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Written by Elisabeth O’Bryon
Co-founder & Chief Impact Officer Last week, I spent the day in two elementary schools learning from the teacher teams participating in our fall research project. We're learning more about what it takes for teachers to adopt a new, learning-focused communication routine with their students' families. One built around a straightforward idea: send something home that invites a real response, see what comes back, learn from it, and do a little better next time. We're also exploring how that routine can become part of teachers’ instructional planning, so that engaging families builds on what they're already preparing to teach. It sounds simple, but what we’re asking is for teachers to try something genuinely new. They're used to communicating with families; they share homework due dates, reminders about Back to School Night and field trip forms that need to come back signed. What they aren’t regularly accustomed to is sharing what their students are actually learning, how families can help reinforce it at home, and asking families to respond so they can learn something in return. Knowing how easy it is to fall back into familiar ways of doing things, I set out to learn how it was going and see how I could provide support. What was working well? What were teachers finding difficult about this new way of engaging families? What I found was that teacher teams were at different stages of shifting their behavior. Some were grappling with what to send, others were jumping to sending another message before learning whether the last one worked. Others had reinforced text messages with in-person conversations and were reflecting on what to do next. And some teams were seeing clear signals that their communication to families was being received and acted on. Students were sharing about the vocabulary words they practiced with their parents the night before. Parents were sharing how proud they were of how their child was reading. Teachers were hearing how much families appreciated videos of their children hard at work that day in class. However, a consistent challenge emerged across teams: finding the time to do something new and stick with it. We often talk about behavior change as if it’s a matter of motivation: if something is important enough, people will make the time to do it. But even when we genuinely want to do something differently, research suggests it can be hard to override what’s familiar, especially when we’re busy and our attention is stretched. And for teachers, whose days are already full of competing demands, this can make adopting a new routine particularly difficult. So what do we know about how to make a new behavior stick? One answer from behavioral science is to hook a new habit onto something you're already doing (what behavioral scientists call habit stacking or using an existing habit as the anchor that keeps a new one in place). And this is just what I saw during my last teacher team meeting. A teacher described his process for communicating with families: as soon as he drafts a message, he adds it to ParentSquare, then he logs it so that he can keep track of what he sent, reflect on what happened, and decide what to do next. He doesn't feel like he needs to remember to do one more thing as he has created a sequence that makes the next step obvious. That habit of logging and reflecting is exactly how he figured out what was actually working: before he started building a clear next step into every message, he might hear back from two or three families out of a class of nineteen. Now, when a message includes one, he hears back from twelve or more. The habit itself didn't cause that jump, but it's what let him notice it, and keep doing more of what worked. His example shows how reflection can become part of an existing communication routine. We're exploring how to connect that routine to instructional planning too, so that deciding what to share with families becomes part of preparing to teach. But making that connection takes more than finding a convenient moment to add a new habit. It also requires teachers to see family engagement as part of their instruction: an opportunity to extend learning beyond the classroom and learn from what families share back. That shift in perspective gives the routine a purpose. For teachers, putting this into practice might look like:
That's what we're exploring with teachers this year: how a new way of thinking about family engagement, paired with routines anchored in their daily work, can help it become something they can sustain. Over time, engaging families can feel less like one more thing and more like part of how they teach. What two DC schools can teach us about designing family engagement practices that last.
Family engagement initiatives often succeed first because someone is unusually committed to making them work. A teacher drafts the messages every week. A family liaison knows which families need another way to connect. A bilingual staff member catches language that will not translate clearly. That commitment can get a new practice off the ground. But it can also hide an important weakness: What happens when that person gets busy, changes roles, or leaves? Consider a second-grade teacher who began sending families a short weekly text connected to what students were learning in class. Families responded. Children brought the learning home. By many measures, the practice was working. But the teacher had built most of it herself. When she moved to another grade, her colleagues did not know how she chose the content or what made a useful message. The practice stopped. For family engagement practitioners and researchers, that story raises a question that reaches well beyond one teacher or one communication strategy: How do we design family engagement practices so they become part of the way a school works, rather than something that survives only as long as the right person is there? Across more than fifty implementations of FASTalk, our research-backed approach to instructional family engagement, we have seen this challenge repeatedly. We think of it as a fragile dependency: a person, role, habit, or action that an effort quietly relies on so heavily that, if it disappears, the work falters with it. That has changed the question we ask when supporting schools. We are interested not only in whether a family engagement practice is promising, but whether the conditions around it make it possible to repeat, adapt, and sustain. Splitting the load instead of stacking it on one person This year, two DC charter schools launching new research partnerships with us answered that question in real time, each in a way that fit what the team had to work with. At one school, two third-grade teachers who had always handled family communication on their own decided to split the work instead, trading weeks and keeping a shared log of what they each heard from families, so no single inbox held the whole picture. As one of them put it, "Even if they don't hear from him, they'll still get the information. Or if I don't make it, he'll still send a picture of some math they did. We've got each other's backs." At a second school, a kindergarten-through-second-grade team built a language specialist into the plan as a required first read on any message going home in a language other than English, not a fallback for later but a step that happens before a message goes out, and neither school needed new technology; both answered the same underlying question with something specific, a name, a role, a structure, rather than simply hoping things would probably be fine. The cycle, and learning to read the quiet FASTalk is built around cycles designed to repeat rather than launch once and rely on hope: send something concrete home tied to a skill families can act on that week, observe what comes back, reflect on what it shows, and adjust the next message based on what was learned. A team has to read that cycle correctly, though, because a read receipt is not, on its own, evidence that a message worked; that is reach, and a team that treats reach as the finish line stops looking for the harder signal underneath it. Real silence can mean several different things, a technical delivery gap, a language or access barrier, a message that never invited anything back, or a family quietly doing the activity without reporting on it, and each is a different problem with a different fix, so treating them as the same problem is how a team convinces itself something is not working when it actually is. Readiness you can rate, not just declare Both teams also closed their planning sessions by rating, one to five, how ready they felt to start their first cycle, then naming whatever would move them up a number, and what moved that number looked different at each school. At one school the gap was access, as one teacher put it, "We do have a percentage of families that don't like to be contacted, or cannot be contacted, because of their living situation. So it's like, what are we going to do to reach the families we're struggling to contact?" At the other school the barrier was capacity, since teachers were clear the approach itself felt doable and what would move their number was more about everything else competing for room this particular year than about the work itself. The same scale surfaced two different problems, and each called for its own fix, low-tech backup touch points where the barrier was access and a bank of reusable messages ready to go where the barrier was capacity. The dependency to keep watching for A fix named in a planning session is not the same as a fix still holding a month into the school year, since a rotation, a family coordinator's role, or a translation check can exist on paper and quietly stop happening in practice, not because anyone decided to drop it, but because the one person keeping it alive got busy or moved on and no one else had stepped in to fill the gap. The two schools above did not just answer the fragile-dependency question once, at the start; their design keeps asking it, all year, rather than settling it once and setting it aside. The lesson from these two schools is not that every family engagement effort needs the same staffing model, communication routine, or planning process. It is that sustainability has to be designed. For practitioners, researchers, and school partners, that means looking beyond whether a practice is working today and asking what will allow it to keep working when conditions change. Who else knows how the work happens? Where does information live? What happens when capacity drops, a role changes, or a family needs a different way in? And how will the team notice when something in the system stops working? Those questions matter because family engagement cannot depend indefinitely on extraordinary individual effort. If we want promising practices to last, spread, and improve, we have to build the conditions that make them repeatable. So as you look at your own family engagement strategy, ask: What is currently being held together by one person—and what would it take to make it part of the system instead? The goal is not simply to launch a promising family engagement practice. It is to build one that can be repeated, adapted, and sustained. How families revealed the missing implementation layer in curriculum, communication, and AI
Denise found out by accident. Her second grader had been struggling with math, but the report card said what it usually said: great effort, doing well. Then another parent mentioned checking adaptive math scores online. Denise logged into a portal she had never been told about and found a number with no scale, explanation, or connection to what her daughter was learning in class. “I got a 3,000,” she recalled. “What’s it out of? Two million? I don’t know.” Families often receive the outputs of the instructional system—a score, a grade, an app notification—without having the insights into their child’s learning that would make that information useful. Over the past several months, Family Engagement Lab interviewed caregivers across a range of schools to better understand how families experience academic information. We expected to hear about communication preferences or technology challenges. Instead, we kept hearing a deeper problem. Families were not asking schools to send more information. They were asking schools to make learning visible. That distinction matters because it points to a broader idea in education that has traditionally been discussed inside schools: instructional coherence. The Consortium on Chicago School Research describes instructional program coherence as the alignment of the programs and practices that shape teaching and learning around a common framework. The concept has largely focused on what happens within classrooms and school systems. Our research suggests that coherence extends further. It also depends on whether families can understand the learning priorities students are working toward and reinforce those same priorities at home. In other words, instructional coherence and family engagement are not separate strategies. They are mutually dependent. Families cannot reinforce learning they cannot clearly see. Across interviews, caregivers consistently described receiving report cards, benchmark scores, classroom updates, and school announcements. Yet many still felt uncertain about what their child was expected to learn, how current performance connected to classroom instruction, or what kind of support would actually be helpful. One caregiver described assessment charts that communicated comparison data but did not translate that information into useful action. The farther the information moved from a timely, specific explanation, the harder it became to use. “As we go through emails and report cards, they get further away from me being able to totally understand them. I look at those charts and understand the intent, but I don’t know what they mean well enough to do more than set them aside.” -Jordan, caregiver interview participant The challenge was not a lack of communication. It was a lack of instructional connection. When curriculum, assessments, teacher messages, intervention supports, and family communication point in different directions, caregivers receive disconnected pieces of information without a clear learning story. Communication becomes something families consume rather than something they can use. The interviews also showed what happens when that connection is present. One caregiver described receiving weekly emails from a teacher that explained what students would be learning in reading and math, often accompanied by a short math video. Those updates made it easier to understand an unfamiliar instructional approach and reinforce the same strategy at home. “Every once in a while, I’d watch the math video because the way they do math now is different from how I learned. Watching my son do it, I’d think, ‘You’re using a different system, but you’re getting to the right answer.’ Seeing it in action is helpful.” -Maya, caregiver interview participant Another caregiver recalled receiving a structured reflection sheet after their child experienced a behavioral challenge at school. Instead of simply reporting that something had gone wrong, the teacher shared the child’s own thinking about what happened, what led up to it, and what they could do differently next time. The communication did not just explain the incident; it changed how the family talked through mistakes at home. These examples share a common feature. They did more than deliver information. They translated instruction into something families could understand and act on. This has important implications as schools invest in new curriculum, instructional technology, and AI-enabled tools. Much of today’s conversation focuses on building an AI-enabled instructional stack: tutoring, adaptive practice, grading support, lesson planning, and student-work analysis. Each component may be thoughtfully designed and aligned to strong instructional goals. But students do not experience these tools as an architecture. They experience them as one learning system stretching across classrooms, assignments, tutoring, digital platforms, and conversations at home. Families experience that same system through teacher messages, assessment reports, grade portals, communication platforms, and increasingly, AI-generated recommendations. Personalization at the classroom level does not automatically create clarity at the kitchen table. Without a connective layer, even well-designed tools can create fragmentation. A teacher emphasizes one mathematical strategy. An AI tutor explains another. A supplemental app introduces a third. Families, wanting to help, choose whichever explanation makes the most sense to them, often without knowing which one aligns with classroom instruction. The result is not personalization. It is competing instructional signals. This is where AI has the opportunity to strengthen - not weaken - instructional coherence. Its highest-value role is not producing more family-facing content or another stream of recommendations. It is helping translate the school’s instructional priorities into plain language, connecting assessment results to current learning goals, and identifying one or two realistic actions families can take that reinforce what students are already learning in class. In that role, AI becomes an implementation tool rather than simply another communication tool. Our interviews point toward a broader shift in how we think about family engagement. For years, schools have invested in improving communication with families. That investment has solved important problems of access and reach. But communication alone does not create instructional partnership. Designing for instructional coherence does. As education systems continue building the next generation of curriculum, assessment, and AI-enabled supports, one design question deserves far more attention: Can families clearly understand what students are learning, why it matters, and what they can do to reinforce it? If the answer is no, then instructional coherence remains incomplete. Families are already part of the instructional system. The question is whether that system gives them enough coherence to participate fully or leaves the next Denise logging in, staring at a number, and guessing. Editorial note: The caregiver quotations are drawn from anonymized research interviews. Pseudonyms are used in the article, and identifying details are omitted. All caregiver names used are pseudonyms. Minor edits have been made to quotations for clarity without changing their meaning. It’s Tuesday afternoon, and you receive three messages from your child's school.
One reminds you about the upcoming field day. Another shares a district announcement about retiring teachers. A third includes a link to a field trip form that needs your signature. All three messages reached you successfully, through multiple text messages, email and app notifications. You even open and scan each message. But none of them helped you answer a question families have every day: What is my child learning right now, and how can I support it at home? For the last decade, schools have invested heavily in family communication infrastructure. Districts have adopted platforms that make it easier to reach families across languages, channels, and devices. These systems have solved real problems. Information that once sat unread in backpacks can now reach families through text, email, app notifications, and translation tools. But as communication infrastructure has improved, a new question has emerged: Can the systems schools use to communicate with families also help support student learning? Communication Is Necessary. Engagement Is Something Different. One lesson Family Engagement Lab has learned across more than a decade of work with 70,000+ families is that communication and engagement are not the same thing. Communication infrastructure helps schools deliver information. Engagement happens when families participate in regular, meaningful, two-way communication primarily about student academic learning. The distinction matters because many districts have already made meaningful strides in addressing the challenge of reaching families. The harder challenge is translating that reach into a learning partnership between home and school. In our work, we have consistently seen that families are most likely to engage when communication feels immediately relevant to what their child is experiencing in the classroom. Generic information may be useful. Learning-connected information is actionable. That is why the next frontier is not simply sending more messages. It is helping families understand what students are learning and what they can do to support that learning at home. Families Need Practical, Timely Guidance Families already support learning every day. The challenge is not motivation. It is access to timely, trustworthy guidance. Consider a family whose child is working on fractions for the first time. A reminder about school attendance is important. But a simple activity connected to that week's math lesson may be the difference between a family feeling uncertain and a family feeling confident enough to help. We hear this repeatedly from families: they want to help, but they need practical support that is connected to what students are learning right now. We see this reflected in our own research. In a study of FASTalk, 95% of families who used the program's tips and activities reported feeling more confident supporting their child's learning at home. The opportunity for schools is not to ask families to become teachers. It is to make it easier for families to engage in learning conversations at home. The Missing Layer Is Instructional Coherence Most districts already have communication infrastructure in place. The challenge is not a lack of delivery systems. It is a lack of instructional coherence between what happens in classrooms and what reaches families. The most effective examples we have seen share a common characteristic: regular communication that is connected to instruction. Families receive guidance that aligns with grade-level learning goals. Teachers understand and endorse what families are receiving. Communication follows a consistent cadence. School teams review engagement data and adjust based on what they learn. None of these conditions depend on a specific platform. They depend on how communication systems are used. For instance, message from a teacher might help a family by providing a brief, curriculum-aligned conversation starter or activity—such as asking a child to identify fractions of objects at home while they are learning about fractions in class. The teacher can invite families to share their child’s successes and struggles with new math lessons. This transforms communication into regular opportunities for shared learning. Communication platforms are becoming increasingly sophisticated — able to schedule content, segment audiences, support multilingual communication, and provide detailed reporting. These capabilities are valuable. But capabilities alone do not connect family communications to learning. Instructional coherence does. Better Questions for the Platforms You Already Use For district leaders and platform partners, this shift changes the conversation. Instead of asking, "How many messages can we send?" a more useful question may be: How well do our communications connect families to learning? Some practical questions districts can ask include:
Ultimately, the goal is to measure not only whether messages are being delivered, but whether families feel more confident supporting learning. That shift — from communication efficiency to learning outcomes — is where the real opportunity lies. What We Are Still Learning At Family Engagement Lab, we are increasingly focused on understanding what it takes for family communication to become meaningful instructional support. We know that communication platforms play an important role. We also know that platforms alone are not enough. The work requires curriculum-aligned content, implementation routines, teacher endorsement, and systems that help schools learn from what families experience. It requires attention to the conditions that make engagement sustainable inside real schools, not just idealized ones. And one idea keeps resurfacing as we learn alongside districts and platform partners: schools do not need to choose between communication and learning. The opportunity is to connect the two. The districts that make that connection successfully may find that the communication infrastructure they have already invested in can become something more valuable: a bridge between what students learn in school and how families support that learning at home. For district leaders and platform partners, the practical next step is simple: audit your current communication strategy through a learning lens. Ask not only whether messages are reaching families, but whether those messages help families participate in student learning. The answer may reveal your next opportunity for impact. As AI-based tools become more common in schools, one question deserves more attention: what does it take for these tools to become visible, trusted, and useful for families?
At Family Engagement Lab, we wanted to understand what it takes for AI-supported learning tools to become useful in building the capacity of families to engage in deeper learning support. In order to generate practical insights for the field, we studied the rollout of a family-focused AI learning tool, not in a heavily controlled demo environment, but, instead in the everyday realities of schools, classrooms, and home environments. This school year, we studied that question across three elementary and middle schools with a majority of students from low-income families. Families at these schools were already receiving weekly, curriculum-aligned learning activities through FASTalk. They also had access to an AI Coach, a newer feature that we created in response to parent requests for more personalized guidance connected to their child’s classroom learning. One parent’s experience captured the implementation challenge. She had used the weekly activities at home with her son and appreciated that they matched what he was learning in class. But when we asked whether she had tried the AI Coach, she paused. “I didn’t know about it at all.” That response surprised us. Information about the AI Coach had been shared regularly alongside the curriculum-aligned learning tips, yet this parent who was using the tips had not understood that the tool was available to her. And across our interviews with 16 parents, we heard versions of her response again and again. For funders, K-12 edtech solutions, and education leaders, this points to an important insight: the promise of AI in family engagement will likely depend less on the specific tool than on the conditions that help families discover it, trust it, and use it in connection with their child’s real learning. What We Studied In April, we wrote about the importance of implementation contexts in high-impact instructional family engagement. In this study, we build on that idea by exploring what happens when families are already engaging with curriculum-aligned communication and a deeper, more personalized support tool becomes available. Would families discover it? Would they trust it? Would it help them extend the learning support they were already providing at home? We looked at two layers of support within FASTalk, Family Engagement Lab’s approach to instructional family engagement. The first was the weekly communication families were already receiving: curriculum-aligned tips, activities, and conversation starters in their home language, sent on a consistent cadence and connected to what children were learning in class. The second was the AI Coach, a newer feature that extends those weekly activities by offering more personalized, on-demand guidance tied to a child’s classroom learning. Both support layers were available to more than 1,000 parents of students at the three participating schools. We paired reach and AI Coach engagement data with in-depth interviews with 16 parents to understand how families used each layer. What Families Used, and What They Missed Families were consistently engaging with the weekly learning tips. Across the three schools, curriculum-aligned messages reached 87–94% of families, and parents told us they valued having regular, actionable information connected to what their children were learning in class. One parent captured a recurring theme: “I like that the learning tips match the work that he does in the classroom, that it matches the curriculum.” However, that engagement did not automatically carry over to the AI Coach. Even though the feature was linked from the same weekly content, fewer than 7% of parents ever had a conversation with it. What Low Use Did (and Did Not) Mean At first glance, that gap could look like a lack of interest in AI-supported learning. The interviews revealed a different reason. Parents were not describing hesitation about receiving more personalized support. Many told us they wanted exactly that: guidance connected to what their child was learning, available when they needed it, and specific enough to help them know what to try next. In this small interview sample, parents expressed broadly positive views of AI-supported tools, and many were already using AI in their personal or professional lives. Low tool usage in spite of parent interest points to the need for deeper analysis of the implementation context. In this case, families were already engaging with learning content, but the rollout had not yet created the conditions for them to discover the AI Coach, understand its purpose, and see it as a trusted extension of the support they were already using. Two Conditions That Made the Difference When we looked at what actually helped families engage more deeply with the AI Coach, two conditions stood out consistently across our interviews and usage data:
One caregiver put it directly: "It needs to be advertised better. From the teacher is better, but the school is sufficient. Parents need to know this is backed by the school." This also has implications for rollout. If teacher endorsement is a trust trigger, teachers need to be part of the design from the beginning. They need enough awareness, context, and support to introduce tools like the AI Coach as a natural extension of the learning families are already supporting. Across the three schools in our study, that foundation had not yet been fully built. Some caregivers were still unsure what the FASTalk messages were, which made it harder for them to recognize the AI Coach as connected to school learning. That is not a family readiness problem. It is an implementation design problem. What This Means for AI and Family Engagement Our findings illuminate what we see as an emerging opportunity for the family engagement field. Education systems are making significant progress reaching families with high-quality, learning-focused communications. The next step is bridging the distance between the foundational supports families are already using and the deeper, more personalized tools that are increasingly available to them. Across the study, four conditions emerged as especially important:
The encouraging finding is not simply that families are open to AI-supported tools. It is that families are already looking for support that is specific, connected to school, and useful “in the moment.” The work is to design the conditions that make that support easier to find and trust. At Family Engagement Lab, we are continuing to learn from this work. There is more to understand about how implementation conditions shape sustained engagement over time, and one study can only provide so much insight. But the consistency of what we heard across three elementary and middle schools, from 16 in-depth parent interviews alongside program usage data, points to something worth building on: families are open to deeper support when it is introduced by someone they trust, connected to what their child is learning, and designed around their real questions. The critical work ahead is not simply to build more powerful tools. It is to learn how AI-enabled support can become part of a trusted, instructionally connected system that families can actually use. |
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