Being ready to improvise helped these Michigan preK teachers strengthen their connections to families during the pandemic.

Getty Images

 

In March 2020, when school buildings across the country were shuttered and in-person gatherings were restricted, teachers were forced to rethink just about every aspect of their work, from lesson planning to instruction, assessment, grading, and on and on. The challenges were, and continue to be, enormous. And yet, our research suggests that this upheaval has brought with it some new opportunities, as well, especially when it comes to family engagement.

Between April and June 2021, we interviewed 30 Michigan preK teachers to learn how they kept children engaged during the pandemic. To our surprise, many of these teachers said that remote teaching and learning had caused a blurring of the boundaries between home and school, allowing them to develop stronger and more authentic relationships with families than existed before COVID-19. This led us to take a deeper look at the conditions created by the pandemic, including opportunities for teachers and families to work together in new ways. Perhaps, we reasoned, there are important lessons to be learned from this experience, allowing schools and families to enjoy stronger partnerships over the long term.

The Michigan preK context

Currently, 44 states and the District of Columbia provide state-funded preK, enrolling 34% of the nation’s 4-year-olds (Friedman-Krauss et al., 2021). Although the characteristics of state preK programs differ, all focus on providing children with quality early learning experiences.

Established in 1985, Michigan’s public preK program, the Great Start Readiness Program (GSRP), provides free school-day and part-day preK to 4-year-olds considered “at risk of school failure” due to low family income, developmental delay or disability, and/or environmental risk (Michigan Department of Education, 2019). In the 2019-20 school year, the program enrolled 32% of the state’s 4-year-olds (Friedman-Krauss et al., 2021).

GSRP is overseen by intermediate school districts (ISDs) — county-level administrative units typically made up of several school districts — and a mix of public elementary schools, charter academies, and community-based organizations (CBOs) contract with ISDs to implement the program. Regardless of who implements the program, all GSRP classrooms must comply with requirements pertaining to health and safety, teacher qualifications, curriculum, student-teacher ratios, and family engagement. The teachers we interviewed for this study worked in a mix of elementary school and CBO sites across four geographically and demographically diverse ISDs.

What we interpreted as engagement was, to the teachers, simply a necessary response to an unprecedented and uncertain situation.

At the start of the pandemic, when most school buildings closed indefinitely, GSRP teachers were required to provide remote learning opportunities to students affected by school closures. In some ISDs, GSRP students were provided with computers or tablets and/or internet access so they could engage with teacher-developed online content. In many cases, though, GSRP teachers took a decidedly analog approach, delivering paper packets and materials, such as Play-Doh and glue, to their students’ homes.

Family engagement during COVID-19

As we spoke to teachers about their experiences teaching preK during the pandemic, we were struck by the centrality of interactions and relationships with families in their reflections. Although family engagement has long been a centerpiece of GSRP policy (Wechsler et al., 2018; Wilinski & Morley, 2021; Wilinski & Vellanki, 2020), the conditions of the pandemic appeared to have fostered a new type of responsiveness among teachers to family needs, while also providing families with a new window into their children’s preK experiences and creating new roles for them in the teaching and learning process.

Perhaps most important, the teachers in our study described family engagement during the pandemic as an imperative, not as a policy requirement that had to be met. Actually, they didn’t refer to it as “family engagement” at all; what we interpreted as engagement was, to the teachers, simply a necessary response to an unprecedented and uncertain situation.

Many lines of communication

GSRP teachers’ first instinct at the start of the pandemic was to find ways to stay connected to families despite school closures. Although everything was “crazy and uncertain,” as one teacher put it, they made efforts to stay in touch with parents and other caregivers, even if that meant driving 30 minutes to have a conversation on their front porch. In interviews, GSRP teachers described how they helped families access meals, housing, diapers, and other necessities. Many said that in the early days of the pandemic, providing such support to families became their top priority, taking precedence over instructional goals.

Teachers were able to maintain these connections, they explained, by communicating through whatever channels worked best for families. Rather than relying on proprietary applications that had been designed for schools and organizations (such as Remind or Class Dojo), they met families on whichever online platforms they were already using, such as Facebook. They held drop-in Zoom office hours daily, and they gave families their cell phone numbers and encouraged them to call or text anytime. Teachers believed that taking a more flexible approach to communication helped them develop stronger relationships.

Responsive remote learning

Teachers also made sure that their remote learning opportunities responded to families’ needs and realities. Many families did not have internet connectivity, and others lacked devices for everyone in the household. And while some Michigan school districts provided technology to K-12 students during COVID-19, few did so for preK students. Further, even if students could access technology, GSRP teachers knew that synchronous online instruction for 4-year-olds would require an adult who could help them log in at a set time, a challenge when childcare arrangements were constantly shifting and when many GSRP parents, who were low-wage and/or essential workers, had little flexibility in their work schedules.

With all this in mind, many teachers provided families with paper packets with learning activities they could complete over several weeks, as well as any materials (paper, glue, etc.) they would need. The packets also included information to help families understand the goals of activities and how to facilitate them. In some districts, teachers were unable to provide materials to go along with lessons, so they developed math and literacy activities that incorporated materials children would have in their homes. For example, teachers created activities that involved sorting socks and creating patterns with utensils.

Teachers also developed multimedia approaches that children and families could easily access on their own schedules. For instance, recognizing that many of her students wouldn’t be able to participate in online synchronous instruction, one teacher began creating interactive lessons and read-alouds, which she posted on YouTube. Explaining her rationale, she said, “I knew at a bare minimum my parents would let their kids on YouTube.” In the end, she made more than 100 videos. This approach appeared to resonate with families; several teachers and administrators were told that children frequently requested these read-alouds as a bedtime story.

New perspectives, new roles

The teachers in our study often remarked that remote learning provided families with greater insight into their child’s classroom experiences. Whether they were helping their children with activities from a paper packet or sitting next to them during a Zoom lesson, caregivers gained a greater appreciation for teachers’ work. They came to realize that “we aren’t just playing with them all day” or “just babysitting,” teachers said.

Further, teachers noted that when parents accompanied their children during remote instruction, they became more personally invested in teaching and learning. One teacher explained:

[Parents are] more in the learning process with us [now], rather than just sending their children to school and just thinking it is all the teacher’s responsibility to do all of the teaching. They really became more engaged. Which seems kind of weird. But I feel like . . . we’ve really helped the families learn how to learn with their children.

The idea of increased engagement and teachers helping “families learn how to learn with their children” came up time and again in our interviews. During remote learning, teachers made a point of explaining the purpose of learning activities so that parents could facilitate them successfully (e.g., “We are squeezing the Play-Doh and we are molding it. The children are doing this so we can strengthen their fingers so later on they can hold their pen or their pencil.”). One teacher used the term “double teaching” to describe the practice, explaining:

I feel like I am double teaching because not only am I trying to interact with the child I am also sidelining [to the parents], “OK, this is why we are doing this, so please don’t do it for them.”

In some cases, teachers relied on parents not only to provide support during lessons and/or facilitate activities but also to take part in assessment. Although the GSRP child assessment requirement was removed in spring 2020 due to the pandemic, some ISDs continued to assess children remotely to help teachers understand individual needs. To do this, teachers enlisted families to help them by submitting documentation of their children’s learning in different domains. This was not a perfect solution, though. Although teachers made detailed requests, they were often frustrated by the results. Sometimes parents submitted documentation that highlighted the wrong skills, or they didn’t provide enough evidence to assess the child’s learning; other times, it was clear that a parent was supplying their child with answers or helping them too much. Still, while collaborating on student assessments proved to be difficult, it did push teachers and parents to work together in new ways, and it opened parents’ eyes to the ways in which assessment supports instruction.

Possibilities for the future

Arundhati Roy (2020) tells us that, “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is not different.” If we want the pandemic to serve as a portal to a different future, as Roy suggests, we can use what GSRP teachers learned during the pandemic to inform family engagement practices post-pandemic. We were initially surprised to learn that teachers felt so connected to families at a time when there were so many limitations on in-person contact. Yet, when we dug into the data, we saw that teachers’ responsiveness to families’ situations, coupled with parents’ opportunities to take on new teaching roles, created conditions that allowed for stronger teacher-family partnerships to emerge. Might these approaches contribute to stronger home-school relationships after the pandemic fades?

What would it be like to have no predetermined agenda for family engagement, other than a willingness to listen and be responsive?

Even as we laud teachers’ work during a time of great stress and uncertainty, we do not wish to gloss over the significant hardship and loss that so many faced. Remote learning was certainly not easy for teachers or families, and many of the teachers we interviewed described feeling completely exhausted after more than a year of pandemic teaching. Still, teachers developed approaches that were highly responsive and resulted in authentic and meaningful family engagement. We contend that this happened, in part, because the pandemic shifted the balance of power between teachers and families. As Roy put it, COVID-19 was (and still is) a crisis that “made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could.” Neither teachers nor parents had a script to follow for preK education during a pandemic; they had to depend on each other to figure it out. Perhaps this shared sense of uncertainty — the reality that even the experts were just muddling through day by day — allowed family-school relationships to flourish as teachers and families relied on each other.

At the time of this writing, there appears to be no bright line between “pandemic” and “post-pandemic.” Local surges, new variants, and vaccine inequality mean that daily life for many is still inflected with a great deal of uncertainty. Yet, if we allow ourselves to imagine a time when life feels just a bit more predictable and regular quarantines and worry about “close contacts” no longer fill our days, we can consider how to carry lessons from these uncertain days forward into a different future. We submit that conceptualizing family engagement as an improvisational practice (Lobman, 2003, 2006; Sawyer, 2004) might be a place to start.

Typically educators are the ones who dictate the terms in a family engagement program, resulting in a narrow range of acceptable practices that tend to reflect white, middle-class norms for engaging with school. Research has shown that traditional approaches to parent involvement, which emphasize parent participation in school- and teacher-initiated activities, tend to disadvantage non-white, low-income, and immigrant families who may be less familiar with or less comfortable interacting with the school system and whose values may not align with the system’s class- and culture-based assumptions about the roles of families and schools (Doucet, 2011; Souto-Manning & Swick, 2006).

Treating family engagement as improvisation, or a practice that requires participants to figure things out together, might result in an approach in which teachers and schools are more responsive to families’ needs and values. An improvised performance has no predetermined outcome; scenes are built incrementally, with each player building on and extending what others have done. Instead of shutting down unfamiliar and unexpected ideas, improvisers take a “yes, and . . .” approach to move scenes to places none of them could have come up with on their own.

What would it be like to have no predetermined agenda for family engagement, other than a willingness to listen and be responsive? Could teachers and families say “yes, and . . .” to each other and improvise their way to stronger and more meaningful relationships? Our research suggests this happened during the pandemic, albeit unintentionally, and we wonder whether an improvisational approach to family engagement could be one way to build stronger home-school relationships in the future.

 

References

Doucet, F. (2011). Parent involvement as ritualized practice. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 42 (4), 404-421.

Friedman-Krauss, A.H., Barnett, W.S., Garver, K.A., Hodges, K.S., Weisenfeld, G.G., & Gardiner, B.A. (2021). The state of preschool 2020. National Institute for Early Education Research.

Lobman, C.L. (2003). What should we create today? Improvisational teaching in play-based classrooms. Early Years, 23 (2), 131-142.

Lobman, C.L. (2006). Improvisation: An analytic tool for examining teacher-child interactions in the early childhood classroom. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 21, 455-470.

Michigan Department of Education. (2019). GSRP implementation manual. Author.

Roy, A. (2020, April 3). The pandemic is a portal. Financial Times.

Sawyer, R.K. (2004). Creative teaching: Collaborative discussion as disciplined improvisation. Educational Researcher, 33 (2), 12-20.

Souto-Manning, M. & Swick, K.J. (2006). Teachers’ beliefs about parent and family involvement: Rethinking our family involvement paradigm. Early Childhood Education Journal, 34 (2), 187-193.

Wechsler, M., Kirp, D.L., Tinubu Ali, T., Gardner, M., Maier, A., Melnick, H., & Shields, P.M. (2018). On the road to high-quality early learning: Changing children’s lives. Teachers College Press.

Wilinski, B. & Morley, A. (2021). “Parent leadership and voice”: How mid-level administrators appropriate pre-kindergarten parent involvement policy. Educational Policy, 35 (7), 1230-1257.

Wilinski, B. & Vellanki, V. (2020). A comparative case study of public pre-k teachers’ enactment of parent involvement policy. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 51 (3), 359-375.


This article appears in the April 2022 issue of Kappan, Vol. 103, No. 7, pp. 14-18.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

default profile picture

Bethany Wilinski

BETHANY WILINSKI is an assistant professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University, East Lansing, and the author of When Pre-K Comes to School: Policy, Partnerships, and the Early Childhood Education Workforce .

default profile picture

Alyssa Morley

ALYSSA MORLEY is an assistant professor in the Department of Teacher Education, Michigan State University, East Lansing.

default profile picture

Jamie Heng-Chieh Wu

JAMIE HENG-CHIEH WU is an assistant research professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies and an associate director for Community Evaluation Programs at the Office for University Outreach and Engagement at Michigan State University, East Lansing.