In order to identify research themes and advance further work in the area of family-school partnerships, we interviewed eight prominent researchers who have made substantial theoretical and empirical contributions on family-school partnerships. These scholars generously donated their time to offer their thoughts on research needs and challenges associated with this area. As a first step toward preparing your thoughts for the working meeting, we ask that you read this article and contemplate on the corresponding thought questions before you arrive. There is room to jot down ideas that resonate as you read this piece. A central ingredient to the success of this meeting will be the thoughts that you bring with you, particularly as they relate to the identified thematic issues. We hope this article will aid you in that process.

Future Directions for Family-School Partnerships Research: A Synopsis from Interviews with Experts

Compiled by Carrie Semke, Elizabeth A. Moorman, and Susan M. Sheridan

What are the important next steps that need to be taken to advance research in the area of family-school partnerships? What are the challenges associated with this area of research? These questions weighed on our minds as we began to organize this working meeting on family-school partnerships. As we pondered these issues, we realized that the best place to seek answers to these questions was from individuals grappling with these concerns every day in their own research. Thus, we conducted telephone interviews with eight prominent scholars in the field of family-school partnerships: Sandra Christenson, University of Minnesota; Eric Dearing, Boston College; Joyce Epstein, Johns Hopkins University; Nancy Hill, Harvard University; Kathleen Hoover-Dempsey, Vanderbilt University; Karen Mapp, Harvard University; Brent McBride, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and Robert Pianta, University of Virginia. In addition to the questions listed above, we asked what these researchers viewed as the central issues or topics in family-school partnerships research, contextual issues in need of more attention, and challenges associated with translating research on family-school partnerships into policy and practice.

Not surprisingly, there was substantial overlap among the issues these scholars raised. Although there was variability as well, three central themes emerged from these discussions. First, researchers expressed a need to arrive at a consensus definition of family-school partnerships. Second, processes or pathways by which family-school partnerships contribute to student growth and learning were identified as in need of study. Finally, scholars expressed needs and challenges associated with intervention research aimed at putting family-school partnerships research into practice. Each of these themes was infused with an emphasis on the need for advances in measurement and development of advanced statistical and methodological techniques to capture the complexity of family-school partnership processes and outcomes, as well as the importance of issues of context (e.g., culture, development, setting, and systems).

Below we discuss the most consistent and salient ideas put forth during the interviews. We took each of these themes and translated them into a structure for the meeting. Please use these summaries as an opportunity to reflect on your own views of these issues and as a starting point for our discussions at the upcoming working meeting.

What are family-school partnerships?

The majority of interviewees mentioned that there is a lack of consensus among scholars regarding the definition of family-school partnerships. "If you talk about family-school partnerships and put 20 people around the table, you get 20 different definitions and you get 20 different things that ought to be in the same definition," said Robert Pianta. Similarly, Kathleen Hoover-Dempsey stated, "Parent involvement that makes a difference comes in many forms." Indeed, the diversity of ways that individuals conceptualize family-school partnerships is reflected in the many terms that the interviewees used to refer to these notions: school-family partnerships, family involvement, home-school collaboration, parental involvement, etc. Many scholars voiced the need to find common ground in our definitions in order to move the field forward. Sandra Christenson, in response to what she views as the central issues in family-school partnerships research, noted that, "We are plagued by lack of consensus on a definition." Brent McBride seconded that notion by stating, "There needs to be a more consistent way in which we conceptualize partnerships and define it."

Some individuals went further to advocate a move toward relational definitions of family-school partnerships. "Parent involvement is far more than having an open house and sending home report cards and periodically doing conferences. A partnership involves a relationship," said Hoover-Dempsey. She added, "Family-school relationships are really something where we have to emphasize the relationships factor and the creation of partnerships. In the true meaning of the word 'partnership' you have two participatory, co-controlling partners." Christenson hearkened back to ecological models, referring to family-school relationships as "the best illustration that we have right now, probably, of really using systems theory, of really going back to Bronfenbrenner then and really saying, 'Hey, wait a minute, we have a mesosystem. The relationship's there. This is a very important relationship.'"

Scholars further indicated the ways in which a lack of agreement on how to conceptualize family-school partnerships is limiting our progress. First, a lack of consensus on a definition makes it challenging to synthesize what we know from existing research. "It is very difficult to compare findings across different studies when they have been using different ways to operationalize what they mean when they are talking about partnership activities" said McBride. Second, this lack of consensus can get in the way of translating research to practice. For instance, Christenson indicated that "Different studies define it so differently and until we can get some clarity, how can we expect our parents and teachers to even define it." Third, lack of consensus on a definition leads to measurement problems. For example, family-school partnerships may not look the same across development, and, therefore, may be difficult to conceptualize at different points in development. "A highly involved parent in elementary, then middle, and then high school may look very different even though there is an underlying continuity in being highly involved. It is difficult to capture that while the actual observable construct of how they are involved changes" said Eric Dearing.

So then, how do we measure partnerships? As McBride noted, "We need to move away from just these simple clicks-and-ticks approaches to measuring partnership activities, like how many conferences did you go to with the child's teacher? Or, how many school-based activities did you attend in the past? That is a very limited way of assessing partnerships and I think we need to push the field to go into more depth as to what is really going on with these activities." Pianta further noted the "need to define real concrete examples of activities and then be able to put those on some kind of metric, in a sense, so you can see where there's progress and traction." Indeed, such "traction" is necessary, as Joyce Epstein pointed out, "Family involvement is a really vast topic. When people talk about school improvement, child development, and student learning, there is a family involvement and community connection component hiding in these and every aspect of school life, school work, school improvement, and children's development."

How do family-school partnerships contribute to children's growth and learning?

Interviewees also addressed the need to identify the processes by which family-school partnerships operate to create important child outcomes. Scholars voiced the importance of understanding more fully why families and schools choose to partner. Hoover-Dempsey stressed the need for "accessing some of the psychological mechanisms that help explain why parents are involved or not involved." Dearing further highlighted this gap by stating "We still know very little about how those thoughts, and beliefs, and internal psychological variables that parents have are translated or not translated into behavior within the home or outside of the home." He went on to say, "This is a black box issue between the ways parents think and feel about education, their children, and their own abilities to be involved, and how that gets translated into action." In addition, interviewees highlighted the need to understand how the benefits of family-school partnerships are transmitted to children. Hoover-Dempsey stated, "What's really important in parent involvement is not so much the specific activity that the parents are engaging with the student, but rather… How does the involvement get into the kid? How does it happen that the parents' involvement has some impact on the students' learning?" She went on to add, "We need to understand how kids are processing what parents are doing before you can fully understand how and why it is having an impact on their learning – or why it's not having an impact on their learning."

However, uncovering these pathways can be challenging due to their complexity. For instance, interviewees were unanimous in their assessment of the importance of context. "Context is huge. Context matters a lot and I think this is the whole debate around the impact of context. That is something that definitely has to be discussed or considered," said Karen Mapp. Similarly, Dearing stated, "The contexts that homes and schools are embedded in are critically important to understanding the role of family educational involvement. Context is a critical piece of the story," What also emerged from the interviews was the multi-faceted nature of context. As Epstein expressed, "You can talk about this topic by grade level. We must understand what involvement activities are appropriate for children's learning and development in infancy, preschool, elementary, middle, and high school. You can talk about it by family background. We must understand what involvement activities will assist parents with very little formal education, a fair amount of formal education, advanced formal education, and those who do and do not speak English at home. There are many ways to understand, study, and implement family and community involvement."

Several influential aspects of context emerged from the interviews. Pianta stressed the importance of culture in these processes, stating "Partnerships have to be very, very embedded in the culture. Whether it's urban, whether it's rural, or whether it's suburban. These things drive off of culture. They operate within the culture, they try to steer the culture, they try to organize cultures together." Several scholars touched on the developmental context within which partnership activities take place. "Sometimes people have trouble shifting how our families and schools should interact as a function of students' development. So you can get to middle school and we're still treating kids like they're in elementary school when in fact we probably should be very concerned at that point about the choices kids are making and giving the students some autonomy," said Christenson about family-school partnerships across development. Epstein pointed out the need for future research in this area, particularly at transitional points in development, "When kids move from preschool to elementary, elementary to middle, middle to high – those are danger points for family and community involvement to decline." Several researchers also emphasized the importance of neighborhood and community context. Nancy Hill stated, "Neighborhood context and the extent to which schools are part of a community and the extent to which families feel that the school is part of their community [are important contextual influences]. So, for example, we think about policies to assure diversity of various types in schools, tend to use bussing and other kinds of districting to create these diverse schools, but it often advantages some groups and disadvantages other groups in terms of feeling like they're going to a neighborhood school. And that's going to have an impact on how welcome parents feel, how easy it is for parents to access the school and access the teachers."

The complexity of process issues also emerged via methodological considerations. Many scholars noted the need to advance our methods to match the intricacy of these processes. "What we need to do is examine some of these things over time, and not satisfy yourself with those things that we have been able to do so far which are, perhaps, short-term or cross-sectional comparisons, but pretty much correlational with a little bit looking towards mediational analyses to see how some variables in the model mediate the impact of others," noted Hoover-Dempsey. Dearing also commented, "Where do we go in terms of trying to understand the really complex reciprocal processes, not just between parents and children, but when we add the triangle of the school? And understanding what economists call positive and negative feedback loops that we hope are occurring to promote achievement? But I don't think that, even with some of the more sophisticated path analyses, that we are really able to demonstrate that yet."

What are needs and challenges associated with translating evidence-based practices into applied field settings?

Interviewees also stressed the importance of more intervention work in this area. As Christenson stated, "We simply need more intervention studies." Such research is often quite complicated, given that family-school partnerships are often embedded among other components of intervention programs, frequently making it difficult to determine the unique effect of partnership activities. As Christenson stated, "I think we have lots of discrete programs that have a family involvement component and we can't isolate the effect of the family involvement. I think that's a critical point that plagues the research base in this field." Mapp added, "We know a lot about the impact of family engagement on development, but in terms of looking at practices and initiatives and [their] impact on student outcomes and other things, we don't have as much current data as we'd like."

In addition to the need for more intervention research, interviewees highlighted the challenges associated with putting such programs in place. "Implementation is everything," stated Epstein as she expressed the importance of applying research findings on school-family-community partnerships to real-world settings. Many interviewees identified multiple implementation challenges associated with effective translation from research to practice, including school culture and system readiness, fidelity, and sustainability. For example, Mapp touched on systemic challenges, "I do think that we have to start to present the data or talk about this as a systemic reform. One of the sayings that our group [National Family, School, and Community Engagement Working Group] has picked up on is we sometimes study random acts of family engagement; we're not really looking at systemic strategies. To move this agenda forward we're going to have to be pushing a more systemic look at family and community engagement, district-level, system-level strategies." Epstein pointed out concerns about the sustainability of partnership programs, "Sustainability is a huge challenge. The organization of schools and districts in the real world is in constant flux. People leave, people move, people get promoted, people retire. Just as they are building expertise, they may disappear from view. Consequently, the sustainability of partnership programs is difficult. Good research and well-implemented practice isn't enough. It really takes persistent attention and investments on both sides. On the research side, it is always about picking the right next question, and on the practical side it is about intentional leaders who say, 'Yes, we want this to be a sustainable program.'"

It was also clear that there are multiple issues that still need to be explored or refined in understanding how to move research into practice. For example, Mapp shared, "I think the biggest challenge is that in many cases in our research institutions we don't value the voice of practitioners. So unless we put together more sort of cross-role, cross-functional teams when we do this research we'll continue to report it in a way that it doesn't ever reach the field." Pianta called for a set of clear, research-based indicators to improve family-school partnerships, "We haven't got a very clearly defined set of indicators and evidence of traction in ways that actually translates into better outcomes for kids. We all say this stuff works and I think we do that with a fair amount of confidence in the fact that there is evidence for that in cases and communities and centered around individuals who are good at this. But I think in terms of translating that into a real science that then says, 'Hey look, we know these things from these studies and these are the five key indicators and you can do these things to make progress on this stuff.' We don't have that."

Research-based methods to train school personnel were also identified as an area of future need to effectively and sustainably translate research to practice. Christenson discussed this issue from a systemic perspective, "Family-school partnerships, that's not owned by school psychology or it's not owned by principals, or it's not owned by teachers. It truly is all of the personnel and if we're going to impact training efforts, which is something that is tremendously needed. People believe in these, and they want to partner with families but they don't necessarily know how and we don't have a good infrastructure for training. If we want to have a major impact we have to be working, I believe, at our state departments of education and then somehow we have to interface back at the federal level. And the more we can be doing at the federal level the better." Similarly, McBride commented on training programs for teachers, "Teacher education, or teacher prep programs, there is so much that most state boards of education try to cram into them, and there is limited flexibility on how you can help prepare future educators to work with families. As we think about better preparing teachers for facilitating home-school partnerships, we have to educate future teachers about what families really look like, how do they function, what roles do members of the family play, how do you establish relationships and communication patterns with families?"

What next?

Each of us may have an individual answer to the question of "what next" and we hope this working meeting will provide the context for leading researchers in the field to develop a cohesive agenda setting forth next steps for research in the area of family-school partnerships. We expect these interviews will provide a common frame for our discussions at the working meeting. It is clear from these interviews that we know a great deal about family-school partnerships, but that there is much more to learn. We look forward to your attendance and participation at the meeting and thank you for your commitment to advancing the research in this field.