Professional Learning Services

Family Engagement Lab’s professional learning services offer teachers and administrators equitable family engagement practices and tools, backed by research, so that family engagement becomes an integral strategy to supporting students’ academic success. Our workshops are collaborative planning sessions with either large or small groups. 

WORKSHOPS
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​Supporting our Learners: Building Equitable Family Engagement

A data-driven and hands-on approach 
​In this workshop, participants explore existing data on families’ needs and preferences when it comes to meaningfully partnering with educators to support student success. Then participants discuss actionable strategies for learning more about the specific and unique needs of families and how to apply those insights to inform their family engagement approach and key practices in their district or school.

Who should attend:

• Teachers, administrators, curriculum leads, instructional coaches

Participants will:

• Increase their knowledge of evidence-based, high-impact family engagement practices.
• Learn how to use data and insights from families to inform their approach to building school-home partnerships that support student learning.
• Initiate or refine planning for their district or school community to effective and equitably engage families.
• Complete a Family Engagement Planning Tool that will help clarify key action steps for developing your school or district family engagement approach. 
• Learn how our current technology, FASTalk, can promote equity and build partnerships between teachers and historically underserved families by sharing engaging, at-home learning activities via text messages in each family’s home language. 

Morris Jeff Community School teachers who attended the professional learning workshop, Supporting our Learners: Building Equitable Family Engagement, created the word cloud above of how they were feeling about new ideas for engaging families.

What you get:

• Research-based insights on high-impact, equitable family engagement practices shown to support positive learning outcomes for students. 
• Action plan for developing an equitable family engagement strategy for your classroom, school or district that centers on the needs of families.

Length: 90 minutes

TEACHER TRAININGS
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Improve Student Outcomes by Engaging Families in Literacy

FASTalk Training
This teacher training is a critical step towards integrating your district family engagement goals with your literacy initiatives. This session features an overview of FASTalk, an innovative family engagement tool designed to promote equity and build partnerships between teachers and historically underserved families. It describes the impact of effective family engagement practices on student literacy outcomes and provides details on how to get started with FASTalk. This training is specifically designed for districts that have purchased FASTalk for their teachers and families.

Who should attend:

• Teachers who will be using FASTalk

Participants will learn:

• Family engagement practices that support literacy development at home
• How FASTalk keeps families engaged with classroom learning
• Why FASTalk is effective at raising student literacy outcomes
• How to get started with using FASTalk in the classroom  

What you get: 

• FASTalk teacher login, preloaded with teacher’s class roster data
• Pre-scheduled text messages to be sent to families throughout the school year with engaging, at-home activities to boost student learning
• Accessible text messages translated into over 100 languages to facilitate communication in a family’s home language

Length: 45 minutes

Languages: FASTalk training is available in English and Spanish

Interested in ways to fund your professional learning efforts? 

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