Multiple textbooks focus on the topic of family engagement in education and early childhood care. We, the co-authors, wanted to design an interactive toolkit (a resource) that provides foundational knowledge and skills practice for professionals who work with children and their families.

To navigate this book, select the “next” and right facing arrow to move forward or “previous” and left facing arrow to return to the previous chapter. These arrows can be found at the bottom right and left of each page. You can also select “contents” toward the top left of the screen to read in a non-linear fashion.

What this book aims to do

Our primary goal was to respond to the question, What do professionals who work with children, adolescents, and their families need to know and be able to do on day one as a professional? Just as all of the co-authors, reviewers, and colleagues who supported the development and design of this book, engage in continuous learning, novices will learn more and refine their skills over the course of their careers. While all of us, the co-authors, learned from one another as we developed this resource, we anticipate that those with more professional experience will find components of this book useful as well.

What this book isn’t

This book is not a comprehensive textbook. We anticipate that readers, professional development facilitators, and course instructors will supplement these materials as needed (just as all of us do with learning that we facilitate).

What is unique about this book?

We incorporate scenarios to illustrate key concepts. Reflective prompts precede and follow each scenario, an evidence based strategy to retain knowledge through metacognitive challenge. We purposefully incorporate scenarios without any right or wrong answer to a specific child’s need. Instead, the scenarios encourage productive struggles with common missteps that capture the reality of being human. Humans are, after all, complex and messy creatures. In addition to the scenarios and reflective prompts, we incorporate interactive features, such as embedded video, data visualization, digital cards, and branching scenarios. As professional educators and clinicians based on Virginia, we also wrote a chapter focused on Virginia’s communities and history. We additionally incorporated Virginia-specific resources in an appendix.

How should you use this book?

We encourage you to think of this less like a book and more of a collection of tools. While you can move through the entire collection in a linear sequence, we designed it so that each part can stand alone. Each chapter is brief to avoid unnecessary scrolling. When we include a school-based scenario as a chapter within a part, we also include a clinic-based scenario. We recommend reading one or the other, based on your professional context.

We recommend that everyone read Part I (Foundational Principles of Family Engagement and Partnership) to establish common understandings of terms. Then, select those parts and chapters that most closely relate to your professional (or course) goals. Course instructors will find an additional instructor guide as an appendix. In this guide, we suggest learning activities to extend what we include in each part and chapter.

Let us know what you think!

We would love to hear how this book is used and how you incorporate the knowledge, skills, and approaches into your work. We also welcome suggestions to extend this work. Let us know what would be helpful to you and your colleagues in the future. Please reach out.

All the best,

Adria, Christine, Judy, Maryam, and Rachel