How Teachers Come To Understand Families.

Abstract

Abstract The building of connections between family, school, and community can benefit children from before the time they enter Kindergarten until after they have left our schools. Through an analysis of 13 in-depth teacher interviews, this study explores the role of the teacher in the home-school partnership and how teachers come to understand families in a rural New England community. Findings suggest that two key processes to understanding families include gathering information through communication and observation and making meaning of the information through comparisons to other families, one's own family, and the particular family over time. Implications for research, practice, and professional development are discussed. Key Words: family involvement, parent-school relationships, teacher outreach, teacher beliefs, teacher attitudes, understanding families, low-income families, elementary school Introduction Tim Kelly1, a second grade student in a small school in a rural New England town, has a good disposition, but struggles academically and is prone to angry outbursts. His teacher Terri suspects that issues in Tim's home life are deterring his success in school, namely that his mother is overwhelmed by depression, a swing shift job, and a large family. She collects information about the family from a number of different sources, including the school guidance counselor, his mother and siblings, and the child himself. She also networks with other teachers. Beyond communicating with other people, she also makes observations about Tim's appearance as he comes to class unprepared physically and academically. He's not coming in clean. He wears the same clothes over and over again...I couldn't send books home with him, unless I didn't need them any more, because they didn't come back or they came back destroyed. Terri makes meaning of the information she gathers by thinking about the family over time. Observing various interactions leads her to see a number of significant family strengths. Because Terri has been in the school for over ten years, she has family knowledge from teaching Tim's two older siblings. She has also worked with Tim for two years in a row. Ultimately, Terri is able to use her understanding over time to take action by finding support for Tim's mother through the school guidance counselor and by making a number of classroom modifications to support some of Tim's nonacademic needs. This case illustrates a process by which teachers can come to understand the families that they work with. More than thirty years of research has established the positive effect that family educational involvement can have on student success. Yet, a recent Public Agenda survey reported that lack of family involvement is among the biggest problems facing public schools today (Public Agenda, 2002). There is a clear gap between the known benefits of family involvement and its low occurrence in schools. To help close this gap, a better knowledge of the process of forming home-school links is needed. Research shows that teacher outreach and invitations are one of the main reasons parents get involved (Epstein, 1991; Hoover-Dempsey & Sandler, 1997). In other words, teachers are key to family involvement. The development of relationships depends on an individual's capacity to understand the other person. This paper begins to look closely at the early processes and elements involved in teachers forging home-school connections, namely how teachers first come to understand families. The assumption presented is that teachers' understanding of families impacts the visions they have of their students and those students' families, their conceptualization of the family-school relationship, the actual interactions they have with families, and their expectations for children's academic and social development. By exploring how teachers understand families, this paper will contribute to the existing body of research that suggests the importance of fostering teachers' skills and capacity to connect home and school. …

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