Engaging All Families: Creating a Positive School Culture by Putting Research Into Practice

Families are a child's first and best teachers. A significant amount of research exists that strongly links the engagement of families in the educational lives of their children as a strong foundation to the successful achievement of all students. Educators cannot expect total engagement and high standards from students if both families and schools cannot form powerful alliances to guide those students to academic and lifelong success.

Putting research into practice remains one of the most significant barriers to engaging families with schools. School leaders, already stretched thin, struggle to carve out the time and energy necessary to pour through research and create programs to promote family engagement within their school and community. As principal of a large, comprehensive, and diverse high school, Constantino solves this dilemma by providing a step-by-step process for practitioners to create family engagement programs at all levels.

Engaging All Families provides a summary of research that acts as a foundation upon which the practitioner's tools are crafted. Readers are given the resources necessary to assess their present level of family engagement and the ideas, strategies, suggestions, programs, practices, policies, and procedures to implement a wide variety of customized family engagement programs. Numerous resources and references are also included.

As a successful school administrator and nationally known expert in the field of family and community engagement, Steven Constantino builds the bridge from research to practice with Engaging All Families, and provides the information that allows all schools to become family friendly.

Steven M. Constantino, assistant professor at George Mason University, was the principal of Stonewall Jackson High School in Manassas, Virginia, where Stonewall Jackson student achievement consistently improved and the school grew from a troubled school to a school with national and international recognition. In March 2000, Stonewall Jackson High School was listed among the nation's "Top 100 high schools" in Newsweek magazine. The May 2001 issue of Time Magazine announced Stonewall Jackson as its "High School of the Year." Dr. Constantino is the recipient of the Washington Post Distinguished Educational Leadership Award and was voted the Virginia Principal of the Year by the Virginia Counselors Association.

Constantino is also the founder and President of Family Friendly Schools, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to engaging families, students, and communities in the academic achievement of all students. Constantino travels extensively throughout the United States providing keynote speeches, presentations, and workshops on the subject of family partnerships. He has presented at national and regional conferences and was selected by the National Association of Secondary School Principals and the MetLife Foundation to create, organize, and host the first national MetLife Foundation Institute for Family Friendly Schools, which took place in Washington DC, in February 2002.