When you were growing up, how connected were your family and your school? Did your family feel welcome at school? Did your family and your teachers make decisions about your education together? The answers to those questions may have had a real impact on your experience.

Today I talk with Dr. Karen Mapp, who has been studying and teaching about family-school partnerships for more than 25 years. She is a Professor of Practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the author or co-author of several books including Powerful Partnerships: A Teacher’s Guide to Engaging Families for Student Success. Her Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family-School Partnerships is used by school districts across the country. She spends much of her time training teachers, administrators, and district leaders about how to partner equitably with families.

Karen was one of the mentors who set me on the path to partnership work. In our conversation, Karen explains what schools that excel at family engagement do differently—and the results it can have for students. She shares how her own family supported her education and why that was so critical to her success. We also talk about this political moment, why teachers receive so little training in engaging families effectively, the deep-seated biases that get in the way, and some hot-off-the-press research.

The report Karen discusses in the episode is The Engagement Advantage: Findings from a Mixed-Methods Study on Family-School Partnerships by Dr. Eyal Bergman and Dr. Zenzile Riddick

Here are some other great reads from Karen and her Co-Authors:

• Powerful Partnerships: A Teacher’s Guide to Engaging Families for Student Success, by By Karen L. Mapp, Ilene Carver, and Jessica Lander.
• The Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family-School Partnerships
• Embracing a New Normal: Toward a More Liberatory Approach to Family Engagement, by Karen L. Mapp and Eyal Bergman
• Everyone Wins!: The Evidence for Family-School Partnerships and Implications for Practice, by by Karen L. Mapp Anne Henderson, Stephany Cuevas, Martha Franco, and Suzanna Ewert

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Partnership Work is an independent podcast, produced with the support of Urban Media Arts in Malden, MA. Visit them at https://urbanmediaarts.org/

The music for this episode was Hazy Reflections from the NFL Music Library on APM Music.