Tips for Supporting Teachers With Family Engagement Challenges

Like many school leaders, Ryan Daniel, principal of Fort Foote Elementary School in Maryland, was once a teacher. In her sixth-grade classroom, an unforgettable experience taught her not to prejudge her students or their families.

When the school year began, Daniel was warned about a boy in her class who was described by her colleagues as angry, often in trouble, and liable to sleep through lessons. She was told he didn’t have support at home—there had been zero family engagement about his academic performance. Those details formed her impression of the student before she ever met him.

Sure enough, the student slept through Daniel’s early lessons. One day, she waited to wake the student until after everyone else was gone, and initiated a conversation about how he was doing. The student broke down in tears—his family didn’t have a home; he was sleeping at different people’s houses and didn’t know where his mom was much of the time. Daniel asked if she could help, and with his permission, she contacted the student’s mom to connect her with resources offered by Daniel’s Title I school.

A month later, the student’s mom paid Daniel a visit. “She came in and just said thank you—thank you for seeing him and taking care of him,” Daniel recalled. She carries that story with her: “I go back to that moment a lot when I’m talking to my teachers about parents who may not be active, or when teachers are trying to contact a parent and hit a brick wall.”

Daniel is describing one of the most common family engagement issues: connecting with parents and caretakers who appear to be unreachable. At the other end of the spectrum, some families might come across as combative and argumentative—or as well-meaning but a little too eager to contact teachers.

Teachers have a variety of ways to handle these scenarios, especially with the support and guidance of administrators. To learn more, I recently spoke with Rachel Edoho-Eket, principal of Waterloo Elementary School in Maryland; Inge Esping, principal of McPherson Middle School in Kansas; and Daniel, about how they support teachers who are dealing with family engagement challenges.

Reminding Teachers Not to Make Assumptions

Early in the school year, Edoho-Eket talks with her staff about giving everyone a fresh start. She particularly means students who’ve exhibited behavioral issues, as well as families who’ve tended to be hard to reach. Edoho-Eket believes this reset is key to developing strong relationships, and it is a product of her own classroom experience.

When Edoho-Eket was a first-year kindergarten teacher, a colleague mentioned that one particular student’s parents were highly unlikely to attend events or conferences. Rather than being dissuaded, Edoho-Eket responded with curiosity and rang up the family herself. She learned a key detail: They didn’t have a car. Edoho-Eket went to her principal, who used school funds to pay for a cab—and the family started attending more and more functions and conferences.

Edoho-Eket shares this anecdote with her teachers. “I don’t make assumptions about families and their needs,” she said. “I never want to go into a situation assuming the worst, or thinking that I know something about a family if I have not directly interacted with them or asked them.”

Daniel, too, shares her anecdote with staff. “We cannot judge a book by its cover,” she says when she talks about her time as a sixth-grade teacher. She knows that educators talk among themselves, and that’s a normal part of the profession. But she says there’s a difference between having context and assigning a student or their family a reputation. “I want the teacher to be informed, but I don’t want them entering the relationship expecting that there’s going to be conflict with this parent,” she said.

Encouraging Positive, Consistent Outreach Efforts

The first time families hear from teachers shouldn’t be when something goes wrong, Daniel told me. She pushes her staff to conduct “early positive contacts,” a strategy that builds what she calls “relational credit.” That way, if something does go wrong during the school year, families will be more receptive to being contacted by a teacher.

Edoho-Eket asks her staff to create at least one positive “touchpoint” with every family in their classroom by the end of the first quarter of the year. In order of priority and effectiveness, she recommends starting with a phone call to each family, sending an email to parents who aren’t reachable by phone, and if those both produce no result, sending a postcard. “It doesn’t have to be something that’s super-long,” she said. Mostly, teachers need to share a specific, individual detail about each student—“they’re a nice kid” doesn’t quite cut it. Edoho-Eket recommends a meaningful observation, like how a student kindly helped their classmate solve a math problem.

Esping also encourages staff to “reach out to families before there’s a problem,” and she sets aside time for staff to do that. Each semester, her teachers are supposed to hit five hours of “contact time,” which can be handled during planning hours. Attendance at events with families counts too.

“The challenge I give teachers is, ‘Please don’t think of this as How do I get my hours?’” Esping said. “Your thought process needs to be, How can I intentionally strengthen relationships with the families of the students I serve?”

To create momentum for contact time, Esping likes to send along prompts throughout the school year that are meant to remind teachers to email their students’ families. For instance, she might write to her staff and ask them to contact the family of one student who exceeded expectations on an assignment. These small tasks are doable for teachers and go a long way toward keeping engagement high.

Knowing When to Step In—and When to Step Back

There are families who are difficult for teachers to reach, and then there are families who present the opposite problem. A mostly healthy rapport can sometimes turn into conflict.

In Edoho-Eket’s district, teachers have up to 48 hours to respond to messages from families, and she said she makes it clear to her staff that they should establish boundaries and utilize as much of the 48 hours as their busy schedules require. Daniel characterizes this as “modeling the expectation.” Her school district has a similar policy.

Sometimes a teacher will come to Edoho-Eket and give her a heads-up about a trying or complex situation, such as a parent complaining about a bad grade, or arguing about missed assignments, or not acknowledging behavioral concerns in the classroom. Edoho-Eket will often defer to the teacher’s wishes about next steps—she’ll ask if they’d prefer that she contact the family herself via phone or set up an in-person meeting. Or she might ask to be added to the email chain.

Edoho-Eket says she defers to teachers because they are typically more knowledgeable about a student’s behavior or about why a family might not be responding in a positive manner. “I don’t want to overstep any boundaries,” Edoho-Eket said. But she also doesn’t “want a teacher to be in a position where they feel like they’re alone,” she added. “So if there’s something I can do as principal to help support problem-solving, then I will do that.”

Daniel prefers to have the teacher take the lead as well. “I don’t try to take over difficult conversations all of the time, because I need the teacher to develop the confidence to manage on their own,” she said. The tricky part, though, is that if she leaves teachers alone during every difficult conversation with families, teachers won’t feel like they have proper backup: “Good leadership really means trying to triage the support ladder,” Daniel said.

Esping’s style is slightly more hands-on. She’ll help teachers draft an important email to a student’s family, and she’ll sit with a teacher when they make a stressful phone call home. When a newer teacher is especially anxious about contacting a family, Esping will offer to be the initial point of contact.

Supplementing Your Teachers’ Efforts

Teachers’ emails, phone calls, and meetings make up the vast majority of the interactions families have with schools, but school leaders can also also take the lead sometimes, particularly with families in need of support beyond their child’s education.

For Daniel, these entry points, as she refers to them, include a monthly coffee meeting with her. Daniel uses this time to chat with families and get a sense of what might be bothering them or why other families might be less involved. The meeting dates and times vary on purpose, so that families who have transportation challenges or work conflicts have more opportunities to attend. To make further inroads, Daniel has rolled out tools to help some students’ families learn English. Her aim is to lower the communication barriers between teachers and parents, and to reframe perceived disengagement as an access issue.

To support families in need, Edoho-Eket has a student support team—a core group of staffers that includes administrators, counselors, and a social worker—who gather to discuss school resources. “Teachers are a really important part of this process because they’re closest to the students,” she said. This group exercises discretion in identifying families: “We’ll say to the teachers, if you know any names, send them to us, and then we make individual calls, or we invite families into the school and ask what their needs are, and we go from there,” she noted.

Edoho-Eket’s district employs lots of federal workers. During a recent round of furloughs, federal workers’ income levels fluctuated, and the district quickly sent notices about how to apply for free and reduced-price meals. The student support team rolled out a food pantry, which drove even more community involvement.

To boost family engagement at her school, Esping created a program called “Parents in Partnership.” Essentially, it’s an opportunity for parents to see “what we do all day long,” Esping said. They get to check out a few of their kid’s classes, interact with teachers, and do a little bit of volunteer work—primarily helping with lunch duties.

As much as middle school students might indicate otherwise, Esping tells parents, “your kids really don’t think it’s weird; they low-key want you here, they really do want you to see what’s going on,” she said. She solicits sign-ups well in advance and features parent volunteers in her newsletter, which has encouraged even more volunteers. A few of the volunteers have enjoyed the experience so much that they’ve become substitute teachers. “Parents are proud to see what their kids are doing during the school day,” Esping said. “Building in those opportunities is really important.”