In out-of-school care centres in Flanders, building warm and trusting relationships with parents is both an important aim and a huge frustration. Practitioners often struggle with their role towards parents and feel insufficiently trained to deal with increasing expectations about cooperation with parents. In this article we describe the results…

Individual-level score reports represent a common artifact in teacher-parent communication about standardized tests. Previous research has documented challenges in communicating student achievement. Researchers have also leveraged teachers in the process of score report design. Little is known, however, about teachers' experiences with using score…

In this article the Second Edition of Essential 5 emphasizes the values of "Collaborative Research and Inquiry" as a critical part of PDSs. Collaborative research and inquiry should involve participants from both colleges and universities as well as those who work primarily in P-12 contexts. The Second Edition of Essential 5 of the…

This article reports on an Australian project involving preschool and kindergarten children learning about 'giving' and the environment. Teachers designed learning modules based on the Learning by Design framework, which views pedagogies as knowledge processes, and conducted action research to explore the impact of learning about 'giving' on…

This article reports on findings from a year-long research project conducted during the 2012-2013 school year in a PK-12 school district, located in the Mountain West region of the United States, utilizing the Photovoice method. The findings in the project point to the important critical counter-narratives Spanish-speaking immigrant parents…

Based on two case studies of Third Sector Organizations (TSOs) working with schools and parents in Catalonia and London, this paper aims to discuss some of the implications of "participative" programmes aimed at involving those migrant families seen by schools as "hard to reach". First, we describe how an ambiguous notion of…

This community-based, participatory action research study examined the outcomes of parent participation in the Best Classroom Project, an organized group of parents in Detroit seeking the best school options for children about to enter kindergarten. These parents' residency and school choices have emerged against the grain of public schools that…

This article deals with parental involvement as a strategy to assist young learners in their efforts to learn an L2. It discusses an 18-month experience involving ten young learners, their parents, and teachers, in the development of another language (L2). The parents had expressed that they were unable to support their children's development in…

The educational approach views the community of practice as a community of teachers and students who share common rules and values, information and experiences through dialogue and collaboration. Three doctoral theses are in progress at the University of Athens which study the possibilities of creating a community of practice in three different…

Although many have documented the high value Latino families place on education, prevalent discourses nonetheless characterize Latino immigrant parents as not caring about their children's education. This paper describes the practice-based components of a participatory action research project in which we created a collaborative film, intended for…

Parental involvement (broadly defined as including both natural parents and other significant adults) has been consistently shown to produce positive results in students' literacy achievement, and there is widespread agreement among parents and school personnel about the value of parental involvement in education. However, educators do not…

This article reports the challenges of race and social class in an action research project to facilitate educational change through community collaboration with African American parents, community organizations, and public schools. This project was undertaken in Charlotte, North Carolina to enhance the participation of African American parents in…

Outcomes of a parent/teacher action research project, the League of Schools Reaching Out, are described in this paper. The League is a group of nine schools working with the Institute for Responsive Education and the Center on Families, Communities, Schools, and Children's Learning as a resource exchange network. Project goals are to: investigate…

A focus-group study recently surveyed 111 parents concerning the type, frequency, and reason for their involvement in their children's education and major barriers and facilitators to such involvement. To improve parent participation, educators must clarify how and why parents can be involved, build on parent involvement at school programs, create…

Discusses collaboration between the Research and Development Center and the Institute for Responsive Education and its national reform project called the League of Schools Reaching Out. League seeks to show how school-family-community partnerships can contribute significantly to school restructuring or reform aimed at increasing all children's…