Before we begin, as we launch into the presentations, I want to start by sharing participation guidelines with you. As you may have noticed, as participants, you will be in mute mode throughout the webinar. However, there are a number of ways to participate actively. Between each presentation, we will offer brief polling questions that will be flashed on the screen for about 20 seconds, give you a chance to quickly respond, and then we will show that response before we move on to the next presentation. So please do participate in the polling questions. At the end of the webinar, as I mentioned, we will also have a question and answer session in anticipation of that. You will note that you are able to enter questions in the chat box on the right of your screen. These will be addressed as we're able to through the question and answer session. Finally, you can follow and respond to this webinar on Twitter at number Pritay-3rd. So here we go. Today, this is the third in an eight-part webinar series. For the full schedule, you can visit our website, which is listed on the screen. Our focus is on family engagement. As the presenters move forward, we will provide perspectives from researchers, local groups, and school districts on how to build partnerships between families and schools with a specific emphasis on the very early years of education, Pre-K through third grade. As we do that, just to give a brief overview, as many of you know, in considering a Pre-K through third approach, one of our big challenges and opportunities is to really build a special Pre-K through third culture. An important part of this is a commitment to collaborative forms of professionalism, as we really try to weave together the cultures of early childhood and K-12 education and combine those cultures in a Pre-K third approach. A very essential part of this is to extend this thinking about collaboration and collaborative ways of working, to our ways of relating with children and families. One thing you'll note today as we move through the webinar is, excuse me, the terms parent involvement, parent education are being dropped in favor of the term family engagement. This is not just new jargon for the same old ways of doing business, but really represent a whole new outlook on how we can and must engage families in our work as educators. In my experience, both as a teacher educator and a school administrator, there are a few topics that arouse as much passion, both positive and negative, often as the topic of working with families. I think this passion definitely will show through as we work across the presentations in today's webinar and as we also see evidence of the benefits for all of us weaving across all of the presentations today. So with this in mind, let's move forward with a quick polling question and start our first presentation. As we wait for those results off, there they are. You can see that we have teachers and administrators at both the early childhood elementary levels, followed by family engagement coordinators and outreach coordinators, and then it looks like a wealth of other individuals with us today. That's terrific. We have the pleasure, with our first presentation, in having Christine Patton with us to set the stage for thinking about family engagement, family school partnerships. Christine is the senior research analyst for the Harvard Family Research Project. So welcome, Christine. Thanks, Chris, and thank you all for being here. So my goal for the next 10 minutes or so is to set the stage for my co-presenters by grounding their work in a larger body of knowledge and research related to family engagement. And I also hope that this stage setting will prompt an action or a reaction from you all in the audience in relation to the work that you are currently doing or are thinking about doing with families. So I want to start by making three points. One, children learn in multiple spaces. So they learn in the classrooms and auditoriums of their schools. They learn in the living rooms and backyards of their homes. They learn on websites and by engaging with apps and mobile devices. And they learn in museums and aquariums and in an array of other community settings. While the focus of this webinar is the bridge between the home space and the school space, for schools wishing to engage in partnerships with families, they must be willing to talk to families about the multiple places in which children learn. And they must be willing to engage with the resources and personnel in these other settings in order to enhance children's learning. Point two, children learn from multiple teachers. All of the multiple spaces I just mentioned have their own form of educators within them. And point three, family engagement is more than a one-time project or an add-on effort. So these three points are reflective of a larger reframing of families and the work that we do with them. In this reframing, families are not viewed as bystanders that passively receive ideas from educators. Rather, within this reframing, working with families is viewed as a shared responsibility among all of the adults in a child's life. So this represents a shift away from an attitude of blame and an it's your fault mentality to a we're in this together mentality in which teachers and parents have complementary roles. The second element in this reframing lies in understanding that family engagement is continuous across the lifespan. So we often think about working with families in early childhood or kindergarten, but we shouldn't think about it in this way. It's not something that only happens in these early education spaces. It instead spans from birth to early adulthood. Finally, with this last element, family engagement is viewed as something that is reinforced in multiple settings where children learn. So with this reframing, by removing the bystander passive recipient label from parents, we position them to take on and be seen in multiple roles. Without this restrictive bystander label, families can be seen as teachers, supporters, data gatherers, partners, leaders, and advocates. And when we partner with families and truly engage with them as partners, as teachers, as data gatherers, and as advocates, everyone benefits. Children benefit, families benefit, and programs and schools benefit. For example, increases in family involvement in school predicts increases in literacy achievement and social skills. And this is especially true for children from low income families. It's associated with greater school readiness as reported by teachers on measures of initiative and interpersonal competence in preschool and for families. When families are actively engaged in their children's learning environments, they share the same language and knowledge of the school's landscape with their children. And this shared meaning can come in the form of shared stories, perhaps from a day when the family member participates in the classroom as a parent mentor or shared language. So knowing, for example, the name of the disciplinary system that the school uses, or the song that the teacher sings to signal that it's time to clean up, can translate into meaningful discussions in the home and create a bridge between home and school. For families, it's also associated with increased social network and increased social capital. Finally, programs benefit from family engagement as it has been found to be associated with improved school climate conditions and policies within the school and at the district level. So to get at these benefits, schools need to commit to partnering with families through the use of interconnected and strategic efforts. So having some state and federal policies in place around family engagement may be one way of jump-starting these efforts. However, schools need to commit to translating these policies into meaningful practices. So promising ways of doing so include having a shared vision of family engagement. So this vision is one that's known and understood by administrators at all levels, teachers and families. Another promising practice is having purposeful connections to learning so that the family engagement efforts are not seen as an add-on or something that happens after school or before school. Making investments in high-quality programming and staff. So staff who are excited about partnering with families. Having a robust communication system that cuts across all stakeholders. And finally, having an evaluation system for accountability and continuous learning. One that has data about family engagement and that data is used to make school-wide decisions and improve practices. So this is just a subset of some promising practices and you're going to hear more from my co-presenters as we move through this webinar. And some of these promising practices can be found in a resource that I want to highlight. Seeing and is believing promising practices for how school districts promote family engagement. And you can go to this resource to see how these promising practices are actually translated in the field. I also want to highlight a couple of more resources here. The first one, Family Engagement in Early Childhood. It's a resource guide that we developed for the Early Learning Challenge Grant Recipients that wrote to engaging and supporting families. But it can be used by anyone with an interest in revamping or continuing to support their family engagement work. Next, the Head Start Family and Community Engagement Framework. Then the Family Involvement Network of Educators. It's a quarterly newsletter that highlights the best information about family engagement. And then finally, State Laws on Family Engagement and Education is a reference guide that was developed by PTA about just that, the State Laws on Family Engagement and Education. So I just want to leave you with these resources to conclude and I will have my contact information up here on the screen for you and I will pass it on to the moderator and next co-presenter. Thank you. Thank you, Christine, for laying that excellent foundation for our consideration of family engagement today. Our participants will see on the screen a very quick polling question. Again, to have you weigh in as you begin to consider new and different or perhaps enhancing some of the strategies you're already using around family engagement. All right, and you will see on the screen creating a welcoming culture, more than a one-time effort as Christine talked about, continuous efforts over time with certainly a starting plan that most people noted as very critical, following establishing connections very early in children and teachers and schools life before we start the kindergarten year. Now, we move forward to our second presentation, which comes to us from Mimi Howard. Mimi is the National Head Start Fellow in the Office of Head Start, the Administration for Children and Families in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. As you know, Head Start has been a historic case setter in our connections with children's families and Mimi will share with us how Head Start is building upon its existing work to promote partnerships as children transition from Head Start programs into school systems. Thank you, Mimi, for joining us. Thank you, Christine. Hello, everybody. Thanks for being here this afternoon. I want to build, first of all, on what Christine has just laid out for us and also want to let you know that all of the things that you checked as being important ways of engaging families will be talked about hopefully within the next 10 minutes. So here we go. I'm wanting to introduce to you a new resource that's recently been developed by the Office of Head Start that's been developed to help programs find effective ways to partner with elementary schools to increase the localities across their two systems. I'm going to spend a few minutes talking about the guide itself, which is called Partnerships for Sustain Learning, a guide to creating Head Start school partnerships and how that can be used to increase continuity across early learning programs in the early grades of elementary school. Then I'll end by spending just a few minutes talking in more depth about how family engagement in particular plays a central role in this guide. So the Partnership Guide really comes out of a long history of Head Start having placed a high priority on assuring that the gains that children make in early Head Start in Head Start are supported and sustained after they move into elementary school. The Head Start performance standards, the new school readiness document entitled The Roadmap to Excellence and the reauthorization of the Head Start Act in 2007, among others, all lay out very specific expectations for how grantees should be aligning their programs with K-12 education. So although this guide is specifically designed for Head Start programs, it can really be easily used and adapted to the work of any early learning program planning to reach out to and work with partner schools. One of the really unique aspects I think of this guide is that it helps make it and helps make it relevant to a broad array of programs and settings is the fact that it was designed to be used at the local community-based level. The underlying assumption here is that programs and practices established at the local level by programs and school administrators and staff and families together are best equipped to meet the highly contextualized strengths and needs of families and children in the community and are therefore more likely to be effective and sustainable. So this guide does not provide a recipe for what partnerships should look like or include but rather provides a menu of very practical concrete activities and approaches that can be tailored to the unique aspects of any given community. So given that sort of caveat, no two partnerships will ever probably look the same but will instead be reflective of what is important and meaningful to each partnership and within each community. So the partnership guide is based on what I'm calling the blueprint for continuity which provides answers to some of the very basic questions that any program or school would have as they think about moving into creating new partnership agreements or working together at any level. And those questions are first, who should be involved? Secondly, what should be aligned or made continuous? And third, what can we do to make it happen? Or what tools and strategies can help us move this process of building continuity? So first question, who should be involved? Now I don't think I'm saying anything here that any of you who have already been involved in working across early learning and early grade systems don't know or will find surprising but establishing partnerships and finding ways to increase continuity across early learning and the early grade is not without its challenges. It requires two very different systems, not traditionally used to working together, to sit at the same table, come to some understanding of how each system works and begin to explore ways they can begin to work more effectively together, not an easy task. At the center of this work are the people who need to be involved and who will be faced with the important job of creating new and mutually supportive relationships. So those key drivers for the creation of an aligned or continuous early learning and early grade program are, first, early learning in elementary school administrators, including program directors, school principals, and others who create the conditions and the culture for building continuity across their two systems. Secondly, early learning in elementary school teachers and staff who are the ones who actually put the plans into practice. And finally, but not last, families and caregivers who inform the efforts to meet the needs of individual children and support the continuous learning of children at home and across both systems. So the partnership guide provides practical, as I said, suggestions and concrete examples of how administrators, teachers and staff, and families and caregivers can all work together across these two systems, early learning and the early elementary grade, to make continuity building an ongoing and organic part of school readiness and school improvement efforts. So what should the continuity address? The guide identifies three important components of learning and development that must be addressed by early learning programs in schools hoping to successfully create more continuity for children moving across systems. To assure efforts to build continuity and are comprehensive, the guide includes partnership strategies and activities that focus on connecting teaching practices and learning expectations and environments in order to create similarities that will build on sustain and expand children's learning. Connecting the delivery of services and assuring that children and families have access to those services as they move from one program to the other. And finally, connecting plans for making them move from early learning programs to school as a key transfer point and opportunity to support school readiness and family engagement. We know this more familiarly as transition. Just a formatting note here to add is that in each of these three component areas, there are specific suggestions and strategies for how each of the three groups, administrators, teachers, and families can be engaged in the work. Finally, to answer the last question, how can we make this happen? The guide focuses on three mechanisms that are most likely to assure that what is planned and implemented works, that it leads to positive results and that it can be sustained over time. The three mechanisms are first, the use of joint professional development opportunities and topics that can help to open up communication and build understanding across systems. Second, the creation of common or shared organizational structures like joint planning teams that help to make partnerships permanent and can sustain changes in staff and leadership. And the use of intentional targeted family engagement strategies that meet the needs of individual families and children and build a mindset or culture of shared responsibility across programs and families. So now I just want to say a short bit about families and schools and the important roles that family plays throughout this guide. The role of families in building well-continuous systems is really a recurring theme and a major focus throughout this guide. And as we heard Christine say, constitutes more than a one-time event or an add-on activity. A guiding principle that informed the work of developing the guide was that schools and families share the responsibility for the well-being and school success of children and therefore families must be equal and full partners in the process of building more continuous systems so that those systems indeed meet the needs of their individual children. To that end, the guide takes sort of a double-pronged approach to family engagement and provides examples, first of all, of what families can be asked to do or how they can play a role as contributors to continuity building by being involved in some of the activities you see here on this slide. And secondly, there are examples and strategies for staff for how to use family support participation, not just in transition but in all areas of teaching and learning and service delivery as well. And those you will see on the next slide, I have a short list of the ways that schools can be involved in supporting families that are addressed in the guide. So there's the list of some of the kinds of activities that are included in the guide that are provided for school staff and administrators to use to make sure that parents and families are engaged throughout the whole process. So just now, in conclusion, I just want to let you know that the guide as it exists now is currently undergoing a review and revision process. It is currently in the hands of practitioners and content experts who are examining the content and the format to provide feedback on the usability as well as whether they suggest examples and strategies that are presented in the guide are really appropriate and doable. The revised guide will be available in late summer, just in time for back-to-school planning. And in the true spirit of collaboration, it's going to be rolled out in partnership with the National Association for Elementary School Principles and the Head Start Office of Head Start together. So I want to thank you very much for listening and pass it back to Chris. All right. Thank you so much. And again, we have a quick poll online ready for responses as you think about actual actions to implement ideas. As you're answering those questions, and I thought about both Christine and Mimi's comments, one of the most important points I think they made was as we begin to think about all of these wonderful ideas, approaches, and mindsets in working with families, how can we actually make it happen? And both of them, I think, said something that seems relatively simple but is so important, which is we can have new policies. We can have laws. Head Start can develop a planning, really rich planning framework for transitioning families and children across Head Start into pre-K-3rd education within schools. But what really is important is what happens at the local level. And it's educators, people like us, who really make things happen by intentionally weaving our actions over time into these frameworks. And clearly, all of you, as I look at this polling question, are recognizing, too, that unless we integrate action plans within the context of strong relationships, we won't make the progress that we know is critically important for pre-K-3rd. So with that, my next pleasure is to introduce Julie Wood as she begins to dig in more deeply around practices that live out these visions for family engagement and pre-K-3rd education with a focus on home visiting. Julie is the former implementation administrator for the Harvard Graduate School of Education for 3-3rd and initiative in the Boston Public Schools. Julie currently serves as an educational consultant for digital media. Welcome, Julie. Thank you so much, Chris. And I'd like to thank my colleagues, Christine and Mimi, for laying out the groundwork. What I want to do today is take you on the ground to a particular project. As Chris said, I directed 3-3rd, which is three-year-olds through 3rd graders. It was an initiative that the Harvard Graduate School of Education got involved in in partnership with Mayor Manino's office in Boston and Boston Public Schools. So our goal was to work in low-income schools to really try to narrow the achievement gap with two main components, one with family engagement and the other is using data to inform literacy instruction. But today, I'm going to talk about one aspect of family engagement, which is home visiting, which we saw as a catalyst for family engagement. I'll also say right from the start that we were surprised by the amount of discussion and controversy and interest and attention that the home visiting aspect of our project really garnered. We just thought it was one piece, but it was a piece that really caught on that people wanted to know more about. And so let me tell you about it. So next slide, please. OK, first, we owe an enormous debt to the Sacramento home visiting model with Kerry Rose, who's their director, who came and did workshops for us, she and her staff, with parents who had been visited in Sacramento and teachers who had gone out and conducted the visit. And she really got us started. In Sacramento, home visits are from K through 12, which is really an ambitious program. And they, at that time, had been doing it for 10 or 12 years, so they were really experts and they were on mentors. We took the Sacramento model and adapted it. I'll tell you more about that as we go. But the main thrust for us was talking to parents about their hopes and dreams for their child, honoring parents as their child's first teachers, but also giving parents the tools they needed for literacy development at home. Our motto became, every point of contact with a parent is an opportunity to add to their skill set about literacy development. So that's something that we struggled with and really tried to integrate. And I'll tell you more about it. We also talked with teachers about developing rapport with families. It's all about relationships. Families really felt that way. The teachers who went out to visit families grew so much as professionals because they were able to establish these relationships with the home that they hadn't been able to do before through more traditional avenues such as open houses and phone calls and other types of chance meetings at the buses before and after school. Next slide, please. That was a visit, by the way, that photograph with the teacher and a paraprofessional. Anyway, I'll move on. We talked with teachers about what made a successful home visit and we got their ideas on this as well. So I mentioned to you before about the goal, just establishing that relationship, honoring the parents, really showing the parents that the teachers cared a lot by going to the home. And I must say that in some of our communities, like in East Boston, that are as little communities, teachers could walk to a lot of their visits. But in other communities like Lawsville-Dale, the child could live 45 minutes away from the school. So that was a really big time investment for the teacher. Getting back to goals, though, another goal would be to introduce the Read Boston program, which is what this teacher and the image that you have here is tracking student involvement in Read Boston, which is a program that one of our principal investigators, Rick Weissbord, had already established in Boston. So they became our sister organization and we tried to merge the two. And here you see that this family outreach coordinator is tracking their progress. And the Boston, the basketball fans might notice that the Boston Celtics were kind enough to camp in this cause. And we were able to give students a lot of really juicy swag from the Celtics. But getting back to goals, then, it's really all about literacy, too, and as a major part of trying to narrow the achievement gap. We all want all of our students being on grade level by third grade, starting with the very youngest students. So with that in mind, we gave teachers protocols for the business and goody bags. When you go to somebody's house, you bring a present. What did we bring? Books and some manipulatives, too. For young children, magnetic alphabet letters, sometimes fun words, games, and puzzles, and so on. We supplied those to the school so that the teacher could just grab the goody bags and run to the visit. The protocols were all about just the four or five major goals of the visit, not to be used in any way as a checklist, because we all know that clipboards and checklists are a real turnoff for parents, but so that the teacher would internalize the protocol and there would be continuity among visits. Committing to the visit in writing, we really asked for teachers who were participating to say that they would make a good faith effort to visit every child in their classroom. And we found this was important because we all know that the school year gets to be very busy, and some teachers were doing all their visits in the late summer if they had a class list and finishing up in the early fall. Other teachers might have only visited four or five families, and then it's getting dark out early in the East anyway, and they're not wanting to go and meet with those students, and they said they'll go in the spring, and that just really wasn't working at all for anybody. So we really try upfront to get that commitment from teachers that they're gonna make a good faith effort, not just to visit the family if they already know and have rapport with, but to dig deeper and visit the families who feel marginalized, who are a bit harder to reach, who may not respond to the first, second, or third phone call or outreach. We also use the buddy system. A lot of times the teacher may have been bilingual or trilingual, but not have a language in common with the family that she was visiting. Oftentimes there was somebody else in the child's school environment who would go with that teacher and serve as an intermediary. We found that this was the way in which paraprofessionals, for example, felt that they were doing something so important because they, for example, may speak Vietnamese where the classroom teacher didn't and they could form that bridge, and this was a new role for them and something that felt much more professional than a lot of the kind of day-to-day groups of tasks that paraprofessionals are charged with. The buddy system also came into play if the teacher felt in any way that threatened by the visit physically in any kind of physical danger. Going out with a colleague who was also compensated for the visit gave them confidence. We also said, at all times, if you ever do feel threatened on your visit, just leave, and that never happened, but that was always an option. The next goal that we had was about stipends because this is a longer conversation than we can have today, but unions may not be keen on teachers going out on their own time. We compensated teachers at an hourly rate and after much debate determined that it was really a two-hour engagement per family because there are a lot of phone calls to set up the visit, and you have to go to the visit, you do a little write-up when you come back, and all in all, it was really about a two-hour investment per family. I should say too, sometimes once the teacher got to the home, the family was so excited to have them there to take the center, and it turned into a longer visit than they expected, but we always said it can be 45 minutes to an hour. It's up to you if you wanna stay longer. Then the follow-up with the teacher taking notes for her eyes only on the visit and what sorts of follow-ups she promised so that she would remember to get back to the family. For example, there's one school that had a winter coat drive, so if the family needed to know that clothing that was available or food pantry or special services within the community, teacher would follow through on that. Okay, next slide, please. Okay, we conducted formative research with our teachers and parents and in the form of focus groups, interviews, questionnaires, and so on, and here's what we found. The P in parentheses below stands for parents and the T stands for teacher. That's our shorthand. So with parents and teachers, they felt a shared commitment to the success of the child. We heard over and over the same language, we're on the same page. They used that exact phrase. We found it really interesting. We also heard from parents and teachers that communication improved drastically. Teacher felt like they could pick up the phone, call the parents, they had the parent's cell phone number, they could do check-in calls much more readily because they had developed a special rapport with them. Now, the whole child's perspective, teachers said to us over and over that they got to understand the child by staying the child in the home. They could often the child wanted to show them their bedroom, their stuffed animals, their toys, and then the teacher also saw them in relationship to other children in the household. Were they the middle child? Were they the child who was trying to get attention because there was a new baby? They're an older sibling who was really nurturing. Just gave them a whole brand new perspective and from a literacy standpoint, it also allowed teachers to engage in deconstructive language with students about things beyond the here and now in the classroom. Student-teacher relationship. Both parents and teachers talked about that. From an instructional standpoint, teachers were able to talk to parents about dialogic reading and really interacting around books. A lot of parents really didn't grow up that way. People in their families may have done a straight reading of a book. Many of them said to us, you know, I could read interactively with my child that nobody ever told me before that that was important. I can do that. So that was an important bonding sort of activity. And then behavioral and socio-emotional situations became much more enlightened. People had more perspective on what was going on with children and what the home was like and how teachers could be more effective in dealing with some of the challenges. For the parent-teacher relationship, there was a new level of comfort and a new level of trust. And they also add that one of the big selling points for teachers, this is another surprise for us, was that after they did a few visits, they got really excited about them. And a major factor was the high regard in which the families tell them. They were treated like royalty when they went on the visits. And, you know, in this age of teacher bashing and teachers not receiving much respect in society, that was a really wonderful experience for them. And they really saw how much parents appreciated them. One-to-one attention coming from the parents, they're not very satisfied doing what schools often need to do for pragmatic reasons, which is to have parents come in and have a 10 or 15-minute conference. This way they have the teacher to themselves for an hour. Time, time, time is the teacher's comment is really tough doing these visits. They had one kindergarten teacher who went into her Vietnamese community in Dorchester with her Vietnamese speaking career professionals and they did eight visits on a Saturday. So, I mean, that's the kind of dedication that we were seeing, but it does take just a huge amount of time. And then language and culture, we found new understandings among teachers. Often they were hesitant going into families if they were not familiar with the culture and we encouraged them to not try to be an expert on every culture, but to go in with openness and curiosity and talk to families about their cultural heritage. And that seemed to work really well. Next slide, please. So, with this, because it's the real world and we know the real world is messy and not everything works perfectly, these are some of the challenges we face. And I can speak at another time to those of you who are interested about some of the solutions that we came up with. But getting everybody on board, the panelists before me talked about all the work that you have, all the layers of buy-in that you need to get before you start any initiative and that was certainly true here. We also thought it was a great opportunity to develop teacher leaders, so we worked with principals on that and some leadership opportunities came to the fore. Scheduling visits can be tough. Parents in our communities many times work three jobs. That's really tough for them to have the teacher come over. Sometimes parents are comfortable having the teacher come over, so we encourage teachers to suggest a neutral site like the coffee shop or a park or a library. Anything that was neutral and that the teacher wasn't sitting behind her big fortress of a desk as the authority figure and teachers understood exactly what we meant by that. The voluntary nature of the visit, not all parents wanna have teachers come and visit, not all teachers wanna make a visit. So what do you do if four third grade teachers want to do this and one really isn't comfortable doing that, just isn't ready? That's a big dilemma. Implementing visits school-wide as part of the school culture is tough because schools often are not very open to change. And I mean, I'm not being critical here. We all know that innovation and change are tough in various cultures. Resources for additional student services based on what teachers learned during the visit, teachers couldn't always connect parents with exactly what they needed. Their communities have experienced a lot of budget cutbacks. So those English language lessons that were once free down in the community center may not exist anymore. Linking home visits and other family engagement data to live with literacy achievement data by systematically tracking and analyzing the relationship. We really try to build a database whereby we could keep track of the parents who are agreeing to the visit, coming to conferences and be really data-driven around this. We didn't quite get the database working in a way that would be easy enough for people to use. So we worked on that for many years and are still challenged by that. Then the last is rockin' the system that I alluded to before. It's hard to go in and bring in and change in the school system and have everybody embrace it. That's it. And there are resources and so on on our soon-to-be-launched website. And I hope you'll go and visit that and I hope you'll contact me if you have any questions. Thanks very much for coming today. Thank you so much, Julie. And as people look at the polling question, what barriers do we need to overcome? To me, what Julie exemplified so beautifully is a commitment to outreach. Really going beyond our traditional, often one way, information and communication with families to reach beyond the school walls to really connect the loop with families by engaging in two-way learning relationships. Going beyond just sharing information with families about literacy but actually caring enough to share actual tools that families can use with their children in supporting their literacy and as the relationships developed over time, reaching out to learn more about family language, family culture as a way of enriching school-based practice. So really developing those two-way connections, those two-way learning relationships that are at the heart of what we do. As we see, principals and administrators, people see those leaders as critically important to fully embrace families as partners. And I noticed we had several questions on the question board around this, which we will hopefully get to during our question and answer period. So as we continue to dig in deeper around practical actions, successful but challenging actions to really live out family engagement, we move now to a presentation on family school community partnerships by Mary Ellen Burns. Mary Ellen is the vice president of partner relations for the United Way of San Antonio and Bexar County in Texas. So welcome, Mary Ellen. Thank you, and I'd like to begin by saying that we're really excited that this conversation is even taking place, this presentation is taking place. It's been our discovery that family engagement is really the critical missing piece in the formula for school success so that the fact there's this conversation and this all work out there, we're all thinking about this in new ways is I think both well for the future. So family school community partnership, we're gonna focus on one aspect of our partnership, which takes place in an inner city district in San Antonio. And we're now in about 16 schools, but we're gonna focus on the aspect of the role of parent real, to rebuild parent engagement. And I say rebuild because parents are engaged with their children for the most part, but are they engaged with them in a way we need for them to be engaged in our schools? Next slide, please. All right, so we're really talking about parent engagement here in San Antonio as transformation. And what you see in 2006 is we started out with a few schools and a few parents. And in the summertime, these parents did some training and they did home visits and they came back and said here are what the parents in these six schools are most concerned about. The interesting thing is we got this report together and we gave it to the superintendent and he said, you know, this is a great report, very interesting, very illuminating, but is there any way that I can speak to the parents directly? I just don't want to filter. I want to hear what they have to say. I want to be able to ask questions. And so could I speak with them? And they said, well, of course you could. So what we did was we started having, he asked if he could have lunch with the parents twice a year. So he has lunch with them in the fall and spring. And as you can see that picture to the right is the parents having a conversation. And the next picture at the bottom is where we are today. These are parent leaders in the 16th school that the partnership now is active in. And they really only represent about 80% of the parent leaders. If you look at these folks and you think to yourselves that they all have influence over at least 20 other parents, you can begin to understand the impact that these parent rooms have had on changing the culture in the schools of this inner city. The other thing that's important to know before we go on is in these schools, prior to this partnership, there were two or three parents occasionally that would walk the hall. Next slide, please. So what is this transformation? I think we're going to back up one slide if you don't mind. The transformation is in the parents. First of all, we meet the need by these home visits, parents doing the home visits. And I wanted to say something about the home visits earlier. I don't know how it's operating in your district, but in an inner city school, especially in an economically distressed area, there's significant mobility. And when we get these lists from the parents, get the lists for the home visits in the summertime, anywhere between 40 and 80% of the lists are wrong. The children don't live there anymore. However, because they're parents visiting other parents, they just ask their neighbors that they've seen at the local grocery store, well, where do they move? And the people tell them. So our rate of actually reaching families is extremely high. In fact, the parents then come back and tell the school, no, they don't live here, they live there, so that they can actually update their records. So it's very effective. But in the course of those home visits, they find out what are the needs, what are the concerns? And in the process of those parents doing the home visits, the parents transform into people who now see themselves as resources and as a critical liaison. These parent rooms and these home visits and this process of parents engaging parents allows people to find their voice again, find their confidence, rediscover their talents. And so this whole, and this new discovery of really how great the need is in their own neighborhood next door that they never knew about. So this whole partnership idea, this parent room, which you're going to see in the next slide, is about empowerment and about shared responsibility and about promise. Next slide, please. So we started with these parent rooms and basically it's a converted classroom. And in the early days, there was a coffee pot and a crock pot and we said to the parents, these are your rooms, you design them. So over time, they created these spaces that are community spaces. And I'm going to stop a minute and let you look at the kinds of activities the parents now engage in under their own role issue. They have decided that based on the home visits and the concerns they've heard from parents that these are the things they need to be doing. And I'll tell you that we've had all the schools design these slides that depict a day in their lives and they're all different. The key there is that every school community has its own personality, its own priorities. And so the flexibility here that remains is that in the home visits, those home visits, the conversations with the parents of that particular school are what drive the agenda and the focus of those parents. Next slide, please. So this is a very interesting gift that the parents brought. All the parent rooms have been decorated with the personality of the parents and what they've learned that is important to do are the parent rooms, is they bring a piece of their history. So many of the parent rooms have multiple cultures in the room.  So it's about building each other up and this happened naturally with the parents. Look closely at the children and at the artwork. That's all about people valuing each other and seeing each other as gifted. Next slide, please. Every parent room has a college corner. Parents had lots of questions about college and so they all look different, but they all have information on where to turn. And they started a project several, about five years ago because they discovered the parents and their conversations with each other in this room discovered that children weren't dreaming about the future. So their parents are gonna do something about that. Next slide. And of course, every parent room because most of the parents have someone at home still. They wanted a children's corner so that even if they have a two-year-old, they can, doesn't stop them from coming into the school and being involved and being engaged in their elementary school child. Next slide. So take a look, a really good look at the curtains. All these kinds of supplies, most of them come from the parents' homes. They bring in a couch. Every parent remember this having a couch so that it's comfortable and it's welcoming. And I don't know if you can see to the right behind the woman in the purple, there's a computer. All the parent rooms have computers and parents come and apply for jobs. They look online at their children's grades. They teach each other actually how to turn on a computer. But they're all there to say, connect to the world, connect to your child, connect to the school and you can do it here. Next slide. They have just simply become community spaces. Now, all the parent rooms, you can see the sides, there's sides of the classroom. They'll put those tables up and they'll hold a Zumba class, they'll hold, they'll do arts and crafts after school, they will do, they call in speakers. Depending on the questions that came up in the home visits, the parents will arrange for community speakers to come into that room and have a conversation whether it's about social needs, about college, about summer activities. It all happens in the parent room. Next slide, please. Just to kind of give you a sense of last year, these are the numbers the parents have achieved just under 3,000 parent-to-parent home visits. The interesting thing that we totally didn't expect were the volunteer hours. We were looking for volunteers, we were looking for engagement. And of course, parents stepped up, stepped in and wouldn't go home. So the other issue that we, of course, track is academics and you can see the results there. We've just yesterday received our data for this school year and found out that in the schools in which these parent rooms and parent partnerships are conducted, attended up across the board. Next slide, please. So the challenges. The parents in this impairment process, they find their voice, they find their talents, they get on the computer, they find a job. I compare it. And they're no longer able to come to school. We consider that a good problem. What we've done as a result is we have developed a succession of parent leaders so that it's not all dependent on one head coach. And we have a team approach to leadership so that they are free to, and we encourage them to go on with their lives, with their education. Many, many, many of the parents, once they get into school and they are less intimidated by education are deciding to complete their own education. In many cases of the GED, but an increasing number of cases that including community college and four-year colleges now. The second bullet is, was a surprise. I don't know what your perception or experience is with underperforming schools, but you've got hardworking teachers. And yet in some cases, there are teachers and there are the minority who over time expect to go home at 3.30, do not expect people to be asking questions, do not expect to be doing tutoring and mentoring. And the challenge we've had with this partnership is that parents understand the process and find their voice, and they track on their children's progress in school. They go to the teacher and they ask for more and they ask for more help, and we've got some pushback on that. The last challenge is principal turnover. You find the principal is engaged, they understand the process, they're changing the culture of campus, the campus does well, what happens well, the principal gets moved to a campus that's not doing well. And you're starting over with a whole new principal and it's a whole new day and it can be very, very disruptive. Next slide. So back to you, Chris. All righty. I'm figuring out a few responses here. It's hard to know exactly where to dig in and I think we've had a long list of fabulous questions. So I will just make a few comments as we move forward after our polling questions and get in and dig in on these great questions. So given the wealth of possibilities that have really been portrayed particularly in the last two presentations and sort of the wealth of possibilities I've seen come through our questions, what is the first step you could envision that would make sense for your school and for center to improve family engagement, particularly with that focus across the pre-K through third grade spectrum? As I listened to Mary Ellen, I just was so struck by the acknowledgement of parents as people or family members as people and the depth of the level of support that the San Antonio Project placed in parents and families both to really construct what they needed and would find most meaningful as they began to engage more fully in schools and also really to think in a two-generational way around not only what would be most supportive through family engagement for children but also most supportive for the adults. And as we look at the polling responses certainly supporting home visits looks like a really important place that's perceived to be meaningful by many respondents and again really trying to build those partnerships across settings such as you've heard talked about in our presentation. So as we move forward before we take on questions and present those to our presenters for today we can move forward slides. One more. There, five C's. It seems like in education, early childhood education we always come up with three or four, five C's of something. And as I was reading the slides before today's presentations and listening with such pleasure to the presentation it seemed to me that five C's really captured the bottom line message we were getting for from presenters as we think about moving forward. As we think about family relationships most of us have always really aspired to having caring relationships with families but I think what we heard today is that as we think about those caring relationships as essentials we really want to redefine what caring means and move to a more intensive intentional level. The concept of relational trust which is then suggested by Burke and others really sums up to me what we heard today. It's not just caring, it's about trusting and respecting family members enough to really listen to and respect their opinions and take actions based on those opinions. It's about showing personal regard by going beyond what perhaps may be the formal requirements of the job to leave the school building, to go out into the community and families homes to learn more and to engage in productive relationships with families. It's also about being creative one thing we know as all of our lifestyles have changed over the past very few years and the old models don't always work. So I heard people being very creative not getting stuck on what doesn't work but really thinking creatively about how can we really move forward with rich and meaningful relationships with families. I love the parent to parent outreach through home visits which again goes back to the issue of trust trusting families and being creative to think about families connecting with others not only on the school grounds but also reaching out to through those home visits. Continuous, again I think Christine started with focusing on the need to think about more continuous. So often we focus on activities all of which are essential ways to live out our beliefs about family engagement. But what I saw across the presentations today was thinking about activities and engaging in activities with families as a means to a broader end. As a means to really having families much more engaged in their children's literacy development as we heard from Julie. As a means to really learning from families about their home culture, their home literacy practices to have that inform our practices as we go back to our school settings again from Julie. About tracking progress, making sure over time that we're moving somewhere with our relationships rather than as Christine said, getting stuck on one time projects or activities. Certainly culture as the fourth C cut across all of the presentations today. We started with the idea of shifting our professional cultures to really rethink the role of collaboration. Collaboration not only among ourselves as colleagues collaboration across programs bringing the traditional culture early childhood together with the traditional culture, professional cultures of K-12 and blending them into some new hybrid that really is the needs of children, staff and families more productively. But certainly family culture and respect and the need to understand and work with families through their own family cultural lenses came through loud and clear as we looked at the practices people are espousing today. And finally, fifth C, the idea of collective responsibility. It always sounds so wonderful but it's so hard to achieve, especially in today's context which often focuses on placing blame on someone else. I heard about teacher resistance. I think from Mary Ellen from someone, teacher resistance or initial teacher resistance to going out in the community. I heard about administrator resistance. But again, when we look at that attitude we're all in this together. How can we begin to talk with families, work with families? So we all are in this together. And that I think so that we as educators really recognize that not only do families benefit and children benefit, but our overall program capacity and just our own lives as educators are really enriched in our capacity to really provide education that matters are all enriched by this idea of collective responsibility. So moving quickly to the next slide, I thought of several questions. Clearly everyone tuned in today is concerned, interested and hopefully excited about new prospects transformation as Mary Ellen talked about. So we all have very different starting places of what makes sense for the next step in our own progress toward really rethinking and enriching family engagement in pre-K through third. Clearly a question that our presenters challenged all of us with is how can we reach beyond the center and school walls to connect with families? How can we physically perhaps reach beyond the center and school walls? If not physically, how can we nevertheless reach out to both give that message of we want to learn from you and learn with you as we move forward on behalf of children, but also to share tools, as our home visitors did with families, and to receive information that enables us to more fully connect with children and connect children's lives into our classroom, teaching and learning. Perhaps some of my students, I'm an old school person, but some of my students are now teaching me about Skyping and social media connections with families. So how can we reach out beyond the school walls to make those connections? How can we cultivate the two-way learning relationships that we heard about across the presentation? I think it was Julie's presentation talked about getting to know families and hopes and dreams for children. But how can we intentionally, not just incidentally, but intentionally find ways to connect the loop to listen to families as much as we talk with families and begin to really move in concrete ways for those shared goals or collective responsibility? And I think it doesn't always take a lot to do a lot of good. I know my own teachers over the last number of years before I left the school started conferences and home visits with a simple question about what goal is most important for your child this year as you start first grade? And so very often it's just opening the door to hearing from families who very often are not asked, but very often are very eager to tell their stories and particularly the stories of what they want for their children. I think we were also challenged to think about how each of us can build in intentional ways to more fully understand and embrace family strengths and their funds of knowledge. I know one of our questions talked about how can we bring in families' home literacy practices to the classroom? So again, it's really how can we reach out and find ways to learn more and to understand more over time, not just because that's a good thing to do and a very rewarding thing to do, but because it will, in fact, lead that to stronger learning outcomes for children in the context of our practices. Big question, and as we talked about passions being both positive and sometimes some conflictual, how can we individualize family connections? Just as with children, we know that not every approach works for every family. I think our challenge is to be as cognizant about individual differences and respectful of individual differences as early educators we are for children and extend that mindset to families. And then finally, how can we build comprehensive two-generational school family support? So many of our families who are living in stressful communities, experienced economic and other life challenges can benefit from connections with stronger resources. Again, we heard Mary Ellen's dilemma of having parents graduate from their program for the very good reason that they advance their own education and their own employment opportunities as a part of connecting with their children's schools and what better way to serve our children than to serve their children as well. So thanks to our presenters for at least those messages that I took away. Just as a very quick final note, I know one thing we wanted to really highlight was our experience with Title I as the Elementary Secondary Education Act. All of us know more intimate PV space as no child left behind. It's historically had parent involvement policies, procedures and funds and set aside funding for schools to support what in that legislation tends to be called parent involvement. And I think we need to all go back, those of us who work within K-12 systems, and take a look at what's really happening under Title I auspices within our districts, within our schools. One question not listed here is are we using the opportunity to invest Title I funds in early education, the early years before K-12 education? But more importantly, are we really sort of nudging our districts and nudging ourselves within the context of schools to move beyond compliance? I know my own experience as a school administrator was very often that the requirements under Title I, such as a parent student-to-school compact, having a school-based parent involvement policy, having a school report card, all of the things that are required under no child left behind Title I, were very often sort of looked at as a checklist. I need to do a cut and paste and pluck up my parent involvement policy from last year's school improvement plan and paste it into this year. And I guess what all of us want to take a look at are these living documents? Going back to the question of it's great to have policies, it's great to have plans, but yet it's the educators at the ground level that turn them into meaningful. So look at how we can turn those requirements into living documents, living processes, means toward a larger end. And I think within Title I, again, this is a message I heard across the presentations today, is how can we be more intentionally inclusive? Within Title I, and also within most of our aspirations for parent involvement, we want families to be involved in decision-making. But yet we know for a lot of us, we find that many families' voices are not readily heard. So I think one of our challenges is to be intentionally inclusive, to seek out families, all families. I love that the home visits, I think that Mary Ellen talked about, were universal, every child, every family. But seek out all families, especially those whose voices are not readily heard, and to make sure that we build capacity, the empowerment that was talked about, so that, again, all families can find meaningful ways of engagement and meaningful ways to be empowered as those other teachers of their children. So with that said, more importantly, I would like to turn to questions, and we'll take as many questions. So what I will do is take questions that were posed during the dialogue, during the presentations, and pose them to specific presenters. So here we go. Julie, I think I would like to target you for this, and if anybody else would like to join in, just type me a little note, and we can move to you next. Question came through on how to engage families who are illiterate in a low socioeconomic status. And as a part of this, what strategies did you all use to build upon the existing home literacy processes of families, particularly as you think about immigrant families who may have alternate visions of what family engagement and working with professionals might look like? Like, since Julie, here, I'm busting it to you. Yes, let's see. I think we tried a number of things. We have one school that had a family engagement coordinator who still has breakfast for parents once a week, and they come in and teachers rotate, giving workshops for the parents. So one teacher might, in English and Spanish, a bilingual teacher talk to families about what a book report is, and use an example of, you know, I can think of one session where she used the biography of Diego Rivera that was a book where she then drew out parts of it that a child would be expected to respond to in a book report format. So it's always taking the parents from wherever they are, providing translations whenever possible, which isn't always possible in, you know, extremely diverse language neighborhoods. We mostly worked with Vietnamese, Spanish-speaking, Brazilian and Portuguese-speaking and Haitian Creole family. So it wasn't the range that you would get, say, in New York City, but anyway, just try to accommodate language whenever possible, bring the parents in, just show them, always be building up their skill set of how teachers think about literacy development and then what they're teaching them and how they can reinforce this at home. And you're right, whoever wrote the question, you know, parents often feel marginalized from schools because they feel that their education ended abruptly or wasn't up to par, and it's, again, the job of all of us to find as many ways as possible to bring them in. One winner sort of form that is to have children perform. And I think across cultures, that's something that parents find really critical. So you get the man through a performance of poetry, singing, dressing up like their favorite character from a book, and then you say, and while you're here, let's talk about, you know, how to read interactively with your child and ask good questions along the way, not just to do a bait and switch, but to, again, once you have the parents already in the school to really work with them and give them some tools and send them away with some things that they can do at home. I don't know if that answers it. I think that is a superb job. Thanks, Julie. Thanks so much. Next question, and I think I'm going to toss this to Christine because she offered. I'm going to actually couple a couple of questions in hope of getting the biggest bang for the buck here. Sorry, that's Mary Ellen. I think I misspoke. One question that came through is, how can community-based organizations work with school administrators to increase family engagement? I know you talked to Mary Ellen about working with the superintendent on down and clearly had 14 partner schools, so that link between community-based organizations with schools to increase family engagement. Then I know you have a lot to say about how we get beyond the walls of the school and center to really engage families. And then finally, I know we had a few very concrete specific questions about how to finance parent centers in schools. So hopefully that's not too garbled, and I will toss it to you, Mary Ellen. Okay, first of all, the community partners. We actually have two community partner agencies, Family Services Association of Parasite Community Center, who are all the managing partners of this family school community partnership. They each have seven schools, and they initially, in the early stages of the parent partnership at a campus, hire staff, and the staff recruit the parents, and then we get the parent leadership training going, and the objective is, and what's happening, is that as the parents step up and are equipped with the skills they feel make them ready to be leaders in the parent room, the staff step out. So the cost over time per school goes down. The community-based organizations are now coming to the parent rooms and saying, we've been here for years. We are not successfully connecting or communicating with families. Can you be the bridge for us? So the parents are really sort of secret shopper marketers, and so they are walking around with an ever-expanding list in their pockets and saying, oh, you need this. This is the agency that's in town that can do it. We're a united way. We have a two-on-one system, but it's still the best-kept secret of town. People are not calling that as much as, especially in the stressed neighborhoods like we had hoped they would. So now the parents are equipped to connect parents to resources, and I'm telling you, they are also tough. If they find a community partner that is not welcoming to families, they will not recommend it. So it's very interesting. On the biennial, I do want to say something about the voices and the sense of being marginalized with families. We have found two things to be true. One is that in our community as well, there's a huge language barrier, and so very early in the process, at the request of parents, we purchased simultaneous translation systems, and so no meeting is held in one language, and parents are during the translating. So the message that sends it to parents is one of not just communication, but of respect, you really are welcome here. The other thing I wanted to say was that whoever spoke about parents being intimidated because they did not have a successful or positive experience in school themselves, we found that as well, and we sort of have this unwritten rule of catching parents when they're doing something right, and that's the beginning of a relationship and a conversation. The parents, the grandparents, the caretakers, whoever is caring for the child, have so many assets and skills that aren't identified or unacknowledged, and so they stop seeing it in themselves that when we have found, when we see them, a teacher spots something and mentions it, that parent looks the future back in the eye and says, well, thank you, and now I have a question for you, so the conversation begins. So in terms of going beyond the walls, this partnership, the parent room may be the focus, but this is really the beginning of community rebuilding, and there's lots of things happening beyond the walls. The parents, when someone is a death in the family, and this is a very economically distressed neighborhood, the parents conduct fundraisers, barbecues, in their homes to raise funds for the funeral, I can go on and on on with the list of things, but the churches are very, they reach out to the churches and they bring the churches into the room. Did you know about this? Did you know about, they are the connectors, the bridge builders, the secret shoppers, they're the community, and in terms of whose conversation is this to have, this is the community of parents and the families and we're the guests, and we're trying, all we've done here is create the opportunity for the relationship and then we got out of the way. All right, thank you so much. I'm watching time. I think we have time for two more questions if each person who responds to a question takes, tries to sum it up in about three minutes or slightly less. This is a question, I think, building upon what Mary Ellen just shared for Christine. Again, sort of starting with that idea that the passion runs strong as we think about engaging with families, both sort of the very positive end of the spectrum and sometimes very challenged, frustrating end of the spectrum. And we have one family coordinator who talked about ways that we can really support families and sort of embracing the idea of themselves as really important teachers in their children's lives as you talked about children having multiple teachers. So I wondered if you would talk about that Christine just quickly building upon Mary Ellen and also shout out how a local group that has done a lot of work over time on constructing a family engagement policy with families can now connect with the national organization to see themselves as part of this broader initiative. Christine? Sure, I think one thing that we can do is ask families to observe what they're doing with their children or take pictures or videotape their interactions with their kids and then reflect on those interactions. I think oftentimes for those families who don't see themselves as teachers, don't often see those opportunities and those day-to-day interactions with their kids as learning moments. So I think by asking them to intentionally observe those moments and what happens in terms of the child's responses is an important first step. So I think that positions families to see themselves as teachers and also speaks to another role as data-gatherers they can observe and then reflect on what's happening in the home and the casual spaces in which they interact with their kids in day-to-day circumstances. Okay, and I'll just kind of fill in. I think it's our group with the local parent policy family engagement policy that constructed goes back and takes a look at Christine's reference list. That will connect you to a number of possible resources through Harvard Family Research Project to connect with the broader network. One final question for Mimi in looking at sort of really building those bridges from the early childhood community to the K-12 world, very often there are incentives built in such as through Head Start for those early childhood programs to support family engagement and family transition. We have a participant who's wondering what K-12 incentives might be there to really connect both with the early childhood programs and also with families. I'm wondering if you might address that knowing your engagement with the federal community and building the Head Start transitions. Sure. Well, I think you mentioned, number one, it's not an incentive, but it's a permission, if you will. The new Title I instructions, I think, really do clarify what schools can do. And I think many times in terms of family engagement and just creating more of linkages back with the early learning programs and communities, a lot of it has to do with just not being clear on what's really appropriate and what's okay to do under the guise of Title I. So that would be one thing I would say it's not an incentive, as I said, but it's more, it's an excuse for doing that. That being said, I think the other incentive, strong incentive that I have heard from people who have worked in schools is that what really kind of grabs and gets the attention of principals and administrators at the district level is the data on school readiness and the importance of what happens in those first grades, first through third grade, kindergarten for second and third grade, in terms of really setting the stage and building what somebody has called the base camp for later learning. So I think really appealing to that sort of notion that those years are so important and that they really can make a difference. I think a lot of the new research and old research that's coming out around brain development and the importance of the early years from birth through age eight is also pretty compelling to principals. And I guess, and to teachers, and I guess the last thing I would say that I have heard is that I think a huge incentive for getting the K-12 people involved is just providing them with some support, ongoing professional development, some training, the kinds of giving them kinds of information that they can use so that they feel more comfortable dealing with the early learning community and with early learning programs either in their buildings or in their communities per se. Thank you, Mimi, so much. You're welcome. Thank you so much. As we transition forward, I really regret that our time is running out. A final question, just to get some feedback from you all as to how meaningful today's presentation. And as we do that and get some feedback, I do want to make sure that we express appreciation to our incredible presenters. And then as we move forward through the slides, you'll see that an archived version of this webinar will be posted on the pre-K through third grade national workgroup website within the upcoming days and that we also have an upcoming webinar, as you recall, this is the third and an eight-part series of webinars, our next webinar focuses on standards, not so simple standards in their implementation and is scheduled to air on June 20th. So there will be a slide coming up to show that, but also just know that if you go to our pre-K third national workgroup website, that information will be there. And I think that concludes our day. Here's the information for your national workgroup, our next webinar, and again, the registration for that June 20th webinar will open in two weeks. Again, on the pre-K third grade national workgroup behalf, thank you to our presenters for bringing your passion and your expertise to all of our viewers today, our participants, and thanks particularly to all of our participants for taking time in your busy days to think about the next steps in promoting family engagement in pre-K third. Thanks and have a wonderful afternoon and they are wonderful upcoming weeks as we move to the next webinar. Thank you. We will tee up the last polling question and have three minutes left. There we go. So agree and agree, which is good news. Keep your comments coming. We had a number of questions that we couldn't respond to, but we really appreciate your participation. Thanks and have a great afternoon.


got some new running shoes so yesterday I went shopping for some new running shoes much needed and these are the shoes that I came home with and I want to give you guys the first impressions for these two shoes so we're dealing with the A6 Nova Blast that's that one and the Adidas Adi Zero Boston 8 so I'll do reviews on these later and show you guys how they look outside and and all that good stuff but of course first I gotta try them and I haven't and I'm actually heading out for a run right now after this video and I'm gonna do it in this pair so I'll add in a little bit of a commentary after my first run I've been running in minimal drop shoes for a while now started out with you know Vibram 5 fingers and ultra shoes really dedicated to the low drop idea and I think there's a lot of benefits to it later years I've run with Hoka shoes mostly which typically have a drop for from around like three four millimeters up to five or six high drop shoes are more like 10 12 even 14 millimeters of drop and of course if you don't know drop is essentially then the difference between the stack height in the back and the stack height in the front so essentially a zero drop shoe will be completely flat your foot will be flat the more drop you have the more your heel will be elevated relative to your toes and the proposed benefit of this of course is to alleviate some of the stress on your Achilles tendon and since it doesn't have to go as far down with each step as well as other structures in the lower leg so they typically say that if you have a lot of lower leg injuries you should probably go with a higher drop and if you have a lot of knee and hip injuries you should probably go for a lower drop and this is not really substantiated well in the science but running lower says that it's so and I thought well maybe I should experiment a little bit right so I've been having issues with my Achilles tendon lately I'm all my running injuries are always lower leg issues so I thought maybe I'm because I do have very limited ankle mobility and my Achilles tendon is very tight maybe I should try some higher drop shoes right and it's worth trying of course I don't want to go completely over that side because that would probably make my Achilles tendon even shorter so the idea is to have some days with higher drop shoes some days with lower drop shoes maybe even some days with zero drop shoes to give a good balance of it all but I've never tried high drop shoes I thought it's about time I do so these are both 10 millimeters in drop which is the highest drop I've ever tried the A6 nova blast really really love the smell of new shoes really really fresh I like the look pretty lightweight it's it came in at around 300 grams when I waited myself and I put it on yesterday in the shop and it was the most comfortable shoe I've ever put on I think it was just immediately comfortable so let's see how it goes on my run today it's lightweight it's very well cushioned it's a very soft shoe which is what I would like I would like to have one of these soft shoes in my rotation fair it's not very stiff but it's not super flexible either just generally a high mileage shoe I think you've heard a lot of good things about it it'll be interesting to keep this in my rotation I want to I want to change up my running shoes more often I again there's no hard scientific evidence for for the need to change running shoes so often but typically traditionally runners do you know say that you need to change your running shoes often or else you'll get injuries and I don't really want to do that experiment you know to see if I can really push the envelope on how long I can run in a running shoe I think it's better for me to just change it more often maybe every 800 kilometer maybe every thousand kilometers I've run in some shoes like my Hoka bond I've run for almost 2000 kilometers in them I think that's probably a little bit too much so those are the A6 and then there's the Adidas shoe which is a little more of a racing shoe maybe it's pretty light 270 grams I weighted that and it's a little bit stiffer in terms of in terms of the sole that the cushioning doesn't seem to be as soft but that's good so you know I have this shoe for maybe longer runs and easy runs recovery runs and this shoe maybe for like a tempo runs and a little faster running it's pretty cool I like the color I've never tried Adidas I've never tried A6 either so it's it's it's just an interesting experiment this shoe was wide enough for my very wide feet immediately fit me perfectly when I put this on it felt a little bit narrower around around the midfoot which could be a problem for me we'll see eventually I have very wide feet and I sometimes get pain in my little toe joint if I if I have a too narrow of a shoe but I'll just have to experiment that's the only way to find out I'm excited about both shoes they're both 10 millimeter drop they're both pretty light one is a little bit firmer and probably faster kind of other one is a little bit softer and a little bit more of a training mileage shoe without further ado I'm gonna head out and as I said I'll make a review later where I actually show you some cool footage outside today I just want to zone out not do any filming and focus on how the shoe feels all right so it's a few days later I've tried the shoes there are pros and cons to both shoes but quickly bullet point style A6 extremely comfortable very bouncy and springy the foam really gives a lot of energy return you feel like you're just being propelled forward that's really awesome downside it's a little unstable laterally I felt like maybe I was pronating a little bit more I have a weird ankle pain that I'm thinking maybe is due to one or both of these shoes the Adidas definitely more firm didn't feel like a high drop shoe it almost felt like a minimal drop shoe and to be honest I liked the stability of it but I did get that weird pain after running in this shoe and I don't know if it's because I ran in this the morning and this in the afternoon and it's because of both of them or one of them is like sort of a weird ankle pain I'm thinking maybe I'm pronating you know more than usual because of the high drop or because of the soft sole in the A6 shoes causing me some ankle issues I don't know but I hope that it's just adjusting to a new shoe they both feel kind of unfamiliar to what I'm used to I must say I'm a big fan of the A6 more so than the Adidas though like initially it just feels the just that foam feels amazing but as I said it was a little unstable a little weird that's all just wanted to share those thoughts with you guys thanks for watching this video please subscribe if you want to stay tuned to the reviews coming up eventually and I do have other shoe reviews I'll put a link to it somewhere here so you can watch it and of course subscribe leave a comment tell me what shoes you're running in at the moment and if you have any experience with either of these shoes let me know if you feel the same that I do or if you like them or dislike them etc thanks for watching