The Best Resources For Learning About Teacher Home Visits

I’m a big proponent of teachers making home visits, and I wrote a chapter about it in my book on parent engagement. I work closely with the Parent-Teacher Home Visit Project, which happens to be based in Sacramento.

I thought it might be useful if I brought together some of the related resources I’ve posted about over the past year.

Here are my choices for The Best Resources For Learning About Teacher Home Visits:

Parent/Teacher Home Visit Project is the title of an interview I did with Carrie Rose, the director of the Project.

Teacher Home Visits Are Important, But The Post’s Jay Mathews Misses The Point is a post I wrote.

“Teachers increasingly use home visits to connect with students’ families” is a lengthy article that appeared in The Washington Post.

Before the First School Bell, Teachers in Bronx Make House Calls is a lengthy New York Times article — with an accompanying slideshow — about a school making summer home visits.

Teachers, families making connections at kids’ homes is the headline of an article in the Denver Post. It tells about a home visiting program being done by parents with assistance from the Parent Teacher Home Visit Project.

The movie “Dangerous Minds” is engaging, but it’s one in a long line of nauseatingly paternalistic hero teacher films out there. However, it does have a great two minute clip of a teacher home visit that shows the importance of telling parents positive news about their children. It’s embedded below (unfortunately, it has been removed from YouTube by Disney):

More Districts Sending Teachers Into Students’ Homes is the title of a lengthy article in Education Week giving a national overview of parent teacher home visits.

Making New Promises in Indian Country is an article from The Atlantic about teachers making home visits on a reservation.

Teachers To Visit Homes Of 7,000 Students — In One Day!

Teacher’s Union Convention Considers Support For Making Home Visits

Here’s a video Mai Xi Lee, one of our school’s Vice-Principals, made about our school’s home visiting project and Parent University. For what it’s worth, that’s me speaking after the text introduction….

D.C. Public Schools Reinvent The Home Visit is an article — with audio — from a radio station on a school’s program to make home visits to families.Here is how it begins:

In the past, interaction with parents was almost always one-way: teachers telling parents what they should know. Often the meeting was about bake sales, report cards or discipline.

Kristin Ehrgood is the founder of the Flamboyan Foundation, which is working with teachers in 20 D.C. schools. She says she envisioned a two-way exchange where teachers learn from parents. “What are your hopes and dreams for your child? What do I need to do so I can be a great teacher for your child? That in and of itself changes the dynamic radically.”

Making College Readiness Home Visits

District officials turn to home visits to boost schools is a lengthy article in The Washington Post about teachers making home visits.

Here’s an excerpt:

Hundreds of D.C. teachers will spend weekends and evenings fall visiting students and their parents at home, hoping to lift academic achievement by creating stronger partnerships between families and the schools. The push to visit students on their own turf is a shift for the District’s school system, which often has been accused of alienating the families it serves. Now, the aim is to help teachers and parents become allies instead of adversaries in the day-to-day work of educating the city’s children.

Students won’t learn? Go visit their parents. is the terrible headline of a decent article in The Washington Post about teachers visiting families.

As the article points out, the purpose of the visits is to build positive relationships with families, not to punish students.

These Teachers Visit Every Student Before School Starts is a nice Ed Week article, including a number of links, about an annual home-visiting program by teachers in Kentucky.

Meet  the Family is a good article form Teaching Tolerance about teachers making home visits.

Here’s an excerpt:

The social, emotional and academic benefits of home visits are well documented and widely acknowledged. But although the number of teachers doing home visits across the country is steadily growing, the consistency with which these visits are conducted varies greatly, a fact that limits the scope of their impact. More administrators, however, are taking note of the importance of home visits and grappling with the scalability challenge: How can a school or district launch and maintain a successful home-visit program that benefits all students?