Special education teacher collaboration with families is essential to supporting students with disabilities, yet such partnerships often fall short in practice, and teachers report they are not adequately prepared to work with families. In order to prepare competent teachers for working with families, a Family Collaboration Project was…

One way to improve the quality of family engagement in K-12 U.S. public schools is by ensuring beginning teachers are well prepared to engage with their students' families. To ensure this, teacher educators and policymakers first need to know what works in preparing preservice teachers for effective family engagement. This systematic review…

Assessment in special education is a shared practice by a number of professionals. Educational diagnosticians are one such group of licensed professionals who assess students to determine eligibility and service recommendations. This study examined educational diagnosticians' perceptions of their role in fostering home--school collaborations. In…

We conducted a qualitative study using key informant interviews with 18 teachers and 39 parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) about how they would envision their ideal interactions with each other. Four main themes emerged from our content analysis. Parents and teachers were concerned about different aspects of communication with…

This article describes the development and evaluation of a classroom-based, low-cost intervention to increase parents' involvement in their children's education. In Phase 1 of the study, 17 parents of 8th grade students in a low-income, high immigrant and minority school district were interviewed to conduct a qualitative assessment of factors…

Involvement by the adult community in schools and students' lives is an effective way to increase student attendance, boost morale, and improve students' perceptions about their school experience. This study examined a two-year comprehensive community intervention initiative within a high-risk junior high school, measuring its impact on student…

This paper examines the results of a methodology used with teachers for an inservice continuing education program aimed at strengthening school-family connections. The question guiding this research was, "Did the adoption of a constructive-collaborative model involving a university-school partnership and based on strengthening school-family…