Minnesota Parent Engagement Video

Increasing Parent Engagement Through Absent Narratives is an hour-long series of interviews with parents talking about engagement with schools. It’s a collaborative project of The Minnesota Humanities Center, Northwest Suburban Integration School District and the St. Paul Neighborhood Network. I think showing portions of it could be useful for a presentation — an hour is […]

Great Article About Teachers Making Home Visits In Minnesota

St. Paul teachers build parent engagement, trust through home visits is a great local newspaper article about teachers making home visits to parents. Here’s an excerpt: Since the project’s beginning with just eight trained teachers, to now with more than 250, the St. Paul Federation of Teachers has been instrumental in ensuring the program’s run. […]

The Best Reasons Why Parents Should Be Looked At As Allies & Not Targets Of Blame

“Blame” has certainly been a theme of many school reform discussions — including blaming teachers and blaming parents. Here are some commentaries on why no one, including teachers, should get sucked into that morass. You might also be interested in seeing all my parent engagement-related “The Best” lists here. Parents Are Our Allies is a […]

“Home Visits Lifted Up as Best Practice by U.S. Department of Education”

I’ve written a lot about the Parent-Teacher Home Visit Project, including our school’s — and my — active involvement in it (see The Best Resources For Learning About Teacher Home Visits). I’ve also posted about the U.S Department of Education’s “Parent and Community Engagement Framework,” which they released in April and which talks about home […]

The Best Resources For Learning About The “Word Gap”

There has recently been a flurry of media attention to what is called the so-called “word gap.” It’s the term used to describe the difference in vocabulary development of low-income children and middle-and-high-income children during their pre-school years. In addition to the media attention, there have been some high-profile efforts at trying to respond to […]