Engage! All Families Legacy Leadership Series

Family Engagement begins with the attitudes and actions of leaders. The “Legacy Leadership” Series is designed to introduce and teach critical components of Family Engagement for leaders to ensure the successful learning outcomes of all students.

How Family Engagement Supports Learning Outcomes for All Students: An introduction for School and District Leaders.
This seminar is designed as the introductory seminar for school and district leadership who have not participated in the FFS Engage! All Families Workshop Series. Research and practice are shared to show the effectiveness and power of real family engagement and its positive impact on the achievement and learning outcomes for all students. The seminar focuses on the needed change in organizational culture and the necessary steps which when implemented provide the engagement of families that supports all children.

Building Effective Family Relationships Through Explicit Public Relations
Public relations programs are often thought to simply be programs of sharing news. Real public relations is much more than communicating, it is about building relationships with families and communities and including them in the vision and operation of the school. This seminar teaches leaders successful practices for relating schools to families and creating avenues to build bridges between all families for the support of all children.

Family Engagement and School Governance: Giving Families Real Opportunities to help shape education
Almost every school and district has some form of governance model that includes families. In order for family participation on councils and advisory committees to be relevant, school leaders must learn how to engage them in ways which are meaningful. This seminar will teach leaders practical strategies that encourage involvement from all families in school governance and how to move beyond involving the engaged parent to reach out to the disenfranchised parent.

All Families Mastery Learning Seminar Series is designed for teachers and administrators to understand the important relationships between engaging families in the educational lives of children and the successful learning outcomes of those children. Each seminar is focused on a specific topic of individual and organizational mastery that is important to the overall success of a school.

Re-engaging High School Students with Learning Through Explicit Family Engagement Strategies
Before all students can learn, they must be engaged with their learning. With alarming rates of student disengagement plaguing literally every high school, this seminar is an essential experience for all teachers and administrators. The focus of this seminar centers on the notion that high school students must be engaged to achieve, and that engagement requires more than classroom reform strategies. This can be accomplished only when families are engaged in the academic and social-emotional lives of their children. This session offers a practical introduction to the Five Forces for Student Achievement, based on the successful research model designed by Dr. Steven M. Constantino and gives participants a chance to begin understanding those practical applications of family engagement that support the successful engagement and eventual achievement of all students.

Closing the Gap Once and For All: Improving African American Student Achievement Through Family Engagement
At the core of every reform effort in education is the explicit idea of closing the gap that exists everywhere between African American Students and their Caucasian counterparts. African American student achievement continues to lag behind at alarming rates. This seminar focuses on teaching educators how to work with African American families to raise the achievement of African American students… once and for all.

I Want a Better Life for My Child: Raising Achievement Levels of Hispanic/Latino Students Through Strong Family Engagement
Hispanic/Latino families desire their children to be successful. Our schools must create structures, processes, and explicit interventions with these families so that all of our Hispanic/Latino students can and will be successful This seminar addresses the dynamics of engaging with Hispanic/Latino families, as well as providing explicit interventions, ideas, and strategies, to measure and increase learning outcomes of all Hispanic/Latino students.

Successful Strategies to Reach and Teach Children in Poverty Through Effective Family Engagement
Research proves that children of poverty can learn as well as any other child, if they are engaged. Unfortunately, many of our schools experience an alarming gap between socio-economically disadvantaged students and their more affluent counterparts. This seminar will train teachers and administrators in providing explicit family engagement that measurably increase the learning outcomes of all disadvantaged children and children of poverty.

Succeeding with All Special Education Students through Explicit Family Engagement
Family Friendly School understands that special education students achieve when processes include families as educational partners. This seminar is designed to bridge the significant achievement gap between special education students and their counterparts by providing strategic processes to: identify these students, navigate the parent paper trail, involve parents in the individual education plan (IEP), create sound instructional strategies that include families, develop parent/family support groups and ambassador programs, and create outreach initiatives to simplify the entire special education process for parents/families and their children.

Research in the area of family engagement supports the idea that parents and families can and do support their children when they have more information about their children's expectation. The “Meeting the Standards” series focuses on family engagement with standards, testing and models for school improvement.

Standards, Test Scores and NCLB: How Family Engagement Supports Successful Outcomes for All Students
Research clearly shows that families are not in a position to support their children's learning when they do not understand the ever-increasing standards their children must achieve. Many NCLB directives focus on the roles of families in education. Schools not meeting AYP are required to incorporate Family Engagement into their long-term improvement plan. This interactive seminar equips teachers and administrators with the tools to implement explicit and tested family engagement strategies to meet and exceed the requirements of NCLB and to involve all families in understanding and using test scores to improve student achievement.

Including Real Family Engagement in Your Professional Learning Community
The professional learning community is seen as a powerful staff development approach and a potent strategy for school change and improvement. The literature on professional learning communities repeatedly gives attention to five attributes of such organizational arrangements: supportive and shared leadership, collective creativity, shared values and vision, supportive conditions, and shared personal practice. It is essential for schools who seek high performance to understand how families must be explicitly included in the PLC philosophy. This seminar will teach educators how to effectively incorporate family engagement into the PLC process to further enhance its success.

From Standards to Family Engagement: Creating Interactive Lesson Designs that Incorporate Supportive Home Learning Practices
This seminar is a must for all teachers! Family Friendly Schools teaches participants how to “begin with the end in mind” by using state and local curriculum standards to develop lessons that are inclusive of families. State standards and local curriculum objectives are used to help educators design instruction and independent practice that supports effective family engagement and home learning environments. Numerous ideas are shared in this seminar that will significantly enhance parent/family support and involvement in the success of every child.

Two-way unobstructed communication between homes and schools provides the foundation of successful Family Engagement. The “Effective Communication” series focuses explicitly on important aspects of communication that enhance the building of meaningful relationships with families that support the learning of all students.

Improving Communication with All Families
The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it is actually taking place. Almost universally, teachers and administrators are frustrated by the lack of communication and participation of many parents and families in the educational lives of their children. The reasons are varied but the resolutions are simple: improve the ability for schools and families to have frequent and consistent two-way communication and improve relationships to support learning outcomes of all children.

Working with Difficult and Angry Families
Anger is a mask for fear. This important seminar teaches educators how to work with families in frustrating conditions and situations. Research-based practices, practical applications, and numerous specific ideas are shared in order to arm educators with the tools necessary to turn rage into hope and help all children and families be successful in school.

Effective Family Communication with Newsletters and Websites.
Most schools cannot afford professional newsletter and web site publications. This seminar shares tested and proven frameworks and strategies to design effective newsletters and website. Participants are encouraged to bring computers to work on actual documents as the seminar shares important design information. The Family Friendly Website Checklist is also distributed and used to help schools design websites that are helpful to families.