As the second semester is underway, many K-12 leaders continue to face challenges with high levels of absenteeism. While educators understand that getting students into the classroom is often the most critical first step to improving student outcomes, they also realize that many traditional practices for improving attendance are just not moving the needle. Making things even more challenging is the fact that many of these traditional practices are time- and resource-intensive.
While there is no single solution, TalkingPoints recently shared some actionable strategies to unlock the superpowers of family engagement and boost attendance by partnering with families.
Here is a recap of the six steps for engaging families to boost attendance and drive positive student outcomes and how the TalkingPoints Universal Family Engagement platform can help.
Step 1: Meet families where they are and ensure access
Partnering with families helps support students and drive student outcomes, but it can be hard to ensure that we’re reaching everyone in ways they can access.
The first step to building trusting family-school partnerships is to remove barriers and help ensure families have a seamless and inclusive engagement experience.
Some of the most common challenges families may face include:
- Language barriers
- Technology barriers
- Capacity / Time barriers
- Culture barriers
- Mindset barriers
- Understanding barriers
By default, the TalkingPoints Universal Family Engagement platform helps ensure access for all families through two-way text messaging that is automatically translated in 150+ languages and getting started is simple and easy for families – no wifi, smartphone or computer needed.
The short, speedy and informal nature of text messaging makes it easier for families to engage when they may not be able to attend certain events or even answer a phone call during the day.
Step 2: Support families in understanding
Trusting relationships are most easily built through regular interactions. However, if messages aren’t understood, then it can be confusing for families and can take a lot of time to clear up.
Making sure that the messages sent to families are understood, TalkingPoints has built-in features throughout our platform to support families and their understanding of the sometimes complex U.S. education system. These robust supports include:
- Best-in-class translations supported by human and custom machine translation specially trained and tuned for K-12 education.
- Parent Ed101 highlights and explains educational terms with one click
- Help Me Understand features offer additional context to explain the message’s meaning with recommended next steps
- In-app education glossary helps ensure that translations are fine-tuned for the educational context of many family messages
- Document translation enables school staff to automatically translate and send an attachment of everyday “backpack” information that schools send home such as newsletters, invitations, and flyers.
Step 3: Educate families on the importance of attendance
Attendance issues are larger than ever and families may not understand the effects of regular attendance on student outcomes or know how to support it.
Good attendance is the foundation and often a dependency for the effectiveness of nearly every other school-based support. Measuring and reporting on absences alone does not change attendance behaviors. Effective methods of addressing attendance issues are proactive, rooted in a better understanding of students and their families, and can result in more trusting relationships between schools and families.
To help tap into this power of families to improve attendance, TalkingPoints has built in several key features to teach families about the importance of attendance and to streamline reporting of absences or attendance challenges.
Attendance reporting is simplified and streamlined with TalkingPoints. Schools and districts can leverage the two-way text messaging and translations to allow families to share attendance updates in their home language at any time. Not only does this reduce the number of phone calls to school office staff, the text-based format helps schools analyze attendance data and address the root causes of attendance issues.
TalkingPoints has also created an attendance messaging series to help educate families on the importance of attendance and how to support it at home. With calendarized and ready-to-use best practice messages, schools can send out the cadence of attendance-related reminders and tips as is or they can modify the pre-built messages to better meet their needs.
Step 4: Reach all families
We know the importance of reaching every family, but it can be time- and resource-intensive to keep track of and to know which families aren’t responding.
For teachers, especially those managing multiple classes, determining which families are not engaging – either because they have not received a direct message or they have not responded to messages – can be arduous and time-consuming. This difficulty makes it challenging to effectively recognize and address the obstacles preventing family engagement.
To remove this barrier and make it easier for teachers to ensure they are reaching and engaging with all families, TalkingPoints surfaces key family engagement insights in the TalkingPoints for Teachers application. Teachers can easily find information about families that are not being engaged and access a family contact list to target outreach to engage or reengage families.
Step 5: Embed capacity-building tools for staff
Family engagement can be powerful, but there are so many initiatives and staff time is a precious, limited resource. Building capacity and family engagement “muscle” needs to be job-embedded to be doable.
Family engagement best practices are not always known and putting them into practice can also be challenging and time-consuming. To help build teacher capacity and knowledge in the area without taking up more of teachers’ time, TalkingPoints has incorporated best practice tips right in the platform. These weekly just-in-time tips offer guidance and provide ready-made, best-practice messaging templates to help encourage ongoing family engagement.
Step 6: Support staff in creating best practice messages
Writing a best practices message to families can be a difficult thing to do with all of the other work school staff have on their plates.
Time is a scarce resource in many schools for teachers and staff. Even though most school staff understand the importance and value of engaging with families and communicating in ways that align with family engagement best practices, they often do not have the time or training to do so effectively. Like many of us, they may also not feel confident in communicating with families about difficult topics.
To help teachers and school staff build their capacity in family engagement communication best practices, TalkingPoints has Message Mentor. Message Mentor is like a built-in helper that allows teachers to level up their family messages with a click of a button. With options for spelling and grammar check, revision recommendations based on best practices, and even starting a message from scratch, Message Mentor is a teacher-favorite guide-on-the-side.
Research has shown that effective family engagement can help improve student attendance and other student outcomes as well. These 6 tips will help you unleash your family engagement superpower today!
Watch the webinar to identify actionable strategies to unlock family engagement superpowers and boost attendance.
