Facilitating Dual Capacity-Building Partnerships between Teachers and Families in Early Childhood Education

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Parent, child, and schools: Promoting connections

Abstract

When families and schools work together, children reap numerous benefits. Unfortunately, years of research suggests that establishing family-school partnerships can be difficult to develop and challenging to sustain. Math Partners promotes powerful, equitable family-school partnerships in support of young children’s math development using the Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family-School Partnerships (Mapp & Bergman, 2021). In phase 1 of Math Partners, we facilitated a series of meetings between two teams including teachers and family members of children in their classroom as they co-constructed culturally appropriate, playful math activities. This paper describes how families and teachers communicated, what team members learned from each other, and how the opportunity to partner together impacted their shared goals for supporting young children’s math development.

Authors

• Jadyn Laixely, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Zhiyue Lu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Tina Smith-Bonahue, University of Florida

• Erin E. Reid, Erikson Institute

• Stephanie C. Sanders-Smith, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign