Using the Relationships Among Families and Teachers (RAFT) Tool: Effects on School Personnel

• In Event: Educators Working Toward Equitable, Collaborative Engagement With Historically Marginalized Families: Developing Competence, Commitment, and Skill

Abstract

Findings from previous community-engaged research on families with refugee backgrounds pinpointed the need to instigate meetings dedicated to families and teachers getting to know each other (Author, 2021). To meet this need, we designed and piloted a tool to guide explicit conversations between teachers and refugee families as a step towards establishing trusting relationships, which we called Relationships Among Families and Teachers, RAFT (Author, 2023). We worked with 2 school districts and an Advisory Council to create a culturally sustaining (Paris & Alim, 2017) relationship-building tool appropriate for use with families with refugee backgrounds. RAFT involves bringing together a student, family, and key school personnel to engage in a relaxed yet structured conversation through which families can get to know their children’s teachers and teachers can learn a tremendous amount about students and their families, including how values inherent to the U.S. educational system and processes may conflict with family expectations and experiences.
The purpose of this paper is to (a) explain RAFT; and (b) present how RAFT affected school personnel who were involved in its implementation. Specifically, we will address this research question: What was the effect on school personnel of implementing RAFT?

We implemented RAFT with 12 families across the two partner school districts. Six Multilingual Learner (ML) teachers, two administrators, five home-school liaisons, and three general education teachers participated in the study. We interviewed them before and after each implementation of RAFT. We also audio recorded the RAFT implementations and wrote observation notes during all meetings and interviews. We created a database of all data in NVivo 20. For this specific study, we separated all data related to perceptions of school personnel. A team of researchers open-coded the data and resolved differences. We also member-checked the findings.
Findings
All school personnel who implemented RAFT expressed satisfaction, and all teachers expressed eagerness to implement it with more regularity. Themes that emerged include: (a) appreciating the time with each family outside of the school; (b) enjoying the depth in their understanding of the family and child due to the deep and relational conversation; (c) valuing the focus on listening to each other and hearing each other’s expectations of academic and social-related issues for the child/student rather than focusing primarily on actions; (d) the flexibility and freedom of RAFT not being tied to required parent-teacher conferences; (e) wanting to create deeper relationships with all students’ families, and (f) wondering how the relationship will sustain in a system that does not make space for regular use of these practices.

Family-school partnerships start with relationships and can lead to transformational change towards more equitable systems (Ishimaru, 2020), and home visits are a promising strategy that must be thoughtfully designed to support the cultural and linguistic strengths of diverse families (Park & Paulick, 2021). RAFT is significant in its potential to increase equity in the way schools and families relate to support student success, and understanding the effects on school personnel will be helpful in furthering its implementation and future research.

Author

• Shana J. Haines, University of Vermont