school personnel with responsibility for family engagement planning.

Facilitator and Contact: Karen Utter, CFEC Project Director

Renewal Credits: 2