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9: Collaborating and Partnering with Families for Purposes of Assessment

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    From the moment a child walks into their classroom, they are learning. They are learning from their peers, their teachers, their families and through their own trials, errors and explorations. How can we best communicate what children are learning to their families in a respectful and reassuring manner? How can we convey that a child’s academic progress is just one aspect, as we strive to develop the whole child? In this chapter, we will discuss how intentional teachers use documentation and assessment to effectively communicate with families.

    The goal of this final chapter is to demonstrate how we connect observation, documentation and assessment all together to provide quality learning experiences for the children and families that we serve, and that there is value in everything we do as intentional teachers.

    By the end of this chapter, readers will be able to:

    1. Identify at least three essential elements (e.g., photos, captions, developmental milestones) included in an effective documentation board and describe how these elements communicate learning to families.
    2. Create a mock family conference plan that includes at least five best practices (e.g., flexible scheduling, sharing portfolios, using plain language) to foster positive school-family partnerships.
    3. Review a case scenario and outline at least two curriculum adjustments based on documented observations and assessment data to support individual child development.

    Contributions from

    Michelle Sands, Northern Illinois University

    This page titled 9: Collaborating and Partnering with Families for Purposes of Assessment is shared under a CC BY 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Gina Peterson and Emily Elam via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.