Family Engagement in Action: Family Engagement Lab

Facilitating at-home activities by text message in each family’s home language to reinforce classroom learning and curriculum

By Elisabeth O’Bryon and Vidya Sundaram June 22, 2021

Family & Community Engagement

This essay and video are part of a series that supplement Embracing a New Normal: Toward a More Liberatory Approach to Family Engagement by Karen L. Mapp and Eyal Bergman, a report commissioned by Carnegie Corporation of New York that explores the dynamics and barriers that stand in the way of effective family-school partnerships and outlines how to reach a more liberatory, solidarity-driven, and equity-focused family engagement practice that supports educational excellence for all children. The essays and videos highlight five grantee partners of Carnegie Corporation of New York that are innovating and leading in the field of family-school partnerships and are rethinking their family engagement practices amid the COVID-19 pandemic and a renewed national reckoning on systemic racism.

At Family Engagement Lab, inequality in family engagement drives our dual focus on empowering historically underserved families to support student learning and modeling inclusive and equitable family engagement for educators. Through our signature tool, FASTalk, we address both objectives. With FASTalk, teachers share engaging, at-home activities by text message in each family’s home language to reinforce classroom learning and curriculum. Features such as opt-out enrollment for families, professional translations, and automated messages aligned with the academic calendar ensure that all families are warmly invited to engage in their child’s learning.

We educate teachers about the benefits of family engagement and offer additional features in FASTalk that support two-way communication with translations. Multiple studies have shown that FASTalk accelerates student literacy growth in diverse contexts, with gains most pronounced for students whose parents do not share a language with their teacher. Importantly, 96 percent of parents want to keep receiving FASTalk messages each year. In achieving these results, we have helped leaders like Superintendent Angela Beck of Redesign Schools Louisiana to “redefine family engagement” by lifting up the valuable contributions all families make to support learning at home.

COVID-19, remote learning, and our national reckoning with racial injustice have prompted many visionary education leaders to address deep fractures in the relationships between families and schools that disproportionately affect students of color. These events have led us as an organization to redouble our commitment to racial equity. In addition, we are developing consulting services to help states and districts implement inclusive, equitable, and sustainable family engagement strategies informed by our experience bringing together cross-functional district teams to implement FASTalk. Our goal is to help systems shift family engagement from a peripheral activity to an essential component of student learning. For those of us who have longed for a platform to speak about and catalyze a response to racial inequity in family engagement, this is our moment to rejoice and find strength in the growing community of education leaders seeking to build a more equitable system for families and students.

Elisabeth O’Bryon and Vidya Sundaram are cofounders of Family Engagement Lab, a national nonprofit that catalyzes equitable family engagement and student learning by bridging classroom curriculum and at-home learning.

Photo Credit: JimmyFam/Getty Images | Video Credit: Carnegie Corporation of New York