Pilot studies conducted by Judy Paulick and Natalia Palacios, professors at the University of Virginia Education School, have shown that with training, teachers who engage in home visits with families change their beliefs and understanding about their students, according to an article in UVA Today.
“The goal of the family visit is to center the family, listening to their stories and experiences and learning about the family’s ways of knowing and being,” Paulick says. “In these moments, the teachers become the learners, and the families are very good teachers.”
According to the research, before visiting, a teacher might describe a child by disposition, being shy or funny or good at reading. Following a visit to the student’s home, they describe their students with more knowledge about their interests, hobbies and family cultures.
“What teachers could articulate following a single, 20-minute visit was far more than they could prior to it,” Palacios says. “They are emerging from these visits with a much richer understanding of the child and the family system within which the child is embedded than they ever had before walking in.”
OK, that’s how teachers can benefit from home visits. But what do these visits mean for the families?
Paulick and Palacios are taking on that question with a $525,000 grant from the W.T. Grant Foundation. Over three years, the pair will work with elementary schools and communities in Colorado to research family experiences with visits. They will be working with schools that use the family engagement model created by Parent Teacher Home Visits, a national organization based in Sacramento, California, that Paulick has worked with for many years.
“We want to demystify the family experience of that home visit,” Palacios says. “We will be following families over a period of time to gauge how they are experiencing the home visit and what the implication of the home visit is over time. And that’s never been done before.”
“If we learn what families are or aren’t comfortable with and what is influencing teaching practice for teachers, these schools can tweak what they are doing,” Paulick says. “But the same is true at the national level with Parent Teacher Home Visits. We have the opportunity to inform what they do in their home visits training that happens all across the country.”
One teacher says family visits affected her sensitivity to her students’ wealth of knowledge and provided her with a sense of partnership in their learning. “I think it is essential to invest in meaningful relationships with families so the student can benefit from a unified support team,” she says. “In the end, we all want what is best for our students, and family visits are a powerful way of putting that belief into practice.”
UVA Today
