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The Harvard Family Research Project separated from the Harvard Graduate School of Education to become the Global Family Research Project as of January 1, 2017. It is no longer affiliated with Harvard University.
December 11, 2014 50 Years of Family Engagement in Head StartKiersten Beigel
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National Center on Parent, Family, and Community Engagement
These Web pages offer resources related to the PFCE Framework, family engagement assessments, relationship-based practice, and family engagement and school readiness.
Family Provider/Teacher Relationship Quality (FPTRQ) Measures
These series of measures are designed to assess the quality of the family and provider/teacher relationship.
FINE Newsletter: New Developments in Early Childhood Education
This March 2012 issue of the FINE Newsletter explores new developments in early childhood education, including what current research and practice are telling us about the importance of involving families early on.
FINE Newsletter, Volume VI, Issue 5
Issue Topic: The Role of Organizations in Anywhere, Anytime Learning
Leading the Field
OUR VISION FOR THE FAMILY ENGAGEMENT FIELD
Head Start and Early Head Start have an amazing legacy of family engagement, and we continue to innovate and improve the quality of our partnerships with families in support of family well-being and children’s learning and development. Since 1965, Head Start programs have worked with parent leaders to help support families and communities’ access to quality early childhood programming. Even more, programs have supported parents as their child’s first teacher, involving them in the learning process at home and school. They have honored parents’ sacred interest in the care and nurturing of their children, and fueled their passion and hope for their children’s success in life.
ABOUT HEAD START AND EARLY HEAD START |
Head Start and Early Head Start are federally funded early childhood programs. The programs serve low-income pregnant women, infants, toddlers, and preschool-age children and their families. In addition to education services, programs provide children and their families with health, nutrition, social, and other comprehensive services. One of the hallmarks of Head Start is its focus on parents as their child’s first and primary teacher and as partners in program governance, recognizing that the involvement of parents is crucial for fostering children’s school readiness. |
In 2011, the Office of Head Start (OHS) launched the Parent, Family, and Community Engagement (PFCE) Framework, a road map for integrating family engagement strategies across systems and services and for guiding programs in making progress toward family outcomes. Over the years, we have learned that two things really drive change and effective family engagement in programs. First, family engagement must be made a priority throughout the organization. Second, we know that relationships propel our ability to achieve effective family engagement, especially in partnership with families and within the cultural context of communities. Family partners bring many strengths, including their cultural beliefs and home languages, which are assets for both parenting and promoting children’s language and overall development. To this end, our National Center on Parent, Family, and Community Engagement has developed trainings and resources to support the implementation of the framework and to help staff build positive, goal-oriented relationships with families and other staff members.
OUR CURRENT EFFORTS TO ADVANCE THIS VISION
The goal of OHS is to continue to broaden the conversation around family engagement so that we can improve both family and child outcomes. We focus on prioritizing strategies that are systemic, integrated, and comprehensive rather than one-time efforts or activities. In other words, our goal is to move the field beyond seeing effective family engagement as simply getting enough parents to participate in an isolated event or training. Instead, we seek to help build staff–parent relationships that invite families to learn and grow as parents, teachers, or learners, based on their individual family goals.
Head Start and Early Head Start have been moving into a new phase of planning and implementation that is more data-driven and focused on continuous improvement. Essentially, we expect programs to track families’ progress in achieving their goals with a similar rigor and intent that is used to understand and promote children’s progress. The critical question we have begun to ask in these last few years is: How do we know how effective we are in our family engagement work? Through our program planning requirements and our training and technical assistance supports, we are broadening the questions related to continuous improvement practices. Table 1 illustrates ways in which our focus is shifting to include questions that yield data related to measures of both effort (how much programming is offered) and effect (the changes in knowledge or behavior, for example, that occur as a result of programming)
Table 1
How Head Start has begun to broaden programs’ data collection efforts related to family engagement practices
From a focus on effort (i.e., how much programming is offered) |
To also include a focus on effect (i.e., positive changes related to families’ knowledge and skills) |
How many home visits has a parent shown up for? |
In what ways are families and their infants connecting with each other? |
What are teachers talking about with families? |
How are teaching staff partnering with families to help them become active supporters of their child’s learning? |
How many parents came to a reading event? |
To what degree are parents gaining the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to foster a love of reading? |
How many parents participated in a kindergarten transition event? |
How comfortable do parents feel about the prospect of communicating their child’s strengths and challenges with their kindergarten teacher? |
PROMOTING THIS VISION
To bring our vision to life, we are working to develop partnerships with parents, programs, agencies, and organizations that promote family engagement in different cultural communities, across different learning settings, over different periods of children’s development, and with children of differing abilities. Specifically, we are looking to:
Kiersten Beigel, MSW, is the parent, family, and community engagement lead for the Office of Head Start, where her work focuses on national training and technical assistance (TTA) and on policy efforts related to families in Head Start/Early Head Start.
This resource is part of the December FINE Newsletter. The FINE Newsletter shares the newest and best family engagement research and resources from Harvard Family Research Project and other field leaders. To access the archives of past issues, please visit www.hfrp.org/FINENewsletter.
© 2016 Presidents and Fellows of Harvard College
Published by Harvard Family Research Project