/ Effective Literacy Practices / Family Engagement for Early Literacy / From Involvement to Engagement
Family Engagement for Early Literacy
Research shows family engagement is critical to improving literacy outcomes for students and schools. With the right tools, information, knowledge and support, parents and families can be a powerful, positive influence on their child’s reading development from birth through pre-kindergarten, elementary, middle school, and beyond.
It is up to schools, educators, and community-based partners to provide resources and family engagement opportunities that are easy, explicit, evidenced-based, and effective in support of their child’s literacy development. Parents need to be informed that reading proficiently by third grade is a critical milestone for their child’s future academic success (including high school graduation and college attendance); that learning to read doesn’t happen automatically; and that the skills needed to be a good reader start developing from birth.
While parents can be engaged as effective partners in their child’s learning, it is important to note that parents are not solely responsible for teaching their children to read. Every student deserves access to evidenced-based classroom instruction and academic supports that will help them become proficient readers.
From Involvement to Engagement
Tapping into the power of working with families to support students’ literacy falls along a continuum of involvement to engagement. There is a difference between family involvement — offering information or making a parent aware of the importance of an issue or skill — and authentic family engagement.
Family involvement is the first step and includes sharing information with caregivers so they have a deeper understanding. This can happen with community events, such as literacy fairs, book drives, and one-time workshops to help parents and other family caregivers gain new knowledge and skills to help their children learn. While social events are important for raising awareness and beginning the process of building relationships between schools and families, they are not enough for building literacy.
Family engagement, sometimes called family partnerships, is the next phase of the continuum and includes caregivers taking the new knowledge and applying it to changing their behaviors and implementing activities that incorporate the knowledge into their family routines.
Productive family engagement strategies revolve around developing equal and authentic partnerships among families, educators, and community partners to promote children’s learning and progress. Effective family engagement spans and reinforces learning in the multiple settings where children learn — at home, in pre-K programs, in school, in after-school programs, in faith-based institutions, in libraries, and in the community. Engagement should apply to any adult in a child’s life who has the responsibility for developing the child socially, mentally, academically, and otherwise.
For children to thrive, parents, families, caregivers, and educators must collaborate to build a support structure that strengthens learning and healthy development inside and outside of home or school. Ideally, parents are engaged as early as possible in their child’s learning and development and have multiple opportunities to learn the various roles they can take to support their child’s development.