Family Matters

Series 3 Leaders Coaching Leaders Podcast

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[00:00:00.82] MODERATOR: Welcome to Corwin's Leaders Coaching Leaders podcast with host Peter DeWitt. This podcast is from education leaders for education leaders. Every week, Peter and our guests, get together to share ideas, put research into practice, and ensure every student is learning not by chance, but by design.

[00:00:19.81] TANYA: Hey, Peter. Excited to be here on another episode of Leaders Coaching Leaders.

[00:00:24.88] PETER DEWITT: Hey. Thanks, Tanya. It's always good to see you, and yeah, I feel very fortunate because I just get to moderate conversations and be a learner. And we have so many great guests that we're getting to learn from. And today, Steve Constantino talking about family engagement, which is just such an important topic. It's always been important, but it just feels like a lot better than importance right now.

[00:00:51.37] TANYA GHANS: Yeah. I mean, I'm currently editing a book with Steve, as you might know, and his work ticks off so many important boxes on the checklist, if you will. In terms of timeliness, like you just mentioned, and his care for making sure he's giving leaders on the ground tools that they can use and start to use immediately. Not a quick fix, but start to use right away to really move the needle with family engagement. No one does it quite as well as him. So I think this session really will give people just even a few simple moves that can have dramatic results that are rooted in research. And that's a win-win all the way around.

[00:01:35.59] PETER DEWITT: Yeah, for sure. So let's give listeners the opportunity to learn from Steve Constantino.

[00:01:42.07] TANYA GHANS: Let's get to it.

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[00:01:46.52] PETER DEWITT: So Steve Constantino, welcome to the Leaders Coaching Leaders podcast. We've known each other for a long time. You actually grew up not too far away from where I grew up too--

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[00:01:56.93] --New York state. I don't know if people always know that because they think of you as a superintendent in Virginia and everything else but--

[00:02:03.77] STEVE CONSTANTINO: Right, yeah. The New York roots are always there. It's been a long time since I've been there, but yep, the Capital District is something I know very well.

[00:02:13.52] PETER DEWITT: That's right. So you are the-- there are a few things that I love about your work. Number one, is that you call it family engagement, and you've always been very specific about using the words family engagement. Is there really a main reason why?

[00:02:30.02] STEVE CONSTANTINO: There actually is. Several years ago-- and I don't-- I can't exactly pinpoint when, but there began a transition in research. For many years, we referred to the term as parent involvement. And researchers began-- as research flows-- and it's been flowing for years and years, a couple of discoveries were made. One was that use of the word parent can be extremely limiting when we're dealing with adult caregivers of children because there's a significant percentage of adults caring for children who are not their parents.

[00:03:06.57] And so we-- I think that this work didn't want to pigeonhole or narrow or worse, alienate someone calling them something that they may not be. So research morphed to the word family because it, for lack of a better term, covers everybody. And even students who might be in temporary family situations. At that moment in their life, it's still their family.

[00:03:34.40] I think the other word was replaced or is being replaced or interchanged because there have been a lot of discoveries about involvement, and one of them is, one can be involved but not engaged. And I really think that many times, that's the root of some of the challenges that we have with family engagement. Because someone can come to an event because they feel obligated to support their child, but they may not be engaged with it. So the word engagement hopefully took it to a higher level. So that's where it came from.

[00:04:14.06] PETER DEWITT: No. And I want to be able to go back to that a little bit because I've had some recent experiences where with family engagement, we know that we live in this polarizing political world too. But one of the things that you've recently done-- so your book on family engagement that came out a few years ago that I was honored to actually write the foreword for it, huge seller. And then you ended up doing a second edition, which is something extremely well again.

[00:04:41.75] STEVE CONSTANTINO: Yeah.

[00:04:42.26] PETER DEWITT: Why did you do the-- why the second edition?

[00:04:46.31] STEVE CONSTANTINO: Well, when we work with schools and districts, I like to try to, when possible, implement small action research studies. I like to know what's working? What's not working? What are schools-- what's resonating with schools? What are schools having difficulty with? If I write something, I try to share a concept. And it makes perfect sense to me but makes no sense to anybody else, then we need to make some changes.

[00:05:13.17] So I started soliciting feedback from tons of people about the first edition and got some really good feedback about things that were missing, and I can talk specifically about two of those things as examples, and then also things that just didn't seem to be resonating. People were like, nah, this doesn't really-- this doesn't help me.

[00:05:37.88] And so when the opportunity for the second edition came along, it gave me an opportunity, for lack of a better term, to fix some of the things that I thought needed to be fixed, but also to make some additions. And I'm really happy with the additions we made. One, as a result of the work in the field, we modified the logic model a bit to-- it's a subtle change in words, but I think it's an important change in words.

[00:06:04.07] For example, principle three used to be empowering families. Well, that word was often misconstrued. Empowering meaning giving them a torch to light and storm the best deal. That wasn't the kind of empowering we were talking about. So I went back to the word efficacy and looked at family efficacy. So it changed a little bit there. And then some subtle changes in some other areas about developing relationships as opposed to words that we previously used.

[00:06:36.03] So we had a chance to update the research and update the practice and make it more relevant. I think the second thing, major thing-- and there's lots of little changes and lots of things that are not important to go into now, but two of the big changes were two things that I had heard in my travels. One was, how does this relate to equity? Does family engagement have a role in equity? And, of course, I believe it does very much.

[00:07:00.56] So there was a chapter on disengaged families, and that chapter got significantly expanded to include equity and issues of implicit bias, which also are challenges when we work with families around the country. And I think the second major addition was the addition of a chapter on family engagement at the middle and high school level.

[00:07:25.37] I often joke and say if I had $1 every time somebody said, so how do you engage families at the middle and high school, I'd probably be sailing around the world on my yacht right now. But it seemed needed, so I was very happy that I had a chance now to add that chapter as well. And some other subtle changes, but I was pretty pleased with the second attempt.

[00:07:47.18] PETER DEWITT: No, I think it's great. And I also think it's an important thing that people who may not write books don't always understand. Is that when you write a book and you put it out there and you have this you know what you mean when you're writing it and you do all the things you can to take away the assumptions, sometimes people will just look at the words and run away with a very different meaning despite what you've tried to do to clarify that. So--

[00:08:13.40] STEVE CONSTANTINO: Yeah. And that word empower was-- in place is problematic. And I found myself a lot of times explaining empowerment. And I think I explained it enough to say if I ever get a chance to change it, I think we need to. What we were really talking about was, how do you promote the efficacy of families? How do you empower them to help their own children? I think the subtle word change has made a big difference already. So people get it better.

[00:08:43.58] PETER DEWITT: What lessons have you learned over the past couple of years with the pandemic? I know you've always had your thumb on the pulse of what's going on. What things have you learned about family engagement over the past couple of years during the pandemic? Like, were there any surprises of issues that were coming up or anything like that?

[00:09:04.25] Well,

[00:09:04.61] STEVE CONSTANTINO: There were a couple of things that one could probably expect, I think, and then maybe a surprise or two. I think at the beginning of the pandemic and throughout the first perhaps six to eight months of the pandemic when things were locked down and schools were scrambling and families are scrambling, I think it ripped the lid off of the fact that we may not have engaged as many families as we thought we were. There was a lot of confusion, a lot of-- well, I'm not telling you anything you haven't read and seen and heard. So that probably was to be expected.

[00:09:40.89] I think there was a study done by Learning Heroes, and there were a couple of statistics out of that study that surprised me. Although they shouldn't, but they did. One of them was that-- I don't remember, I think it was hovering around 70% of the families that participated in the study had indicated they had a newfound appreciation for what teachers did in their classrooms, which I think is extremely positive.

[00:10:11.30] But along with that came about the same percentage of families who said, we're getting this higher level of engagement now. Parents are leaning over the Zoom screens and watching school. Parents are now saying, well, in a post-pandemic society, we want the same level of engagement now that we've whet our appetite to knowing what's going on in school today as opposed to never knowing what's going on.

[00:10:38.45] And I think the third thing is that-- the third set of data that wasn't a surprise was just that there's always been a correlation between disengagement and socioeconomic status, for example. And when we saw the more significant learning loss in socioeconomically disadvantaged students, we can correlate that directly to either little or no engagement of their families prior to or within COVID. So I think there's some good news and some challenges that have come out of it.

[00:11:18.00] PETER DEWITT: One of the-- lately with the political polarization, and a friend of mine posted on Facebook yesterday. It was an announcement from a person who's running for school board pretty close to where I am in upstate New York. And one of the things that they wrote is the bullet points for why they need to be on the board, is to give parents a voice in education. Parents finally need to have a voice in education.

[00:11:46.27] It's actually something that I've heard politicians say. We're dealing with New York state, some people are running for governor, and that's the rally cry to giving parents a voice in education. How do you help schools deal with this issue? Because in some ways, I look at it and say, well, there is a voice of families within schools because parents want certain things, but it seems to be like there's just this lightning rod where it comes to families having a voice in education. How do you help superintendents and school building leaders and teachers deal with that kind of political issue?

[00:12:30.96] STEVE CONSTANTINO: That's a great question. And it's a multifaceted question. I think I always start with, what do you mean by voice? Because when I talk about family engagement and voice, I mean a voice in the educational lives of their children, an ongoing role in the educational lives of their children. I don't mean-- choosing my words carefully here, but some people look at this and-- giving power or you have power over curriculum and you have power over this your power of that. That's where this whole political thing has gotten a little bit dicey, I think.

[00:13:11.67] I do believe, however-- and this may be naive, but I do believe that if we could do a better job of engaging the disengaged-- I often say we're very good at engaging the already engaged. If we could do a better job with the disengaged because a lot of the turmoil that we're seeing seems to be coming from portions of communities where families just feel in the dark. They don't feel-- and they see something on the news and that escalates as like a match to a gasoline filled rag.

[00:13:50.46] And all of a sudden now, we're arguing about a book or arguing about something-- this or that, or the other thing. Whereas I think if we could have done a better job of including families in the process of teaching and learning all along, we may have been able to avoid some of this. Now, again, I qualify that by saying, that could be extremely pollyannish and extremely naive, but it makes sense-- it seems to make logical sense to me.

[00:14:21.39] I go back to 1970s when there was racial integration issues, and there was actually a movie made about this particular issue where a community came together in a charrette. Here you had a white population and a Black population, there was no middle. You know and they came together over a series of months to come to commonalities, to talk about commonalities.

[00:14:51.21] And that conversation and the relationships that were built between people who didn't have relationships before, who thought they knew something or had assumed something started to move that school district toward its final vote of resegregate-- I can't think of the word I'm trying to use.

[00:15:17.58] PETER DEWITT: Yeah.

[00:15:18.18] STEVE CONSTANTINO: Desegregating. Thank you. I'm losing command of the English language while I speak. And so I thought that was a very healthy model that we could use. We see a lot of things on television now where families are storming board meetings and they're banging their fists where it's masks or vaccines or curriculum or this or that or the other thing. And I've had so many school boards call me to say, what do we do? What do we do? What do we do.

[00:15:46.86] And I say, well, what's happening in many districts, for example is that they're limiting public comment or they're eliminating public comment or you can only call in or you can only write in, and I think that's exactly the opposite that we should do. I think what we should do is come together as a community and talk reasonably-- set parameters and talk reasonably about our differences, educate one another about things we might not know, and then come to some kind of consensus on what direction we're going to move forward.

[00:16:19.38] If we can desegregate school systems using that process, it seems to me then we could take that very same philosophy and apply it to some of the things that seem to be rather divisive at the moment.

[00:16:32.63] PETER DEWITT: No, I like that. It reminds me a couple of years ago, superintendents were starting to do town halls to help community members understand virtual town halls through Facebook or whatever to help families understand the pandemic and masks and virtual learning, all of that kind of stuff. So it sounds like continuing that process of a town hall.

[00:16:57.86] STEVE CONSTANTINO: Well, yeah. I think take it out of family engagement, put it into leadership theory and organizational theory. And can you name an organization that has ever thrived without strong relationships? I can't think of one, and I think the same thing applies here. We are a relational business. It's what we do. And there are difficulties. There are challenges. I'm not trying to suggest that it's easy, but it can be done and it has been done successfully in a lot of different places.

[00:17:31.80] So having opportunities to engage. And I was talking to one of our client school districts who wanted to do something. And what I said to them was, I think the town hall philosophy is a great idea, but put some structure to it. Because if you don't, you're just going to have a bunch of people yelling at you from the audience, and you're not going to be a whole lot better than it was in the board meeting.

[00:17:56.99] So tell people, this is what we-- here's five questions we want to answer tonight or here's three issues that we have and we would we're going to break into groups and talk about. What do we think about the-- do some kind of a structure so that something productive can come out of it outside of just disagreeing and letting the emotions take over.

[00:18:18.83] PETER DEWITT: Yeah. No, I like that. I think that's great. So I know that with your family engagement work, you've been looking at case study approach. I know you've been looking at those kind of things because of all the great work that's going on all over the place. So ending on the positive, what are things that you're seeing that schools are doing really well? When you're doing your work and you're going to work with these schools and you just thinking, wow, this is what I wish every school was doing, what are some examples of that?

[00:18:50.72] STEVE CONSTANTINO: There are several examples out there. And I think as I have written and been consistent in my thinking is that it really does start with leadership. It starts with somebody who says, we're going this way and this is why. And so in those areas where we have seen strong superintendent support, district organization, understanding that this is not a quick fix strategy but a long term commitment to a culture change, those are the schools and the districts that start to see success.

[00:19:28.85] They start to see differences. They're taking it slowly. The pandemic has, of course, wreaked havoc with everything. And so I'm thinking of one fairly large school district that we work with that could have just thrown their hands up with the pandemic and said, forget this. We'll get to it when the pandemic is over. Well, they doubled down and said, we want to remodel the whole thing so that we can continue this work because they got the idea that maybe now more than ever, this might be important.

[00:20:02.31] And so leadership, culture change, and a willingness-- I really think a willingness to step out of traditional thinking and to examine our own practices. I often talk about-- I'll give an example in a workshop of a pretty typical line in a teacher handbook that says, if a child is going to receive a D or an F, you must call the parent first. And that's a pretty common-- it's a pretty common thought process. Most schools do that.

[00:20:36.98] But I offer-- I said, there's nothing in the handbook that says if a child raises their grade by a letter grade, we must call a parent. So I think if we begin to-- the schools that are examining their own procedures, they're looking through a different lens, they're stepping out of their comfort zone, which isn't easy, I admit and I applaud them for it, they start to see things differently.

[00:20:58.95] They start to understand-- home visits, the schools that embrace home visits, for example, quickest way to dispel assumptions on both sides-- assumptions that we carry as educators that families may carry as us, a 20 minute conversation in someone's living room can literally change the course of a relationship. And almost 100%-- this is research that comes out of the parent teacher home visit project.

[00:21:24.60] Almost 100% of the teachers who were apprehensive about their first home visit at the end of the first home visit wondered why they hadn't been doing this the entire time. The experience they had was nothing like that they had imagined it would be. And so the schools that are doing those things are seeing progress. They're moving forward. They're seeing successes.

[00:21:49.05] There are events that they're hosting for families. We talk about remodeling them a little bit so that they're more inclusive. Schools that are making things available in live streaming and online and ways in which families can connect, I think those are the areas where we're seeing some really, really great successes in engaging families that have traditionally been disenfranchised.

[00:22:13.30] PETER DEWITT: I think what I appreciate about your work and what I respect about your work is, you are giving families voices, I mean, for sure. And you're giving very practical ways and in order to do that. But I also think what you're doing is asking schools to not make the assumption that they always know what families need and to go in as a learner too to say, what can you learn during this process, and you give them a pathway to be able to do that. And I think that can be really powerful.

[00:22:45.19] STEVE CONSTANTINO: There's a quick example of that if I may. I know we're running out of time, but we talk about conferences. That's another thing I hear everywhere I go. Can't get parents to come to conferences. What do we do? What do we do? And I said, why don't you try this. I said, why don't you call the parents and families up prior to the conference, tell them that you're excited about the opportunity to meet with them, and ask them what they'd like to know.

[00:23:09.93] Because we know that engagement research, we have to make things meaningful and relevant to people. And when a parent says to you, well, I don't know that my son is reading well enough. Is he reading well enough? Well, we're going to have that answer for you when you come to the conference. It doesn't preclude us from sharing with families things that we know we should share, but it gets there-- it immediately makes it relevant to them in their child.

[00:23:36.12] And in districts that have applied this simple principle of just that precall invitation questioning have seen anywhere from 15% to 40% increases immediately in the numbers of families attending conferences. So yeah, I think that if we can take-- and sometimes I've been called all kinds of things, the Velvet hammer. I'm not sure all of these names that people have gotten for me. And I certainly don't try to go into a room to alienate educators, but I make it very clear from the beginning that I am here to push you out of your comfort zone, and I am here to have you look at something perhaps differently than you've ever looked at it before.

[00:24:18.21] PETER DEWITT: And I think that's important. You remind me when I was a school principal, I used to flip communication with parents because I felt like I wanted them to know, what are we going to be able to talk about? The parent teacher conference, we're going to talk about your report card. But here are some questions you could ask, but please feel free to bring your questions. And give families time to actually speak instead of being on the receiving end of one sided dialogue. And you do that very well within your work. And I think it's important.

[00:24:53.52] STEVE CONSTANTINO: And a lot of the things-- the experiences that I had in trying to do this myself, I can remember the parent coming in-- the parent was from another country, and they were in school one morning and said hello to me, very happy, very smiley and all. They loved everything. Their son was doing great.

[00:25:11.49] And in back of my mind, I thought, gee, I thought I had heard that this young man was not doing all that well. And so I quizzed the parent and I said, well, how are things going, blah, blah, blah? He said, oh, we saw his report card, and he came home with all F's and we understand that that is the best. And I had to sit him down and explain to him

[00:25:33.13] PETER DEWITT: Yeah that's an awkward conversation.

[00:25:34.72] STEVE CONSTANTINO: --was it really the best? But that one example-- that one experience I had has stuck with me for years and years and years about making assumptions or just putting information out and hoping-- communication, you have to have evidence that a message received, but you also need evidence that a message is understood.

[00:25:58.54] And I think the more we can get to that point so that we are not just making an assumption that everybody knows what we're talking about and that we look at language we look at communication protocols, there's all kinds of things we can talk about. But those little things add up quickly and make people feel much more comfortable in building a relationship with their child's teacher or with their child's school.

[00:26:25.82] PETER DEWITT: I think that is a perfect ending for the conversation. So Steve Constantino, thank you so much with all of your work that you've been doing in family engagement and in general, but thanks for being on the Leaders Coaching Leaders podcast.

[00:26:37.94] STEVE CONSTANTINO: Oh, I'm happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

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[00:26:44.05] PETER DEWITT: So what did you think of the conversation? It was good to talk to Steve because I've known Steve for a long time. He's actually of-- we had something in common. He reached out to me a long time ago when I was writing the "Finding Common Ground" blog for Education Week because he was going to write it-- he was one of the first people to write a guest blog for me, and he told me that he was from-- he grew up probably 20 minutes away from where I grew up.

[00:27:06.99] TANYA GHANS: Yeah. It's a small world that six degrees or seven degrees of separation sometimes gets really small. Yeah, Steve is so great to listen to. And there are so many things that I feel like I could end on or just bring to light as we close on this, but one that really stood out for me is him saying that schools are such a hotbed of so much controversy right now.

[00:27:31.60] And that there can be a temptation to close down and silence voices because it can be frankly quite scary to try to manage people who have such strongly different views, but that we should actually be doing the exact opposite and leaning into discourse. That this is the exact time that structured well facilitated dialogue is called for. And I think again, people who get into his work could really begin to find the tools to do that. And so I thought that that was really profound to tell people that it's actually more talk that we need with each other, but it just has to be talk that is conducive for growth.

[00:28:16.77] PETER DEWITT: Yeah. I certainly appreciated that because he's absolutely right. I think these are conversations we need to be able to talk about. The other thing that I really enjoy about-- that may be the perspective that he has is it's about schools going into the relationship building with families, but they do it from a learner's perspective. And I'm always going to be a big fan of going in as a learner.

[00:28:44.49] I don't want it to be about power and who has more control. I want to know-- I want to-- my best moments with families when I was a teacher and a school principal was when I went in as a learner, and I never have regretted that because it has developed relationships that I still have to this day years and years later.

[00:29:06.67] So I always appreciate the fact that he does that. He talks about how schools can go-- and in the example that he gave when he was talking about home visits. So many times, home visits were almost about scaring families. And when he talks about home visits, it's about learning about the families and building a relationship. So yeah, he just-- he has a lot of really great practical information. He has the credibility to do it because he's been in so many different roles in his life. So really enjoyed that conversation.

[00:29:41.40] TANYA GHANS: Yeah, that was a great one. Well, and I'm looking forward to learning with you again on our next podcast. So--

[00:29:48.09] PETER DEWITT: For sure. Yes.

[00:29:50.07] TANYA GHANS: --until we meet again.

[00:29:51.75] PETER DEWITT: All right. Thank you.

[00:29:53.10] TANYA GHANS: Thanks, Peter.

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