At the end of the school year, schools around the world sit down to reflect on learning outcomes, address challenges, and create a vision for the next year. In some schools and districts, families are invited to participate in planning, while in others they may play a limited role, or none at all.
Families are central to the learning ecosystem. They help ensure children get to school on time and are reinforming learning at home. When students are struggling emotionally or academically, they are a vital link as they know their children best. Yet families are often underutilized in assessing family engagement practices and in planning how to strengthen partnerships.
The Global Family, School, and Community Engagement Rubrics Tool
This school-based tool was developed by the Center for Universal Education (CUE)’s Family Engagement in Education Network to ensure schools had an easy-to-use approach to celebrate and strengthen strategies for partnering with families. Devised by educators in Colorado, education teams in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, and the U.S. worked together to develop a global tool through a collaborative research and practice process. Families and educators (and sometimes students) can use the tool to examine the practices schools use to engage and partner with families, and to identify key areas where they could do better. The four key areas include: creating an inclusive culture, building trusting relationships, leveraging families as assets, and sustaining meaningful family, school, and community engagement (FSCE) practices.
Education partners in public schools in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Cesar, Colombia, and rural, urban, and semi-urban schools in Bangladesh used the tools to bring families into the school planning process. In Brazil, the “rubrics helped schools understand how they could improve communication with their families,” said Carolina Campos, an education leader with Vozes da Educação who facilitated the process. In research conducted with CUE, schools described how communication with families was not consistent and often focused on addressing problems—such as absenteeism or violence—rather than building supportive relationships.
In Colombia, teachers and families detailed how schools were implementing the national program of Alianza Familia Escuela, or Family-School Partnerships, and what strategies were meaningful and impactful—and others that were more transactional and light-touch. “Rubrics help schools evaluate their work with families and create work plans to improve family engagement and have strong teamwork,” said Adelaida Gomez, who led the process in Colombia with the national coalition of families Red Papaz in collaboration with CUE.
Secondary schools in Bangladesh are using the Rubrics to involve families in school decisionmaking. In research led by the Education and Cultural Society and CUE, few families reported being involved in decisionmaking and planning and described how their participation was often symbolic rather than substantive. “There are few spaces in schools for listening to families, understanding their needs, or co-designing solutions…Families need mechanisms that support strong partnerships with schools,” noted Nasrin Siddiqa, who led the process in Bangladesh with her civil society organization, Education and Cultural Society.
Check out the tools in English, Arabic, French, Portuguese, and Spanish. A culture of collaboration is critical to building stronger family, school, and community ecosystems and thinking outside of the box on how to promote greater inclusion, belonging, and alliances in schools. As one school principal in Brazil noted, in the process of sitting down together, “everyone shares their perspective, and it helps me see beyond my own.”
