Default settings play a significant role in shaping our experiences and interactions with technology. In the realm of technology adoption, default opt-in features can have a profound effect on whether individuals embrace new tools and their subsequent impact, particularly as it relates to family engagement and communication tactics. This post explores the relationship between the opt-out model, technology adoption, and the eventual influence they both have on student learning outcomes. 

Technology almost always comes to market with a set of defaults. These are pre-set options or configurations that guide users through a process, intended to optimize their overall experience. They serve as a starting point, and individuals often stick with defaults without considering alternatives. This is particularly important in the context of implementing technology designed to serve teachers and families. What is paramount, however, to ensuring sustained adoption of technology for these audiences is users' initial experiences and overall ease of use. 

This where opt-in defaults play a crucial role that most developers overlook. When it comes to technology adoption, defaults can act as a double-edged sword. On one hand, well-designed defaults can simplify the onboarding process and encourage users to explore new tools. They provide a seamless and intuitive experience, minimizing barriers to entry. However, default settings that are poorly chosen or not customizable may hinder adoption rates. Users might find themselves grappling with features that don't align with their needs or preferences, leading to frustration and disengagement.

Default opt-in settings on family engagement tools like FASTalk, have a pivotal influence on the impact technology has on learning outcomes. When families are automatically opted-in to receive communications and updates from schools on their child's curriculum and what they're learning in the classroom, the likelihood of them actively choosing to opt-out drastically diminishes. This simple default setting requires passive consent from families, while simultaneously serving as the key to opening the doors to active participation and collaboration at home.

By harnessing the power of the opt-out model, organizations like ours are able to bridge the communication gap between schools and homes, taking the load off teachers' hectic schedules as well as the pressure off busy parents and caregivers. It's time we acknowledge the immense impact of simple and often overlooked features to ensure we continue to develop tools that are beneficial to our children and students and easy to adopt for educators and caregivers, alike. 

Recent studies have revealed educators have been facing burnout at unprecedented levels. According to a survey by the Rand Corporation, one in four teachers said they were likely to leave their jobs within a year, up from one in six prior to the pandemic. The survey also found that three-quarters of superintendents considered quitting in the 2020/2021 school year. To combat these ever-increasing instances of burnout, the study recommends districts and schools actively look to “communication mechanisms” for innovation to help teachers support student and family learning expectations.

Enter technology-backed educational texting tools, like FASTalk which are emerging as a key instruments to improve how school districts support and communicate with families at scale. These new technologies combine an evidence basis with automated messaging, often via texting, closely aligned with curricula intended to help bridge the gap between classroom learning and home revision.

Tools like FASTalk can dramatically boost a school team’s ability to handle the large volume of effective communication that must be regularly deployed. Rather than asking overworked staff to send messages to families and students, schools can defer to a series of scheduled, classroom content-aligned messages to busy or curious caregivers even in their specific preferred language. This is an incredibly easy and effective way to keep families and schools aligned on the progress or hinderance of their child's education. 

When the Massena Central School District in New York rolled out a chatbot last year, they decided to name it Raider, after their mascot. They introduced it to their community as a “Siri” for school and used it to send positive, affirming messages and important information when the pandemic forced a switch to remote instruction. Within weeks of introducing Raider, the Massena Central School District sent out 13,105 texts to parents and students. This saved 328 hours of staff time and tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars that would have been spent on hiring additional staff. 

With tools like FASTalk, student motivation and overall performance can be significantly boosted by keeping parents informed on what their child is learning at school. Caregivers receive regular tips and  activities to review the themes of the lessons their child received, while back at home. This has proved particularly helpful to families that speak English as a second language as proved by surveys that captured parent sentiment and gather community feedback. 

By empowering schools with the right tools, school staff can meet new expectations while simultaneously being relieved of a workload that continually threatens to overwhelm them. Most educators will tell you that even before 2020, there weren’t enough hours in the day to get their work done. Now, three-quarters of National Board Certified Teachers report working more hours since the start of the pandemic. This is a straight path to burnout. 

In conclusion, technology-backed community engagement tools can make a significant difference in reducing the workload of educators and school leaders, while also improving communication with families. With recent advances in technology, a behaviourally intelligent chatbot makes it possible to provide personalized support to every single family in a district. By using services like FASTalk, schools can free up time for their staff, allowing them to focus on what they do best and actively prevent burnout.

What is the parent perception gap and why is it more common than you think?
​A recent study conducted by Learning Heroes found that 90% of K-12 parents believe their children are performing at grade level, but standardized test scores reveal otherwise. Testing reading, only 29% of eighth-graders were considered proficient, and that dropped to about 26% in math. The findings show a significant gap between parent perception and reality and this is referred to as the parent perception gap. The reasons for this gap are multifaceted, including parents receiving differing reports from schools versus scores from standardized tests. The report highlights the urgent need to close the gap, and former U.S. Secretaries of Education, Arne Duncan and Margaret Spellings, elaborate on the findings while suggesting implementable solutions.

One solution offered to help close the parent perception gap is to use standardized test scores as an indicator of where a child stands in their education. Considered alongside report cards, parents can better understand the areas where their children need help. Instead, report cards tend to differ from the standardized test scores, leading to parents overestimating their children's performance.

Another tested solution suggested by the former secretaries of education is to increase parent engagement. Parents must be made aware of the resources available to them, and schools should communicate with parents to explain their children's results on regular challenges in addition to standardized tests. Parents can then take action to ensure their children get the necessary help to improve their scores.

One question raised is whether the pandemic has contributed to the parent perception gap. The study found that the children's test data was from the end of 2022, and the parent survey was conducted in March 2023. Both secretaries agree that the pandemic has had an impact on the education system. To address this, the government allocated $190 billion in pandemic relief funds, but both secretaries believe that it has not been enough to close the gap.

To address the issue, both secretaries suggest that high-dosage tutoring works well and would go a long way in helping to close the gap. Physical, virtual, or hybrid tutoring after school, on weekends, or during summer school, can provide students with the additional time they need to catch up on missed learning during the pandemic. Duncan suggests that we have a window between April and August or September to close the gap as much as possible, so that children can enter the next school year prepared to be successful.

The parent perception gap is a significant issue, more common than we'd like to think and one that requires attention. Standardized test scores can be used as an indicator of a child's performance, and schools should be clear in their communication with parents to ensure they understand their children's needs. Simply put, parent engagement is essential, and resources like FASTalk ensure families and schools talk in order to support their children. Simple technology backed by government resources can help students recover missed learning and close the gap between parent perception and reality to ensure that students receive the help they need to succeed in their education.

At Family Engagement Lab, we value our customers and how much we learn about the existing and evolving needs of students and their parents/caregivers, teachers, schools, and districts in equitably engaging families with academics. For every implementation of our service, FASTalk, we partner with customers to understand their goals for family engagement and its role in their instructional strategy to support student learning. While we have always put the customer first in our work, what that means and how that looks has changed over the last 5 years and especially since the pandemic and its impact on students, their families and the school community.

When our Customer Success team launched in 2018, the team's priority was simply to help teachers use FASTalk and to have a great experience with it to build relationships with families and to boost their students’ learning. But, with the pandemic and shifted priorities in schools, we noticed a change in our level of support for our district partners as well. Families had more visibility into their child’s education and teachers experienced stress and challenges as never before. This dynamic, combined with our existing practice of supporting customers, resulted in even deeper levels of empathy and partnership. Sometimes we zoomed out to a big picture view with customers to understand an overarching goal or zoomed in on an immediate need and customized their FASTalk service to be timely and relevant.

At Family Engagement Lab, our support for customers goes beyond ensuring success with our product. We start by spending time with district-level academic instructional leads and family engagement coordinators to gain an understanding of the unique needs of each of the communities we serve. Only then can we work alongside the schools and school systems to set goals around academic and family engagement priorities and implement our products, professional development, and/or coaching services with an asset-based approach. Given the shifted priorities since March 2020, our department's name "Customer Success," didn't quite reflect how our district partners thought of us or how we think of ourselves.

So effective this year, our Customer Success Team at Family Engagement Lab has changed its name to District Partnerships. The name change more accurately reflects how Family Engagement Lab works with our customers; as valued partners. 

To better support teachers’ unique needs and build teachers’ capacity to form meaningful partnerships with families, we also welcomed Kelsey Hodge as our new Partner Success Manager. Kelsey is a former secondary classroom teacher and understands first-hand the role family engagement plays in learning and the common barriers that prevent it. Through trainings, PD, 1-1 support, and innovative beta testing opportunities, Kelsey works closely with teachers to try out new family engagement strategies to build authentic relationships with their students’ families. 

​The District Partnerships team is committed to helping our customers reach families equitably in their home language with content linked to student learning and helping teachers to build trusted relationships with their students’ families. These are, and will continue to be, our team’s highest priorities. 
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To learn more about how the District Partnerships team can help support your family engagement efforts, contact Hannah Lee, Director, District Partnerships.

Family Engagement Lab and Stand for Children have proudly partnered since 2019 to support improved student learning outcomes through family engagement. In 2021, Stand’s Home Visit Partnerships’ Director, working closely with Fort Worth ISD’s Leadership Academy Network, identified a critical need to provide continued connection and relationship building between teachers and families after a teacher’s initial home visit. Because home visits only happen once or twice a year, teachers were looking for additional ways to leverage the positive relationships they established during those visits to build stronger partnership and the capacity of families to support learning all year.

It was with those questions in mind that Stacey Vanhoy, Director of Home Visit Partnerships, began to research best practices on ways to support teachers to extend learning from
the classroom to the living room, while not adding additional work to teachers’ plates. In October of 2021, Home Visit Partnerships and Family Engagement Lab met and excitedly spoke about how FASTalk could support Leadership Academy Network teachers’ need for ongoing, learning-related information that could be sent equitably and easily to their students’ families.  

During Spring 2022, Family Engagement Lab and Home Visit Partnerships came together to support ongoing partnerships between teachers and families through home visits and the regular sharing of at-home learning activities through FASTalk  at two schools in the Leadership Academy Network, a partnership between Fort Worth ISD and Texas Wesleyan University.  FASTalk was piloted  for 12 weeks in 6 pre-K classrooms at the Leadership Academy at Maude I. Logan and the Leadership Academy at John T. White Elementary Schools - and was met with resounding success all around. 100% of teachers and families who participated wanted home visits and FASTalk messages to continue. 79% of families responded to the FASTalk text messages and 56% responded 5 or more times. These strong engagement rates generated excitement about expanding the program at the Leadership Academy schools and in other Fort Worth area schools. 

At the conclusion of the pilot, Stacey, along with Dr. Elisabeth O’Bryon, Family Engagement Lab’s Chief Impact Officer and co-founder, conducted a series of focus groups with Logan and White Elementary Schools’ educators and families to learn more about their experience with FASTalk and home visits. 

Fort Worth teachers shared the importance of having already visited families’ homes and
developed trust prior to beginning the FASTalk program. Teachers loved the outgoing, translated FASTalk messages and the automatic message translation feature that enabled regular two-way communication in families’ home languages. Fort Worth families noted that they loved being able to support their child’s learning at home and that FASTalk helped them feel included in their child’s education. Families wanted even more weekly messages, reporting that the FASTalk activities were really engaging for their children. FASTalk helped families feel connected to what was happening at school and fostered a sense of partnership between families and their children’s teachers. One mother noted that she felt like her child was the “MVP” and she and the teacher were both on his team, helping him succeed. 

“FASTalk has been a game changer for our schools. This valuable resource has been one of the tools we have been able to utilize to build our communication efforts with our families. FASTalk has helped equip our parents to best support their students at home!” - Priscila Dilley, Senior Officer, Leadership Academy Network

The pilot results were so positive that Leadership Academy Network’s senior leadership team has expanded the use of FASTalk this academic year to all four campuses for pre-K, Kinder, and 1st grade families. 

In addition to Leadership Academy Network schools, Home Visit Partnerships and Family Engagement Lab, with the support of the Rainwater Charitable Foundation, have teamed up with East Fort Worth Montessori Academy in PK-5th grades. As Mrs. Farhanaz Reza, 3rd grade teacher shared, “At the beginning of this year, we learned about ‘FASTalk’ and ‘Home Visit’ as the communication systems available to us. After visiting several families, I noticed that kids are putting extra effort to accomplish their tasks. They are making behavioral changes as well. They were super excited to see teachers at their home. Parents were happy and grateful. They appreciated our efforts to go beyond and help each other to make a difference. Now, parents are comfortable communicating via FASTalk. The majority of my families reach out to me with their daily needs, any concerns, or questions through FASTalk. I have started feeling stronger and I would say, seeing these positive changes in my students, is a great achievement.”  

This month, through generous support from Rose Community Foundation, Gary Community Ventures and The Deane Family Fund, a fund of the Denver Foundation, Home Visit Partnerships and Family Engagement Lab will build on their partnership to support early literacy learning in both Denver and across Colorado.
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If you are interested in learning more about Home Visit Partnerships and Family Engagement Lab, please visit our websites and learn more about how you can support our work. 

Home Visit Partnerships
Family Engagement Lab 

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I believe that any changes I want to make in the world must begin with a truthful reflection of myself. This belief and my past experiences, including my time as a classroom teacher, have paved the way for me to work with Family Engagement Lab. 

In my short time as a teacher, I cannot count the number of long days that I ended up thinking, “Why do I do this to myself?” I truly enjoyed the time I spent in front of my students helping them unlock their natural curiosity about the world around them. But, too many days of arriving early; making a thousand small, quick decisions per second; and staying late to grade and plan left me exhausted. Plus, having to call the families of students who were misbehaving or falling behind in class had me overwhelmed. 
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I knew something was wrong after countless conversations with colleagues that began with, “No matter how many times I have called her mother, I can never seem to get an answer” to which they’d respond, “I could never get her to pick up last year either. Just document it and keep it pushing. You can’t expect everyone to care about what goes on at the school they send their children to.” This conversation was part of what seemed to be a self-fulfilling prophecy —  we call and don’t get an answer, we converse about how difficult it is to engage families, we don’t see a change, and we become frustrated. It was a demoralizing experience. But quite frankly, it was not a reflexive one. It was not until I stepped away from my position in front of the classroom to a seat within one that I started to unpack this experience and draw a damning conclusion — making one-way calls with the intent to report was not effective, assets-based, family engagement practice. It was an audit trail.

At Harvard Graduate School of Education, I took a course dedicated to family engagement titled, “The Why, What, and How of School, Community, and Family Partnerships” led by the incomparable Dr. Karen Mapp. I was pushed to unpack a lot of what was embedded into those prior conversations and feelings shared by my colleagues and me (and as I imagine, other educators, right?). In short, I learned that we did not dig deep into understanding why the relationship between the school and the families was so fraught. Common themes were: 
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• We were reporting to our families, not inviting them into the conversation as equal partners. 
• We saw family engagement as strictly a tool for behavior management and not as a requirement for advancing equity in academic outcomes. 
• We viewed family engagement as an additional task to add to a growing list of requirements, not as a necessary praxis for building strong relationships with families and students. 
  
  

No matter how many times we saw phrases declaring how important it was to engage families, we did not make the connection that meaningfully engaging families would imply a change in the way we were accustomed to doing things. 

Armed with this new understanding of my own experience as an educator, I felt compelled to continue learning about a new way forward. While I am not returning to the classroom as a teacher in the near future, I am happy to say that partnering with Family Engagement Lab as a Summer Fellow with Education Pioneers has allowed me to use the knowledge that I have gained to help facilitate a change in perception for other educators and introduce districts dedicated to assets-based family engagement to an organization that is doing the work. 

Family Engagement Lab is a national nonprofit that “catalyzes equitable family engagement and student learning by bridging classroom curriculum and at-home learning.” My role is to perform a landscape analysis and identify districts across the country that have shown dedication to practicing assets-based family engagement and perform outreach to learn more in-depth about how these districts are approaching family engagement. I analyze each district’s market-facing content on family engagement and assess what I find against a rubric I designed. Then, I reach out to districts to gain extensive insights into their family engagement practices and goals to help Family Engagement Lab learn more about how districts materialize their value for family engagement. 

This experience thus far has been challenging and rewarding. The team is supportive and capable, which has been a very safe environment for me to learn, make mistakes, and pivot when necessary. I have been able to learn about their operations, strategies, internal DEI work, and their dynamic technology-based tool that bridges the relationship between the classroom and the home — FASTalk. 

Admittedly, I am not a techie by any means, but the amount of care that the team has put into this tool is impressive. I found myself reflecting on my time as a teacher and imagining that with both the new knowledge that I gained about what assets-based family engagement means and access to FASTalk, the tides would have changed dramatically for my students and their families. 

First, I would not have spent so much time reporting, but rather creating opportunities for thought-partnership and capacity building for my families so they would have known how to use the wealth of knowledge they have about their students to support their educational journey. I would have forgone so much effort on tasks that surreptitiously were used to account for the “gaps” that the families had with supporting their students and search for the root cause of the disconnect I felt. Finally, I know that if I had a tool like FASTalk on my hands, I would have been able to further build the capacity of my students’ families to support the classroom learning we were doing by providing them with targeted questions and tasks aligned with our curriculum. Not only would the families be able to support the students’ retention of our lessons, but also this would have improved the relationship the families had with the schools. With these benefits in mind, I would not have seen it as an extra task or some new tool that the district was requiring that I use. Instead, I would have seen it as something that accomplished what my ultimate goal was: to inspire learning in and outside of the classroom. 
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It’s my sincere hope that my outreach efforts can at least result in teachers and administrators becoming more curious about how it could look if they invested in two-way, capacity-building family engagement as an academic strategy. While I also have a vested interest in districts becoming curious about Family Engagement Lab and its tools, I feel that their three-fold vision built on the premise that “authentic family-school partnership is critical to a child’s successful learning journey” their creation of tools that “bridge classroom and at-home learning to raise student outcomes,” and their goal of helping students “achieve their full potential by catalyzing partnerships between the most passionate advocates for children — teachers and family members” are a recipe for more equity in the educational landscape in this country.

Back to school season is upon us! As students return to classrooms for the new school year, we recognize that this is one of the most exciting times of the year for those working in schools. We also know that it is one of the busiest. Between reviewing curriculum, setting up materials, and establishing classroom communities, we know teachers and administrators are hard at work to create the foundation for a successful year. 

As a way to support your efforts to build partnership with students and their families, we’re sharing simple FASTalk messages for teachers to share with families. The messages focus on building trust and relationships with the families in your school community. 

These messages can be accessed in English and Spanish.
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Teachers, feel free to copy and paste them into a text or email, or use them in conversation with families. Administrators, please forward these messages to the teachers on your team.
Thank you for the incredible work you do with students and families every day. Have a great start to the school year!

It’s the end of the 2021-22 school year and teachers have given their all during another challenging year. Many are tired, frustrated, and overwhelmed. They have continued to educate students in environments where their roles, their students’ roles and especially the roles of families have irrevocably changed. Teachers know that families can be a powerful partner for student success, yet family engagement often becomes a secondary activity instead of a priority to support student learning. 

Dr. Megan McNamara, Associate Superintendent at Redesign Schools and a FASTalk client, recently shared: 

We all agree that engagement from family members strengthens our school community and enriches experiences for our children. Still, when other school operations sidetrack our plans, we tend to work inward instead of reaching out for support. Likely, it is the same at home for a busy parent or caregiver. We must be intentional about our outreach as it is imperative in building lasting relationships and meaningful communities.

With the challenges currently facing educators, we know that providing teachers with meaningful opportunities for professional learning around family engagement, especially equitable family engagement, is critical. Decades of research, including our own, point to the fact that when families are engaged in at-home learning, student performance improves. 
Coaching and supporting teachers to engage their families in meaningful ways is valuable at all levels of our education system. However, in a recent study of K-12 teachers conducted by Edge Research, only 32% of teachers said that professional development has been an influential factor in how they engage with their families (C.1).

The teaching landscape looks different now, largely due to the pandemic, and the way we engage families can change too in order to ensure equitable access for all. Now more than ever it is imperative that families are engaged with their child’s development at all ages and stages. Families are valuable partners in their child’s educational journey when they are included in innovative, accessible ways. - Dr. Lisa Holliday LeBoeuf, Supervisor of Literacy Professional Development, Louisiana Department of Education

At Family Engagement Lab, many school districts we work with simply don’t have the time and/or resources to implement regular professional learning across their schools, especially around family engagement. Some districts implement traditional practices of family engagement, requiring parents and caregivers to be physically present, which was not possible during the pandemic and may not reach all families equitably. Other districts focus on family engagement at the district level but struggle to see that focus translated into ongoing, 2-way communication and collaboration between teachers and families in support of student learning. 

What We’re Learning: What professional development do teachers need to build a trusted partnership with families?

Teachers want teamwork with families to support student success. So what does high impact professional development on family engagement look like? Let’s start by looking at the research. Effective professional development on family engagement must prioritize: 
1. Teacher readiness to learn new strategies and tools, 
2. Creating an ecosystem of support for teachers as they try out new strategies and, 
3. Teachers being able to track progress towards goals and receive feedback on implementation (C.2). 

According to a recent research study from Rivet Education, “96% of teachers believe that the number one factor leaders should consider when planning professional learning is whether it will help teachers effectively use their instructional materials.(C.3)” Knowing that, it’s important that professional learning around family engagement is designed with a clear connection to classroom instruction and builds equity when supporting families with learning at home. This type of professional learning should be active, ongoing, and collaborative as teachers need and want opportunities to reflect on their practices to ensure that they are prioritizing effective family engagement strategies.

At Family Engagement Lab, we have seen this play out in our practice. At our partner sites, meaningful professional learning occurs when the entire school community, from the literacy coach, to the teachers, to the front office staff, engage together in action planning. During the action planning process, educators are encouraged to reframe current notions of in-person parent involvement, and think more deeply about their own school communities and the traumas or barriers their students’ families may be facing. These barriers may make it difficult for families to get engaged or even enter the school building. Participants create and commit to short-term and longer term goals around high impact engagement strategies that are inclusive and accessible to all families, often incorporating FASTalk as part of their implementation strategy.  

Parental involvement is a key component of our mission and vision, but communicating the “why” behind the importance of effective family engagement can be a challenge. This next year, we will be focusing our teacher professional learning and FASTalk training opportunities to set specific goals on how to involve and inform families about their students' day-to-day instruction. We want to improve our family engagement plan and build partnerships between families, educators, and the greater community. - Georgia Gross, Academic Coordinator at Redesign Schools 

Our partner sites are desiring to move away from the brief, one-time teacher training option and opting into our yearlong model of building in regular touchpoints and coaching for teachers to feel successful in their family engagement efforts through FASTalk. Through a series of 3-4 sessions, teachers will be provided with the latest research around effective family engagement strategies; provided time to reflect on their own readiness and create goals to try out new strategies; and given hands-on practice time to carry out the new strategies through FASTalk. District and school leaders are also invited to participate in the training sessions to collaborate on how to effectively and authentically engage their students’ families. 

We recognize that as school leaders, we have work to do to build connections, and our professional development strategy now has intentional checkpoints to make sure we are making family engagement a part of our learning, mindset, and scheduling.  Just as we train and plan for curriculum and instruction, we must also plan to build regular habits in making lasting connections with our children’s families. - Dr. Megan McNamara, Associate Superintendent at Redesign Schools
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Going forward, we are continuing to take a critical look at our own training and professional learning opportunities for teachers. We are focusing on research-based practices in order to build teacher’s capacity to form meaningful relationships with the families that they work with. When teachers are supported in their growth, we believe that school system change around family engagement is not only possible but powerful.
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C.1: Learning Heroes, Parents 2021 “Going Beyond the Headlines”; Findings from Surveys of K-12 Parents, Teachers and Principals, December 8, 2021, Research Conducted by Edge Research 
C.2:https://archive.globalfrp.org/family-involvement/publications-resources/professional-development-in-family-engagement-a-few-often-overlooked-strategies-for-success 
C.3:https://riveteducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/2022-Trends-in-HQPL-Market-Report.pdf 

  This month, I sat down for a Zoom chat with Amy Walker, Director of Strategic Partnerships for Committee for Children, creators of the Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) program series, Second Step. Amy and I previously had the chance to discuss the role of families in SEL on a webinar titled, “Engaging Families with Social-Emotional Learning” last Fall. Our conversation then was rich with ideas and my recent discussion with Amy allowed for us to dive deeper into some of the key areas that are top of mind for Committee for Children and Family Engagement Lab when it comes to teacher-parent partnership around SEL. 

During our conversation, Amy shared how important it is to talk about SEL in ways that resonate with families. By focusing on key student skills that are important to families (e.g., learning how to form friendships, solving problems in a positive way), teachers and schools are best positioned to collaboratively support students’ well being. At Family Engagement Lab, we too believe in the power of forming strong partnerships between teachers and families to support wide-ranging positive outcomes for children around social, emotional, and academic learning. 

In our blog, I’m excited to highlight the strategies Amy shared for how schools can meaningfully engage families around SEL to deepen trust and build collaborative relationships with the key adults in a child’s learning journey. We would love to hear more about your strategies and invite you to share them with us through LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook. 

Elisabeth: Tell us a little more about Committee for Children and your role there.
Amy: Committee for Children is a nonprofit organization that has been around for over 40 years, reaching over 20 million children in more than 30,000 schools around the U.S. Most of what we do is social-emotional learning but we also work in the field of child abuse prevention and bullying prevention.
I’m the Director of Strategic Partnerships and my role is to forge relationships and business partnerships with other organizations to help us reach more children and have more impact. I’ve been in this field for over 20 years. 

Elisabeth: What do you enjoy most about working in the field of SEL?
Amy: I am so grateful that I get to earn a living doing work that is so good for kids. I really believe in social-emotional learning. In my own life, I work on these skills every day and I love the idea of teaching children skills so they can start managing their feelings and solving problems in positive ways. I wish I had learned these things when I was in school. 

The skills you learn in SEL programs like Second Step are the skills that carry you through your life. They allow you to hold down jobs, have good relationships, be a good parent, and make good decisions. It’s hard work to learn social and emotional skills, but these skills are an essential part of our lives. 
 
Through SEL, I think we can help kids to have better experiences in both school and their lives outside of school and in their futures. I have a real heart for teachers and I know that everything we do in SEL, also helps teachers and schools.
 
Elisabeth: What are 1-2 ways that the pandemic has affected your work with school districts?  
Amy: Family engagement with social emotional learning is a big deal and it certainly has become much more critical since the pandemic. 
 
At the start of the pandemic, 90% of our clients were using the print version of our SEL program Second Step. We worked quickly to meet their digital needs by accelerating our existing efforts. In addition, our school partners immediately asked how they could connect with families about SEL. Including families has always been a part of our programs and we have been doing a lot of coaching to encourage our clients to use the resources we provide.  
 
As the pandemic went on, we saw that children were struggling with isolation and feeling disconnected from peers and their teachers. It was apparent that children needed support to help them manage their feelings and the effects of the pandemic on their emotions. Our school partners were able to support children through Second Step because social-emotional learning builds skills that can help provide foundational support for the emotional well-being of kids. 
 
Elisabeth: What strategies have you seen Second Step schools using that work well to engage families with SEL? Are there some common pitfalls or missed opportunities around family engagement that you see in your work?  
Amy: In some ways, engaging families with SEL is not so different from engaging teachers with SEL. One of the important things to do is to educate families on what it is. 
 
One really important thing is to talk about SEL in a way that they understand as it relates to their child. We encourage using terms like “managing strong feelings,” “setting goals,” “learning skills to make friends,” “dealing with stress,”  “solving problems in a positive way.” This helps bridge to the things that families care about and what they are struggling with when talking about an SEL program.
 
When a school makes an effort to teach social skills, families can have more visibility into how this is helping their child. It communicates to families that, “we can grow together as a school to help kids have skills to thrive.”
 
Amy provided a number of recommendations for schools and educators who would like to engage families more deeply around SEL: 
 
                               Amy Walker’s Recommendations for Involving Families in SEL

• Survey families and share the data with teachers! Ask families how they feel. Do their children feel connected to school, feel safe, have friends? Do families feel welcome and safe too? Panorama Education has a good survey tool for this. 
• Incorporate SEL topics into your newsletters. Share more about what students are learning and practicing. 
• Use Video. People love videos. There is a lot available about social-emotional learning on our website and Edutopia and CASEL have videos on Youtube too. 
• Use social media. A majority of Second Step users are on social media, like Facebook. Social media has become an essential vehicle to find parents where they are. Posting about SEL is positive and uplifting!
• Talk to the head and talk to the heart. There is good research around SEL and how it positively impacts students. And videos speak to the heart in powerful ways.
• Share the scope and sequence of your SEL program with families. It can help families understand what SEL is and how they can be aware of it during daily interactions.
• Feature your SEL work at family events at your school. Have kids show what they are learning for a family night event, like singing a song about calming down or leading a deep breathing exercise that they are learning in their program. At events that parents attend, have an SEL table where families can view the SEL program you are using and learn more about it and ask questions. 
• Provide SEL-themed reading lists. Suggest SEL-related books and include them in summer reading lists.
  
  

Check out the National PTA’s new podcast on SEL What is Social and Emotional Learning Anyway?

A big thank you to Amy Walker from Committee for Children! If you would like to learn more about Amy’s work, check out: http://www.cfchildren.org/
 
To learn more about how FASTalk can support your SEL efforts, visit:  https://www.familyengagementlab.org/what_we_do.html. 

Megan Lorio, Managing Editor
In thinking back on our many discussions, something that emerges is that we have been able to use our time together for both an exploration of identity and an opportunity to use frameworks/tools that support making our work more equitable. For instance, we had a session that unpacked a tool from the Edtech Equity Project, in which we were able to think about our design process in the context of designing services/products that are centered on racial equity. The work we've done together has not only built my knowledge of history but also continues to shape how we think about our work going forward. ​