Transitioning From Siloed Student Interventions to a Family Meeting Format

In the early days of my tenure as a principal, I noticed that I wasn’t getting anywhere with one-off strategies intended to support children with complex needs. I often caught myself thinking, “If we had all the right people at the table, things would look differently for this child.” After lots of brainstorming and tinkering, my staff and I developed a game-changing approach, which I call “Family Meeting.”

Family Meeting is an invitation to a student, their family, educators, administrators, and support staff. Everyone sits down for ongoing conversations about how to improve the student’s quality of experience at school. Family Meeting bypasses blame and shame by focusing squarely on what’s working for a student. It surfaces opportunities for the student, their family, and the school by drawing on the resources in the room. Because it’s voluntary and established at the onset as ongoing, participants arrive to Family Meeting ready to make a positive change and celebrate transformations.

Family Meeting is a resource-intensive intervention, but that’s also by design. It converts time that schools normally spend in reactive meetings about disciplinary incidents to proactive meetings where we acknowledge a child’s progress and plan for how to build on it.

I’ve found that Family Meeting dramatically reduces low-level disciplinary incidents for children whose misbehavior can come from a deficiency of basic necessities (like housing and proper nutrition) and/or a desire for structure and attention from a trusted adult. By cultivating relationships of trust and interdependence among all participants, Family Meeting opens conversations about essential services and helps schools better recognize how to support students and their families. Family Meeting is an especially powerful experience for students who are experiencing big shifts, but it can also benefit children who feel disconnected or listless at school. 

The dynamic structure and impact of Family Meeting is best understood through implementation. To illustrate as much, I’m sharing the story of a child—I’ll call him Avery—whose struggles at school were rooted in some of the factors above and who benefited mightily from Family Meeting.

Using Family Meeting to Support Students With Complex Needs

Avery, a second grader, repeatedly arrived at my office with disciplinary referrals for outbursts of anger. Teachers worked hard to get to know Avery and his family and to nurture a relationship with them. Together with the school counselor, we implemented check-in, check-out with a school-based mentor. We noticed that Avery connected well with his mentor and thrived with positive feedback, but sustained changes were not taking root. We ran through all of the strategies we had in place.

It was a familiar frustration: a group of deeply invested adults doing what they could in isolation to turn things around for a child. As I processed through the ups and downs of Avery’s first quarter with his teachers, then his family, and finally with the school counselor, a simple idea emerged: Why not pull together all of the adults working in silos on Avery’s behalf, and why not have Avery there as part of the planning? Family Meeting was born.

Investing in transformation

Even during our first Family Meeting, I noticed a meaningful shift in energy. At a rectangular table in our school’s conference room, Avery and the team—me (the principal), the school counselor, his grade-level teachers, the art teacher, and his guardian—imagined a different educational experience. After so many depleting, reactive meetings, this felt energizing.

We talked about how much we loved Avery and wanted him to thrive, celebrating his strength as a mathematician and helpful peer. The family was forthcoming about Avery’s life outside of school, where he had minimal opportunities to connect with peers his age. We quickly narrowed in on “managing frustration” as the team’s priority for Avery. Intake papers for counseling were signed at the table. The art teacher shared information about a youth group, which Avery eventually joined.

At the first meeting and those that followed, we utilized a consistent structure, which is now a template. We start by introducing ourselves one by one and relating to the student—for instance: “Hello, I’m Dr. Nashelsky. I am Avery’s principal.” Then we go around again, and each person shares the strengths of the student and their family, as these are often the foundation we build on as we transition to areas of concern. From there, we make a disciplined selection of one or two high-leverage needs and create a simple plan to support the student’s progress. We articulate who will do what, and we set a new date to come back together.

Setting and correcting course

At first, we met intensively with Avery, and then with less frequency. Our initial two meetings were a couple of weeks apart. As we saw Avery taking pride in his own success, beaming by his family’s side, we extended the time between meetings. By the fifth Family Meeting of the year, we were solely celebrating Avery’s growth. We all agreed to take a pause.

The challenges in Avery’s life are substantial. Family Meeting did not melt away those obstacles, but it did lend Avery an invaluable ladder. Recently, a much-older Avery received a referral for misbehavior. His family reached out, ready to come back together for another Family Meeting.

Lessons from the field

At my site of practice, Family Meeting serves around 5 percent of students at some point during the school year, with an average of three meetings for each of those students. Roughly 1 percent of my students engage in Family Meeting over the course of multiple school years, participating in an average of five meetings per year.

Though it can work spectacularly, Family Meeting is not for every child. Before applying Family Meeting as an intervention, I look for reflectiveness in the student and openness in the family, as well as a sense of possibility in the educators who work most directly with the student. We all have to believe things can be different before designing a path forward.

Letting families know what they’re in for really helps. Some have opted out because of the time-intensive nature of the intervention, which can be difficult to coordinate. It helps to have consistent facilitation and scheduling, ideally by a school counselor. It’s essential that the facilitator have a firm grasp of the meeting’s elements, taking all precautions to elevate strengths rather than tunneling into what’s going wrong at school.

In general, I’ve found that Family Meeting is able to surface participants’ core beliefs, help find common ground, solidify what is and isn’t working, and rally resources for children and their families. For those reasons, it’s worth a try.