Most family engagement efforts treat parents as an audience to inform rather than partners to equip. This session walks through a different model — one in which families are positioned as practice partners for reading at home, with classrooms serving as the launch point for instruction and the bridge that connects learning between school and home. Drawing on previous research on Just Right Reader’s Take Everywhere literacy packs and games, the Academic Parent-Teacher Teams (APTT) framework, and school-mediated messaging routed through teachers, we will examine what changes when districts redesign the school-home relationship around shared instructional practice rather than one-way communication. Participants will leave with a practical framework for building family practice partnerships and the implementation evidence to support it.
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Participant Objectives:- Examine common assumptions about family engagement — particularly the belief that engagement means communicating to families rather than equipping them as practice partners — and the impact those assumptions have on what districts invest in and what students ultimately get at home.
- Explore the research base for family-as-practice-partner models, including the APTT framework, the cognitive science of decodable text practice and home reading routines, and evidence from previous research on what makes home-based delivery durable across multilingual contexts.
- Reflect on how family engagement is currently structured in your district — where reading practice actually happens, how materials flow between school and home, and whether families are positioned as audiences or as partners — and identify specific opportunities to redesign the school-home relationship around shared instructional practice.
- Apply practical implementation strategies — quarterly family literacy workshops grounded in APTT, school-mediated messaging that respects rural connectivity, and accumulating home libraries through Take Everywhere literacy packs — to design or strengthen a family practice partnership model in your own district context.
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Credit Reflection Questions: Applying Learning to Practice- What does “family practice partnership” look like in your district today, and what would need to change for families to function as genuine practice partners rather than recipients of communication?
- Where does reading practice actually happen for your district’s students — at school, at home, or somewhere in between — and what does the current distribution suggest about your implementation priorities for the coming year?
- Which element of the home-based delivery model (sending home books, APTT-style workshops, school-mediated messaging, or co-design with families) would most strengthen your current literacy strategy, and what’s the first step you’d take to begin implementing it?
