The Family Engagement Practice Framework: A Comprehensive Framework for Practice Developed from the Voices of Practitioners

Background and Purpose:  Theories of school-wide family engagement emphasize mutually beneficial relationships that include a wide range of services to assist parents in supporting their children. Child welfare literature also highlights considerations for practice with families, including the importance of family-centered practice and empowerment. Yet, few studies on family engagement point to specific and effective strategies that practitioners use to engage families in schools and there are no comprehensive models of family engagement practice in the school social work, education, or child welfare literature. This qualitative study examined the practices and perspectives of Family Engagement Specialists (FES) within one district-wide school-based agency to develop a practice framework for family engagement in schools.

Methods: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a sample of 17 FES who had an active caseload of at least one family. Participants were recruited in partnership with a local education agency. Two coauthors with expertise in family engagement, school-based service delivery, and school social work independently coded the first three transcripts, using open coding to inductively identify themes emerging from the data. After reaching consensus on a list of primary codes, the remaining transcripts were coded by a single coder. The authors reviewed all transcripts and synthesized themes from the open coding collaboratively to develop overarching themes organized into a framework. Concepts from family engagement theory, child welfare practice, and school social work practice with families informed the themes.

Results: Although FES often indicated that “there is no road map” for family engagement practice, results indicated specific engagement strategies, values, and personal dispositions that they found important and effective for engaging families in services. These findings were organized into an overarching Family Engagement Practice Framework that collectively synthesizes the FES responses and describes key practice components necessary for family engagement. The framework is visually depicted as a set of three concentric circles. The innermost circle includes practitioners’ personal dispositions, which describe the values, beliefs, and attitudes FES expressed as important for engaging families. These include: a strengths-based perspective, flexibility, accessibility, consistency, and persistence. The second and middle circle depicts a set of practice strategies that FES identified as critical for effective family engagement. They are: holding families accountable, providing immediate support, emphasizing the benefits of services, lingering, joining with families, allowing families to drive meetings. The outside circle portrays three predominant principles that FES consistently reported as meaningful for their family engagement practice: family empowerment, a trauma-informed perspective, and culturally responsive practice.

Conclusions and Implications: The Family Engagement Practice Framework is a practice-based framework developed from the voices of practitioners. Its utility lies in its clarity, given that it provides a comprehensive and succinct picture of critical components of school-based family engagement practice. It may be used to guide professional development activities, as well as to refine existing practice and inform programmatic policies shaping family engagement initiatives in schools. Future research may use the Framework to evaluate specific components of family engagement practice, as well as to target research efforts aimed to identify effective strategies for family engagement.