Building Family Engagement Skills through Community Schools: A Crosswalk of Professional Competencies for School-based Professionals

• In Event: Preparing Educators to Foster Strong Family-School-Community Partnerships in Community Schools

Abstract

Field experiences are a core strategy to train a number of school-based professionals, including teachers (Darling-Hammond, 2014), social workers (Bogo, 2015), principals (Anast-May, 2011), speech therapists (Heilmann et al., 2021), and nurses (Schultz et al., 2019). This paper posits that by partnering with community schools, which are place-based initiatives that prioritize strong family partnerships (Community Schools Forward, 2023), school-based professional training programs can provide high impact field placements that build family engagement skills, filling an important gap in training. This paper presents a crosswalk of competencies in family engagement practices for five common school-based professions and discusses barriers and facilitators to learning. Examples provided will include preliminary findings from two innovative field experiences, one for pre-service teachers and the other for school social work students.
A variety of professions work in school settings including teachers, nurses, and social workers, and each has a set of competencies that guide their preparation and practice. The American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN), for example, describes 10 domains, competencies, and sub-competencies for entry-level nurses (AACN, 2021) and the Council on Social Work Education specifies nine competencies for practice (CSWE, 2022). To achieve competency in the specified domains, training typically involves theoretical and practical training (Ball et al., 2010). While each of these fields have distinct skills and practices, they also have competencies in common, including one broadly described as “family engagement” (see Exhibit 1). Across school-based professions, family engagement practices are linked to positive outcomes for students including improved academic achievement, attendance, homework completion, and student motivation, along with lower rates of dropout and truancy (Leo et al., 2019). Despite family engagement practice being a shared priority, it remains a challenge to learn. For example, novice school nurses report barriers to developing relationships with families, while at the same time administrators view school nurse work as primarily clinical, thus reinforcing barriers to family engagement (Brown et al., 2019). Likewise, speech therapists reported little emphasis on family engagement skills in their training even though it is a professional competency (Mandak et al., 2018). Research demonstrates that school-based professionals recognize family engagement as a critical practice and lament their lack of training (Smith et al., 2019; Mandak et al., 2018).
This paper paired basic literature review methodology (Snyder, 2019) with crosswalk analysis (Hai-Jew, 2019). The author reviewed competencies for five common school-based professionals and community school standards to identify similarities and overlaps related to family engagement practices. This paper offers contributions in three areas. First, it argues that professional preparation for five school-based professions would improve through partnerships with community schools. Second, this paper advances family engagement practices through professional preparation. Third, the paper contributes to research and practice of university-assisted community schools, which foster collaboration between higher education and community schools to enhance PK-20+ research, teaching, and learning.

Author

• Naorah Rimkunas, Binghamton University - SUNY