Five Principles with Twenty Examples for Engaging ELL Families

James Erekson, Youb Kim, and Kara Lycke

Teachers of English language learners (ELLs) respond to complex student needs, including the need to learn language skills for navigating school culture and grade-level content. But their work also extends beyond the students to their families. Both teachers and students benefit when families are engaged and involved in students’ learning. What approaches to and principles of family engagement can support our students and our own growth as teachers?

Past research offers three approaches, each with strengths and limitations. The first approach is to invite families to school activities like conferences, back-to-school nights, science fairs, or parent-teacher organization meetings. Although successful participation in at-school activities can help families and schools value each other, such activities are ritualized and often have unspoken expectations and scheduling requirements that can be unfriendly to families from diverse backgrounds. The second approach is to empower learners by studying the "funds of knowledge" families bring from their varied class and cultural backgrounds. This approach recognizes young learners and their families as assets to the school community, but the necessary ethnographic and linguistic research can require a significant amount of professional development resources. The third approach is collaboration, where teachers focus on a specific set of home-friendly strategies designed to help families engage in successful learning practices at home. Although this approach shares teachers’ knowledge with parents, it does so in a way that is school centered and directive in nature.

The principles below minimize limitations of each approach by following a family-centered model rather than a school-centered model. Educators can engage families most powerfully when they respect the specific values of each family. Here are five practical principles for effectively implementing the aforementioned approaches (see table 1 for specific examples of how to carry out these principles in K–12 schools).

1. Avoid the "cultural deficit model." Recognize that all families want their children to be successful. Explicitly value any family efforts that support school. Doing so fosters in educators a disposition to build on what families do.
2. Acknowledge anxiety and frustration as natural outcomes of English language learning. In-class activities can acknowledge that social and emotional responses are part of the learning process by building in opportunities for students to discuss their experiences with school culture.
3. Spend classroom time inviting connections between home and school. Invite students to share and discuss connections and create assignments that encourage and reward students for relating an assignment or topic to their out-of-school experiences.
4. Make homework purposeful and communicate language and content goals to families. Families need help knowing what progress and work is expected of students.
5. Show students how schoolwork connects to work or ideals valued in their community and to roles and expectations they may encounter in future work.

Table 1. PreK–12 Examples for Engaging Families of ELLs

Applying family-friendly principles helps make typical school routines more inviting to families and also helps school learn more about the families they serve.

James Erekson and Youb Kim are associate professors of reading at University of Northern Colorado. Kara Lycke is assistant professor of secondary education at Illinois State University.

ASCD Express, Vol. 10, No. 13. Copyright 2015 by ASCD. All rights reserved. Visit www.ascd.org/ascdexpress.