Creating Welcoming Schools: A Practical Guide to Home-School Partners with Diverse Families

JoBeth Allen (Professor of Language and Literacy Education, University of Georgie) presents Creating Welcoming Schools: A Practical Guide to Home-School Partnerships with Diverse Families, a useful resource that explains how schools and diverse families across America have entered into constructive partnerships to improve student learning. Intended for teachers, parents, and school administrators, Creating Welcoming Schools covers such options as writing cultural memoirs, inviting dialogue at the conference table, engaging families in classroom projects, collaborating for more democratic schools and a more democratic society, and much more. "Evidence of learning may come from other teachers or adults who know the learner. If the child has a gift in art or music or physical education, or is working as an assistant in the library, invite that teacher for the conference. These teachers cannot go to every conference of every child, but they are rarely invited to any. What does that say about what we value?" Highly recommended.

JoBeth Allen has created an exceptional resource and guide book in this text. She uses the voices of teachers and others in the schools, as well as her own mother/grandmother experiences to expose the reader to what a welcoming school looks like, feels like, and does. I would encourage anyone who is interested in their school or school district being sincerely open and welcoming to families to read this book. If you really want partnerships with parents, this is a wonderful place to start or extend on what you've already begun.

This book is a pleasure to read on so many different levels. For starters, Allen doesn't fall into the trap of pitting teachers against parents. She writes frankly from the perspective of a parent and an educator, building on her own experiences and those of others to illustrate the challenges in creating productive partnerships between families and schools in diverse communities. She does an exceptional job of suggesting ways to create meaningful family-school relationships that move beyond bake sales; in doing so, she gets readers to think about the kind of partnerships that are shown to really improve student learning. She does this in a way that is open, engaging, even friendly, while not being afraid to ask us as parents and educators to take a hard look at our practices and assumptions. In sections that are worth the price of admission, she discusses real-life examples of ways to create genuine dialogue between families and schools that deepen understanding and communication while also providing opportunities for increased student learning. But the book doesn't stop there. Instead, it moves into the arena of educational transformation, pushing readers to imagine ways of building community-school-home alliances that speak to living in a democratic society. In that sense, it is an optimistic, hopeful and inspiring book, chocked full of practical ideas, hands-on activities, thought-provoking stories, and opportunities for action. And did I mention that, on top of all that, it's a good read?