Promising Practices for Family Involvement in Schools

This volume will address major frameworks for understanding family involvement and government support of family involvement projects in the initial chapters. The following six chapters present a theoretical base for understanding school, family, and commu-nity partnerships and research supporting promising practices. Included within each chapter are examples of research in action, focusing on spe-cific interactive activities or programs designed to bring families and schools together. Such promising practices are organized into chapters dealing with two-way home-school communication, family literacy projects, school-site parent centers, parent- school collaborative governance, and family-school education programs spanning infancy through young adult-hood. The monograph concludes with a chapter on teacher preparation for work with family, school, and community partnership issues.

Besides their research expertise, each author brings a unique back-ground as classroom teacher, parent, and community social advocate to their writing. Individually, most of us have spent our early professional years within the classroom, acquiring the value of connecting home with school for the benefit of the children. As parents and grandparents, we have advocated for parental interests within the school. As community advocates, we strive for collaborative communication across groups who serve children and their families. We invite you to share our passion for working with families and community groups within our schools.

Gary Thomas took up the post of chair in education at Birmingham in 2005. Before university teaching, he worked as a teacher and as an educational psychologist. In higher education – at the University of Leeds, at Oxford Brookes University, UWE and University College London – his teaching and research have focused on inclusion, special education, and research methodology in education. He has received awards from the ESRC, the Nuffield Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, the DfES, Barnardos, the Cadmean Trust, local authorities and a range of other organisations. Most of his funded research has been on inclusive or special education, though his Leverhulme Research Fellowship was awarded to examine the role of theory in education. He currently leads an ESRC thematic seminar competition in the Teaching and Learning Research Programme on the assessment of quality in educational research. He is the founding co-editor of a Taylor & Francis Carfax journal, the International Journal of Research and Method in Education and he is an editorial board member of the British Educational Research Journal.