Family Engagement Reframing Institute: Session #3

Sherri:

Welcome everybody. We’re super excited you’re here. This is session three of the CAFE Reframing Institute, where we’re going to talk about framing engagement. This is our special holiday edition, which is why I am dressed like I am because I’m excited about Hanukkah and Christmas and all the other things that make winter fun. As you come in today, please sign in on the chat box. Make sure you click on the drop down screen and send your messages to panelist and attendees. Otherwise, it defaults just to panelist and very few of us will get to see that. Welcome again everybody. We’ll give everyone another minute or two to log in.

Sherri:

Hi, Barbara. Hi, Adelle. Hi, Karen. Super excited to see everybody. I hope everybody was able to attend the first two sessions, where we talked about the research behind this. We’re going to have another great session for you today. So, I think we’ll go ahead and get started. I’m going to turn it over to Marisa, who is going to tell us everything we need to know.

Marisa:

Thanks Sherri. Hi, everyone. Welcome back. So this is session three, we’re going to go over a few more of the recommendations for our framing strategy, if we’re talking about family, school and community engagement and also sort of go back to thinking about what all of these framing strategies are and how we can put them together and then talk some about the resources that NAFSCE has to continue this conversation and to think about how you can implement this framing strategy in your own work. I’ll get started. I do want to say, I just noticed that I have a date wrong on my slides and I think it’s weird because you think I’d be excited to get further to the end of 2020.

Marisa:

So apologies for that and yeah, I’m just excited again to talk to all of you and let’s take it away. So, first things first, pull out your homework. I hope that you all have something that you’ve been working on for this session and just let me make sure one thing. Yup, either you’ve been working on it in between sessions or you have it from the last session or if you want to work on something new, that’s totally fine but I’m hoping that you are still remembering what we talked about last time and are ready to look at it again and sort of get back into this framing training. I’d like you to share an example of a frame communication in the chat box using some of our framing recommendations that we introduced in the last session and in the first session as well.

Marisa:

So, I’ll give you a minute or two to bring that up and start adding things to the chat box and Sherri will let me know what’s there.

Sherri:

Yeah. Super excited to see what everyone brought with them Marisa. While we’re waiting, I want to say hello to Anna and Aliyah. Thank you for saying hello in the chat box. Sorry go ahead, Marisa.

Marisa:

I was going to say, it looks like we have a whole bunch of people here today.

Sherri:

Yeah, it’s a pretty big crowd which is very exciting.

Marisa:

Fantastic.

Sherri:

Also, I want to remind everyone if you have questions as we go, to use the Q and A box because if you put those in the chat box, they might get lost. It’s a fast moving stream.

Marisa:

Yeah, and at the end, we’re going to address questions and have a change for people to potentially … if they want to come up on screen to re-ask their question live, so please put questions in there so that we know that they’re there and we get a chance to answer them at the end.

Sherri:

It should be great. Still no homework in the chat box, Marisa.

Marisa:

Okay, how about we give it another minute or as I said, it doesn’t have to be homework. If you’ve sort of have the frames in mind and want to add something in using them, again … and I know I said this in the past and I want to reiterate that this is a learning process. Nobody frames perfectly the first time out for the vast majority of us including me. It takes practice, so don’t be shy. Don’t think, “Oh, I have to frame this perfectly before I share it.” This is a chance for us to work on things together.

Sherri:

Yes and Alice has pointed out in the chat box that the frames that we worked on last time were the space launch, the opportunity for all and the examples of equity.

Marisa:

Thanks Alice.

Sherri:

Stephanie has written, education is a key opportunity.

Marisa:

Great. Yeah. See, it’s as simple as that, like it’s a short message that if you use the word opportunity, you kind of bring people in and get them interested in what you’re talking about.

Sherri:

Marisa, she added, education is a key opportunity and she added for all to the end of that. Would it strengthen it?

Marisa:

It would strengthen it, I think. It’s not 100% necessary but I think … especially, if you’re writing something a little bit longer using opportunity in either for all or talking about opportunities and then late in the next sentence or something, talking about all children or all families or all communities and then reinforcing those two words is really helpful.

Sherri:

Excellent. Here’s another one from Sandia. She said regarding inclusion, under the sun, everyone is included.

Marisa:

Okay. Yeah and-

Sherri:

Martha wrote, using the ideas from the framework helped my planning for a system wide event, navigating difficult waters, finding mental wellness in a pandemic.

Marisa:

Interesting. That’s great. I’m glad it was helpful and that sounds like it was a really interesting event too. That’s great.

Sherri:

Here’s one from Jenna. Jenna said working together to create individual student goals as an opportunity for all.

Marisa:

I like that.

Sherri:

Angela wrote, school to community. Come and see how your investments have greatly impacted our future.

Marisa:

Okay. Yeah, I think with that, you can also talk about … you can also add opportunity for all and that is also a good place where you could potentially talk about equity and give people a description of how those investments create opportunities in the future with these equitable practices et cetera, et cetera.

Sherri:

Here’s one last one and we’ll start to move on. This is educators plus families, plus community members, equals opportunities for all.

Marisa:

I like it, that’s great. That’s perfect. Okay. So, we’re going to do a couple of Zoom polls that Alice is going to run for us. Alice if you want to go ahead and put that up. So this is a chance for you to share some things about your experiences so far, with using the frames. Alice, how are you doing?

Alice:

55% have voted so far.

Marisa:

Give it another 30 seconds on the … Okay, shall we go ahead and close the poll? Okay, so I’m always thrilled to see they’re all helpful winning this particular poll. That’s great opportunity for all value. I’m really happy to see that that’s been the most helpful and easy. With the equity explanatory example, I’m not surprised that hasn’t been quite as helpful and easy. For one thing, it is a little more complicated, because you really have to be thinking through, connecting all those dots and I feel like that is a type of framing that takes a fair amount of time to practice. You really do need to practice using that.

Marisa:

The space launch metaphor too, it is just about practice and I hope that the … we’re going to talk about the toolkit later on, famengage.org and it has actually a mapping sheet that can give you some ideas about how to use that and how to sort of take the different parts of the metaphor and compare it to different things about engagement. That’s also going to be a matter of sort of thinking it through and practicing with it. I love that they were all helpful, that’s fantastic. Then, I think we have another poll for this one. Okay, so now I’m curious about what wasn’t quite as easy to incorporate. So Alice, how are we doing with answers to this?

Alice:

52% have voted.

Marisa:

Okay. So let’s give it another like 45 seconds or so and then you can go ahead and show us the results.

Alice:

All right, they seem to have slow down.

Marisa:

Okay, perfect. Okay, so yeah, this was … we sort of saw the flip side of the previous question with the equity explanatory example being the most of call and I completely understand that and I definitely recommend going back to the previous slides, and sort of seeing what I did in terms of reframing, but also thinking very clearly about, okay, what … when I’m talking about inequity, and then what we can do to create equity, sort of, what are the causes of inequities, what are the effects and then what are the solutions, sort of as equitable solutions and sort of writing those out separately, so you can make sure that you’re connecting the dots is really helpful. I’m sorry to see that 18% said all of them help. So hopefully, after this, we’re going to talk about a couple more frames.

Marisa:

We are going to get a chance to ask questions at the end and I think that’ll be really helpful. Then, of course, we have a lot more resources to share through Fam Engage and through the NAFSCE community. So we will get to those towards the end but let’s talk about a few more frames. So if you want to go ahead and close the poll. Sorry about that. There we go. So, as always, I want you to remember the traps that we are trying to avoid and I think I said this last time, but in general, I find it and I know that other people who we’ve work with find it helpful to print something like this out, to print out the traps, print out the cultural models.

Marisa:

So, we call them a few different things and have them with you when you’re writing communications. So that you can really think about, “Okay, are the things that I am getting ready to say or communicate in whatever way, is that going to kind of push people’s thinking into these traps that we’re trying to avoid?” So that idea that it’s just teacher, parents and students, caring is everything. This is … I just want to point out what a prominent trap this is, in the world of engagement and it’s not that caring doesn’t matter. Of course, caring matters in relationships, absolutely but what we know from the research that we did is that when you get people thinking about caring, it’s very hard for them to think about skills and systems and ways in which you can make engagement available and work well for everybody.

Marisa:

As opposed to just relying on one teacher or one family being particularly caring. So that’s when I always like to sort of reiterate for people, moving beyond parent-teacher conferences, thinking about the fact that most people see the work that is done at schools is being separate from what happens at home and how you can kind of bridge that gap. This idea of poor, frankly … people won’t say it out loud but frankly, poor black and brown families in people’s minds don’t value education. So making sure that you’re not inadvertently reinforcing that and then, thinking about how you can bring community into this conversation. Those are all things to think about as you go along.

Marisa:

So I do recommend keeping this handy. So the framing strategy that we created in response to understanding how people already think about engagement, again, this is the strategy. We talked about the opportunity for all value that you want to use just wildly with members of the public, with everybody because it works really well to bring people into this discussion around engagement, using concrete examples and being really clear in your explanations of equity and using the space launch metaphor. So we already went through that and continued to practice with that and now, we’re going to talk about the three other parts of this framing strategy.

Marisa:

So just a quick reminder on what values are, opportunity for all is obviously a value. These sort of cultural beliefs, about who we are, about what we care about, that orient people towards your issue. So if people see an issue as being about opportunity for all, it gets them interested and they think, “Oh, yeah, that’s something that I believe in, that all children … all people in America should have opportunities.” So therefore, if you’re talking about family, school, and community engagement is about opportunity. Now, I’ve sort of perked up and I think, “Okay, I’m interested in this and I have a connection to it.” So that’s the power of values and that’s why we often say, you should start with a value because it brings people into the conversation.

Marisa:

So something that we learned was that, in addition to the opportunity for all value, there’s another value that we found in our research. It works really well with educators. So we did this research with teachers and with principals and with vice principals, to sort of talk to them about what are the things that … the understandings that they come to family engagement with and how can we sort of bring them into the conversation. Now, what we found was that this value of interdependence actually worked really well with educators in particular. So how do we use this? So the idea of interdependence is … just sort of fundamentally, it’s about the fact that we all rely on one another.

Marisa:

So when you’re talking about it in terms of family engagement, you’re talking about the fact that everyone relies on one another, in order to help children succeed, not just academically but in general. So, teachers … yeah, what this does in terms of helping bring teachers and educators to the door is that it sort of redirects them from some ways of thinking that aren’t really helpful and towards some ways that particularly among educators are really helpful. So one thing that we heard quite a bit was, “Oh, I can’t work with … engaging with parents is extra work. I don’t really have the time for that. I can’t … there’s certain families I can’t really work with. They won’t engage,” et cetera.

Marisa:

So there’s a lot of sort of sense of, we’re still on our own with engagement and when talking about interdependence and the ways in which families and teachers and schools and community members actually do rely on one another, and work really well together to help children succeed, we found that was really helpful and really moved practitioners, education practitioners talk away from that sort of, “Oh, this is one more thing,” and towards a couple of ways of thinking that we found were actually specific to practitioners, so one is that schools are families. We saw this quite a lot in the early part of our research, when we talked to educators.

Marisa:

They referred to schools as families. So there’s already this idea of connectedness and relying on one another within a school building, so bringing families and community into that sort of circle of interdependence is really helpful, and that’s why that value works. There’s also an understanding on educators of schools building citizens. We are creating the future essentially, where the children that we are educating are going to be the citizens of our country. They’re going to be citizens of our democracy and that’s a really critical point of what we’re doing. The connection to community is in that way of thinking. So again, talking about interdependence and talking about it when you’re talking about communities as well is really helpful.

Marisa:

What it does is it sort of pushes aside that very fatalistic way of thinking of we’re on our own, to helping educators think about, “Okay, there are effective practices that can make this possible and actually lighten the load for us,” because that’s what ideally and ultimately engagement is about. It’s about improving education not just for children but for teachers and for families and for our communities, everybody is going to benefit. So this interdependence … and I don’t know if you all notice but I kept kind of going like this. That’s something that we actually saw, when I conducted some of these focus groups and educators would talk about interdependence.

Marisa:

Some of them would actually do this. So in our work, if people use a hand gesture or some sort of particular physical expression to express a frame, then we know it’s really working well. So, next exercise, we’re going to use the chat box again and again, you can use something you’ve already been using or you can create something on the spot to create a new message to education practitioners using that interdependence value. So something that you would be saying to other educators or practitioners, maybe already and how can you put interdependence into that particular communication? So go ahead and put stuff in the chat box. Again, if you have questions, please put them in the Q and A.

Sherri:

Excited to see what everyone comes up with Marisa?

Marisa:

Me too.

Sherri:

Rochelle has already written headstart, got it right, and then she put in quotation marks, home visits.

Marisa:

Yeah, so talking about home visits with that value would be really powerful, I think and I think, yeah, some of the communications I’ve seen about home visits are really … it’s such a great example to show people how to think about engagement differently, so good point.

Sherri:

Here’s one, it takes a village to help our children, all adult is accountable.

Marisa:

Yeah, so that sort of idea of everybody working together and relying on one another which is what the, it takes a village idea encapsulates is very powerful. Yeah.

Sherri:

Here’s another one. Relationship building is very much at the heart of parent engagement work and is vital in cultivating healthy school climates and communities, more than just ensuring that everybody gets along relationships … I’m sorry, relationship building is also key to building collective momentum for school change and improvement.

Marisa:

It’s great. Yeah, so making … I think even making the, we rely on each other, sort of value even more explicit in that because it’s there definitely already, would be really helpful.

Sherri:

All families welcome our school. Sorry, Viviana didn’t finish that. She’s probably going to be working on that.

Marisa:

Okay.

Sherri:

Here’s one, work together and be creative.

Marisa:

Yeah, so working together, thinking about the different ways in which you can talk about working together and ways that are mutually beneficial and that help everybody do better.

Sherri:

Gloria wrote, for educators in primarily white suburban school districts, I point out that technology has made this world much smaller and the importance of understanding different cultures and customs as our youth move into the world or work, prior to working just attending school in an urban setting from a small town, needs the prep of creating relationships with others who are different than us.

Marisa:

Interesting. So the idea of sort of, as a … on sort of a societal scale, the interdependence of people coming from different backgrounds and things like that. I think that that’s really interesting use of that.

Sherri:

Yeah, I love that one.

Marisa:

Yeah, that’s really cool.

Sherri:

My friend Sheila wrote, “Our school is the hub of our community, everyone is important to our success.”

Marisa:

That’s great. I love that.

Sherri:

All family is welcome, starting with our school family. That’s the one Viviana was doing that she didn’t get to finish her …

Marisa:

Okay.

Sherri:

Good job Viviana. Here’s one from Richard. Richard says, understanding that each family has its own definition of family who is in and who is not.

Marisa:

Interesting. Okay. I’d love to hear a little bit more about that, maybe towards the end because that’s … I think that’s a really important point and I’m wondering how to like, sort of use that with the frames. That would be really helpful.

Sherri:

Lisa wrote, family engagement is everyone’s job. When all work together as educators, we can reach families in new ways and make our jobs easier in the process.

Marisa:

Yup. That’s great.

Sherri:

Lisa is really good at this. Here’s one from Lindsay. Home and family’s influence how kids interact at school and student teacher interactions influence how kids act at home. No line in the sand, makes sense to pull from each other’s strengths to help our students.

Marisa:

Yep, that’s good and that’s going to go with actually the last couple recommendations that I’m going to talk to, that are very sort of synergistic with the other frames and with this frame in particular.

Sherri:

Yes. It’s like Lindsay studied in advance. Good job, Lindsay. Darlene wrote, “We are on this journey, let’s work together for a better future.”

Marisa:

You know what, we can say we’re on this journey and like, that would be a great place to use the space launch metaphor because it is a metaphor about travel and going somewhere towards a destination together, so I like that.

Sherri:

Yeah. Here’s one from Thelma, collaborating together with families and keeping the child central to activities, goals and interactions while building a supportive community.

Marisa:

Yup. Good. That’s really good.

Sherri:

Cynthia Grace wrote building genuine and authentic relationships that are meaningful and value parents, families and community members is vital and essential partners in building a collaborative learning community.

Marisa:

Yeah, that’s good. I think that that sort of idea of collaboration is so useful when you’re using the value of interdependence to talk about why collaboration is so critical. So yeah, we’re just bringing all of these pieces together. Really, really helpful.

Sherri:

Do we have time for one more?

Marisa:

Yeah, let’s do one more.

Sherri:

Okay. Isabelle wrote, interdependent supports families, community and educators with a focus on student success. Children will achieve more success when we connect with one another.

Marisa:

Yes, perfect. Yeah, that’s exactly this type of very short communication that you can create, using this value. So, in addition to connecting it to the other frames. So thank you all. I love that so many people are ready to just jump into the chat box and put their ideas in there because there’s so much to work with. Also, it takes like a kind of bravery that I’ll admit, when I first started doing this kind of work, I don’t know if I had. So thank you so much for doing that and being brave enough to really share and put your work out there. It’s really cool. So, the last few frames that we’re going to talk about … and these are fairly straightforward but they’re ones that, I think are … they’re straightforward but critical in terms of thinking about your overall framing strategy.

Marisa:

The first one is about making sure that you not only foreground the benefits to students, which is often the default in communications around family engagement and just in education generally but also definitely when I’ve looked at websites and other materials, around family, school and community engagement, it tends to foreground the benefits to students but what we found is that you also want to talk about the benefits to teachers. Then, lesson three, which is about using parents, as your messengers, when you’re talking about how parents benefit from family, school and community engagement. So this is just an example of how you can use that teachers benefit message, and this is a fairly long one.

Marisa:

So it’s sort of lists all the ways in which teachers … based on the literature and research that’s already out there, the various ways in which teachers can benefit when families and schools engage with one another. So improving teacher performance, potentially increasing test scores, which could potentially lead to pay raises. Improving student’s attitudes is a really big one, that just from the work that I did with educators, was a benefit that was also very important to them. Basically making teachers jobs easier, what we found in the research and why we think that teachers benefiting is as important as student benefits messages.

Marisa:

So putting the fact that teachers benefit up there with students benefiting in your communications is that, although members of the public, parents, et cetera, families might have some critiques about education, they might think in their minds, ways that are unproductive that we want to sort of navigate around those traps. They also want the teachers in their children’s schools to be happy and to be doing well. They want to keep teachers there because they care about them, because they want their students to do well, et cetera. So that’s why talking about teachers benefits and not just student benefits, is really important and can really be foregrounded, more so than we had expected when we started doing the research.

Marisa:

Then the other one … and I realized this is not exactly how Facebook page looks like, it was kind of hard to make it vertical and still allow you to see the text that’s on here, is to have parents be the messengers when they talk about parent benefits. So what we found was that, when you just talk about parent benefits, without having a specific messenger, it’s fine, it doesn’t hurt your message but it doesn’t boost it the way that having a parent be the messenger to talk about parent benefits is. So this is really a very powerful combination that we found in our research. So this is an example of the type of message that you might have and actually, the picture that I have there, as you all know from last time, I like to search the internet for pictures around family engagement.

Marisa:

This is one that I found, I can’t remember now if it was Texas or New Mexico but it’s a parent Zoom, where they’re bringing parents together to have these conversations on Zoom because of course, we’re in the middle of a pandemic, so sharing a picture that shows a lot of different parents together but have one parent be the messenger to talk about the ways in which this engagement is beneficial to them, and especially I think in this current situation that we’re in where parents have become teachers at home who did not expect to be teachers at home, I know that I’m in that category myself, having that support and engagement with the schools.

Marisa:

Then, also from that potentially connecting to community resources, so libraries, for students whose families might be struggling some financially, resources that can help them with food or with clothing or rent or whatever, is really important. So this kind of message where you have a parent talking about the ways in which engagement has helped them and their family, as I said, was really powerful when we tested it. So I think particularly right now, there’s really good opportunities to use this kind of framing. So we’re actually going to do one more exercise, and then we’re going to get a chance to talk to Barb and to Karmen as well and then, do some … looking at the famengage.org and some of NAFSCE’s resources and also do questions.

Marisa:

So we’ve got plenty more to come but I just wanted to kind of go back and look at the things that we know based on the research that we did and the conversation we just had over the past few sessions, the things we want to avoid and the things that we want to advance. So, the fundamental thing is always, you don’t want to reinforce those really unhelpful ways of thinking, right? We’re trying to move people in a certain direction and we don’t want them to fall into traps. So the flip side of that is anticipating the traps, printing out that page that will come into PDF, that’s been in all three sessions now.

Marisa:

Having it next to you while you’re writing or thinking about how you’re going to communicate so that you can see where you might potentially push people towards thinking stuff that you don’t want them to think. So amongst those types of things that you want to avoid, focusing on caring, which leads to people thinking, “Okay, well, some people care and some people don’t as opposed to engagement is something that can be embedded in systems.” It’s a skill that people can learn, both parents and teachers. So, it goes way beyond just caring. Spotlighting individuals and we talked about this, some with the … when we’re looking at the pictures and framing the pictures that you do want to make sure … and this is on the advanced side as well, that you’re widening that lens.

Marisa:

Making sure that when you do talk about individuals, people can see it in this broader context so that they then don’t sort of ascribe individual characteristics to what’s going on. For instance, “Oh, there’s that teacher hugging that student. She must be a caring teacher,” but thinking more about context, so talking about home visits, showing visuals of home visits. Get people out of their sort of traditional engagement way of thinking about, “Oh, it’s parent-teacher conferences,” showing them examples that are outside of schools that are something different, so that you can kind of expand their understanding.

Marisa:

Don’t assume that people understand equity and you’ll see this on the advanced side. That word is not well understood. It’s a very popular word right now, across all sorts of fields but sometimes it means slightly different things depending on what field you’re in and the average American is just … they think it means equality or they don’t know what it means. So making sure that people really see the ways in which inequity, equity and equitable solutions, what they are and how they work. Then, and this goes with the expanding past traditional engagement, trying to avoid that very narrow benefits and expand it beyond just students to teachers, to parents and also to communities and thinking about the ways in which communities can be brought in.

Marisa:

Then, on the advanced side, most of this is the frame recommendations we’ve already talked about, right? So you’re going to anticipate the traps and then, you’re going to use opportunity for all ideally at the beginning and then throughout, you’re going to give those concrete examples of equity and that’s fun to practice. You’re going to use the space launch metaphor to explain how engagement works to people. So thinking about these are things that happen … for a space launch, you start planning early. You might start … For family engagement, you start before the school year starts or in early childhood. Mission Control has this set of key experts, just like family engagement has families, educators and community members who all have their expertise that they’re bringing to the table to launch student success.

Marisa:

So thinking about how you can use the metaphor for that sort of explanatory power that it has, which is, as we know from our research, incredibly powerful. Use interdependence, as I just talked about to sort of bring educators to the table. Again, it pushes them past that sort of fatalistic like thinking about this is one more thing or I can’t do this with certain families or parents, towards thinking about, “Okay, we all rely on one another and therefore, we need to think about how we can make engagement really work well.” Talking about teacher benefits and having parents talk about parent benefits. Again, seems really straightforward but are things that are sort of missing right now from the communications that I’ve seen out there that we found really had a lot of power to help people understand why this is so important and how it actually works.

Marisa:

This last chat box share out is choose your own framing adventure. So you can use one of the previous things that you’ve been working on or you can do something with a frame that you haven’t played around with yet, and add it into the chat box, and if you’re using a previous message, so say, you use the opportunity for all already in something that you’ve written up, if you want to add another frame to it, so it could be one of the benefit messages, it could be the metaphor, it could be the equity example, and put that in the chat box, if you’re feeling really creative, then that would be fantastic. So I’m excited to see what comes up.

Sherri:

Marisa, can you go back to the different frames so they can see that as they’re thinking about this?

Marisa:

Yeah, hold on. Let me see if I can go back to some of those. There we go, this?

Sherri:

Yeah, I think that would be helpful for them.

Marisa:

Cool.

Sherri:

Jason posted a link in the chat box to some of the districts and his county, have created communication campaigns around family engagement, specifically fatherhood engagement and he’s in Alameda County, California. Thank you, Jason. There’s a link, so if anybody wants to check those out later, you can do that. We’ll give everyone a minute to work on this. I can’t wait to see what they come up with, Marisa.

Marisa:

Me too.

Sherri:

They can work on any of the frames, right? They don’t have to look at the-

Marisa:

Yeah. Use any of them and if you have something you’ve already played around with, and you want to refine it or you want to add another frame to it and be really adventurous, we’d love to see it.

Sherri:

Here’s one from Stephanie. Parent mentors and paraprofessionals, strengthen and prepare all for the future.

Marisa:

Nice. Yeah. That’s great.

Sherri:

Therese has written, “Triple A, awareness to advocate.” Not sure what that means, Therese. If you want to give us more info. Chelsea wrote, be yourself be positive and work hard.

Marisa:

Okay. Yeah, I mean, I think that those are all really important and thinking about how you can use the frames with those really important points would be great. I would love to see what you did with that.

Sherri:

Yeah, Marissa, while we wait for everyone to populate this, maybe this would be a good time to talk for a second about the importance of using frames that have been tested versus coming up with your own frames.

Marisa:

Yeah, yeah, thank you for reminding me of that. So I think, just to explain … just to go back and explain a tiny bit about what Frameworks Institute does, is we come at communications from … I often describe us as wonky sort of perspective. Basically everybody I work with is a social scientist. I’m a sociologist and so, we come in communications from a very social science background of how do we really understand the way people think about social issues, and that’s where the traps come from and in order to create effective communications, you need to understand where people are coming from on sort of a very deep level, and then create frames that address the way people think, and the challenges that are in their minds when you want to talk about any particular thing, in this case, family, school and community engagement.

Marisa:

Then once you really understand that, create frames to test, to see if they avoid those traps, right? If they kind of, address the challenges that you know you’re going to face when you are communicating. So then we do a very rigorous process of testing using interviews, focus groups, a large scale survey, with about 5000 people demographically representative survey and only after doing all of this research, do we make recommendations about what frames and what the framing strategy should be, that we know are going to work. So for instance, with the metaphors, we tested a lot of different metaphors. We tested a bunch of them initially in interviews, and then refined and then tested a bunch of them in our large scale survey, our quantitative survey.

Marisa:

Space Launch just blew all the rest of them away. It did incredibly well. It did incredibly well in the interviews, and that they did incredibly well in the survey as well. So that’s why we recommend it. That’s really the … it demonstrates the importance of testing your frames before you use them because something that sounds really good to you and makes total sense to you, as somebody who’s deeply involved in a field doesn’t always work out there in the public, because you’re running into ways of thinking that are different from you because you kind of have that expertise. So yeah, just something to keep in mind.

Marisa:

I showed it I think in session one and session two with that value chart about addiction and the fact that empathy actually was counterproductive. Even though members of the field, they were using in like 98% of their communications and it turned out that they were kind of shooting themselves in the foot because they’re using a value that did the opposite of what they wanted it to do.

Sherri:

Yeah, I think that’s so powerful because you assume when you say these things that you’ve come up with like a really good metaphor, and it’s going to blow people away, and they’re all going to get behind your idea and you have no way of knowing oftentimes if the metaphor you came up with says the same thing to them that you want them to hear. So using those tested metaphors, I think is really important. So we have a few messages now. I will read these out for you. Darlene this one might be my favorite one, but only because I know happy hour is not far away. Darlene wrote all experience is valuable. Let’s pour together for a tasty future. Nice.

Marisa:

That’s very holiday appropriate.

Sherri:

Ready, first of eggnog now.

Marisa:

Exactly.

Sherri:

Charice wrote, “We found it was important to show how being aware of opportunities to advocate prompts collective action to support the greater community. That makes sense if people don’t know the opportunities are there, it’s hard to engage with them.”

Marisa:

Yeah. Yeah.

Sherri:

Stephanie wrote, “This meeting today has been full of functionality thanks for preparing meat rather than milk.” I like that. Deana wrote, “Anticipating traps is okay but naming and explaining in cartoon frames acting them out.”

Marisa:

Interesting. Okay.

Sherri:

Thelma wrote, “Interdependence build strong communities that value the contributions of all engaged, parents and educators in the process of promoting successful youth.”

Marisa:

Good. Yeah. That’s great.

Sherri:

Yeah, so for that one, I love that she’s … that is a really good example. It’s got a lot of really good pieces. The only trap I would see in that one might be the tangible triad, right, triad, they talk about parents and educators but the community is missing there.

Marisa:

Yeah, which is …

Sherri:

So, that could be-

Marisa:

I think that is something that … and I know that I fall back on it too in terms of talking about family engagement but yeah, thinking about how can we … and I’ll talk about parents when families are … we want to talk about families so definitely thinking about expanding it as much as we can. There are going to be context in which talking about teachers and parents obviously, just doesn’t make sense to go past that but as frequently as possible, expanding it, talk about communities, talk about families and talk about educators more broadly.

Sherri:

So Rochelle wrote, using a simple metaphor, such as a food recipe and the required steps that allow all plates to enjoy the meal. Again, I think that might be a really good metaphor to use for us but for people who are out in the field, we don’t know if that would work or not, right, Marisa?

Marisa:

We actually tested a cooking metaphor, and it just didn’t do anywhere near as well as the space launch metaphor. I mean, again, top of mind, that metaphor seems like it would make sense and it just didn’t do as well for whatever reason. I think, because it doesn’t … there’s something special about space launch and part of it is that embedded is this idea of mission control and there are these groups of experts that are working together, and it’s sort of … in terms of engagement, that’s such an important part of talking about the collaboration between the different sets of parties and important groups, so parents, community, educators, talking … comparing them to something where you know there’s a lot of expertise and training, and skill, I think elevates engagement to something that is really important.

Marisa:

Also takes skill, right, like it’s sort of almost professionalizes everybody in that group. I think that’s probably part of it, is that ingredients don’t sort of have quite … it’s not comparing them to something that people think of as skilled and professional, and important in the same way that it works in the space launch metaphor.

Sherri:

Thelma wants us to know that she originally included stakeholders in her statement that I read earlier, and then to get out. So she’s got to put that back in.

Marisa:

Okay. Sounds good. Yeah, no, I mean, as I said … and there’s also sometimes you have room enough for something and sometimes you don’t. So, there’s always strategic choices but when you can sort of expand it past the tangible triad that’s important.

Sherri:

Gail wants to know, what demographic was used for the cooking metaphor? Do you remember?

Marisa:

So we tested it in a demographically representative survey of all Americans. So, it was about 5000 people, I think a little bit more and it was demographically representative, and that we … it was designed to represent or reflect America in terms of race, ethnicity, social class, gender, age, political affiliation, et cetera. Then, we look for the metaphors, values, et cetera, that work best across the line. So we did find that space launch, for instance, worked really well, sort of basically across all categories. We even dug into it a little deeper than we usually do to make sure that it was working well for people of color, lower income, et cetera and it worked great.

Sherri:

Cynthia Grace makes a fantastic point. She says space launch may also be easily associated with science and STEM or Steam, and it is related and relevant in the concept of education and learning.

Marisa:

That’s true. I mean, yes, I agree and I think that again, that’s the power of this metaphor, is that even if people don’t … they don’t necessarily understand the exact mechanics of what goes into a space launch, they have a model of it, that they understand pretty clearly and that they share with other people. So that’s why it works really well and can be used in a lot of different ways.

Sherri:

Yeah, Stephanie said, as a community organization, I have constant push about including community organizations, it is key. Thanks for that reminder, Stephanie. We like to see them included as well. Jason said families and schools partnering to build healthy and hold children and communities for our collective future.

Marisa:

Yeah, talking about sort of the ways in which we’re collectively responsible and collectively benefit is just as like a framing practice is really helpful, because you want people to sort of recognize and that’s what opportunity for all also it does recognize the ways in which we’re all invested in these things.

Sherri:

Yeah, and I’ll read one more, because I want to get to the Fam Engage page and talk a little bit more about the space launch there. Miriam says, “I can’t wait to read up on Space Launch. Thank you for such a unique research supported approach. I’ve heard so much but this model is new.”

Marisa:

Thank you. You’re welcome. I mean, this is the result of a long research process and just being able to have such a great framing strategy that we know is really well supported is … I mean, that’s why we do this work, so thank you very much. So I think Sherri are you leading this conversation?

Sherri:

Sure. Let’s bring up Barbara and Carmen on so we can talk about what we’ve learned and what we’re going to do with it. Hi, Barb.

Barb:

Hey, Sherri, how are you?

Sherri:

Good. Hi, Karmen.

Karmen:

Hi. Hi. How are you?

Sherri:

Fantastic. Happy Holidays and Happy Hanukkah to everyone.

Marisa:

Should I stop sharing my screen just so everybody can really see you all better?

Sherri:

Yeah, I think that would be great.

Marisa:

Would that be helpful? Okay.

Sherri:

Yeah.

Marisa:

Let me stop sharing.

Sherri:

So we wanted to talk with you guys about what we’ve covered in the frameworks and what we’re going to do with it now that we’ve been through the institute. So, I want to start by just asking you guys, what did you think of the content of the opportunities to reframe our conversations?

Karmen:

I’m going to go Barb.

Barb:

Sure.

Karmen:

Okay. Well, this is maybe my third time hearing this and every time I hear it, I take something new away. In terms of the messaging and how to message, the ways in which we work with families and really, what do we want to get out of that at the end of. What are we taking back to our districts, our organizations and how we work together to support families. So, I really appreciate Marisa coming to talk with us and sharing that knowledge. I thought it was absolute … like I said, I learned something new and I love it, so thank you.

Sherri:

Awesome. Barb, how about you?

Barb:

I agree with Karmen. As many times as I heard the presentation, which is probably three or four times, always learning something new. It’s one of these things that … each presentation I’ve heard, it never gets boring, it never gets old. I always hear and learn something different and focus on something different. For whatever reason, something will just resonate with me and I really look forward to how we will embrace, how we reframe our conversation in Maryland and how we will look at moving this forward and especially looking at our messaging.

Sherri:

Yeah, Karmen, I know that you are leading the statewide Family Engagement Center in Maryland and Pennsylvania. Is there a particular use for reframing with the messaging that you guys have going out?

Karmen:

I would say so. I mean, I think it’s how we work with our districts and describe the work that we do to support them. I was actually talking to Barb earlier today and like, I think one of the things I would like to do is take this back to our advisory council, in both advisory councils, I should say, in both states, and figure out, is there a way that we can use what we’ve heard over the last three sessions to think through how we get buy in and bring other folks along with the work that we’re trying to do and support the families and educators and early childhood providers?

Sherri:

Barb, I was wondering if there is a frame that is your favorite. Is there one in particular that you like the most?

Barb:

I actually really am attached to the Space Launch. To me, I just really … it’s a visual for me and it’s something that I would feel most comfortable talking about because if you think about our kids, our students, our scholars, they are astronauts. They are who we want to launch into this universe and it takes a team, it takes our mission control, it takes a team to get us to that point and together, we will get there. So it really, I think, demonstrates that shared responsibility in support of our students.

Sherri:

What about you, Karmen, do you have a favorite?

Karmen:

I think it’s the Space Launch. I think it’s easy to grasp and understand, right? I think I said this before, maybe, I don’t know to whom, but I feel like some of the other frames can be captured in that Space Launch. So to me, that’s the opportunity for all for instance, like I think that messaging can go into the space launch metaphor.

Sherri:

Yeah, Marisa, do you have a favorite?

Marisa:

You know it’s Space Launch. I mean, as soon as we started testing it, and people could just use it so well, and then when we were kind of refining it and we were doing it, using it with a particular method that we use, it’s sort of like a game of telephone, where we teach people metaphor and then we have them teach it to two people and then, they teach it to two more people, and then they teach it to the original people. So we get to see like where does the metaphor go. I had never seen this before but people started drawing. They got really excited about drawing spaceships and writing down, like here’s where the families are, and they’re doing this and the ground control is this.

Marisa:

I was just like, “This is fantastic, when people get this excited about using metaphors.” So you could even do that if you’re like training other people around the frame or presenting it, if you want to draw, it really lends itself to that. I’m not a great artist but I can draw a spaceship. It kind of looks okay.

Sherri:

I’m definitely drawing a spaceship in my bullet journal today. Well, thank you guys so much for coming back to join us again, so we could just get a sense of how you were feeling at the end of these three sessions. We do want to share with everyone some of the tools that we have available to them and the community that everyone should have been invited to join. So they can practice using those tools with each other. So I guess we will go to Fam Engage now and share that Marisa, does that sounds good? I can share it from my screen.

Marisa:

That would be great. Yeah, because I’m not screen sharing now.

Sherri:

Yeah. Okay. This is the Fam Engage website that everybody should have a link to. There’s … Again, we’re going to build a community that everybody can join, where they will be able to walk through these materials and see them there as well. On this link, you will find a fantastic video with Shaun Adamec, who you all met in our first session, giving sort of a high level overview about changing how we talk about family engagement. There are some other resources on this page. There’s an opportunity to learn how to reframe your communication with the online tools, or to ask for training or download our family engagement reframing booklet.

Sherri:

My favorite part is the toolkit. So when you go to the toolkit page. You can see we have a table of contents that walks you through the different tools that are available in this toolkit and there’s some information about why framing matters and then, some specific tools like do this, not that which really summarizes the strategies that work and the ones that don’t work. We have, “When You Say They Think,” that really helps us to get an idea of how sometimes we communicate things with the best of intentions but people aren’t thinking the same thing we want them to think when they hear it. So it really walks you through some of those things. There’s the swamp, which is where you will find all of those different traps that Marisa was talking about.

Sherri:

You Say We Think and then, I want to get down to the space launch metaphor. So we can see an example of that, which is not loading. Here we go. The space launch metaphor … I’m sorry, this is the … Yeah, this is a space launch. There is a before and after, so you can see what that looks like and without the explanatory metaphor, and with the explanatory metaphor. So just a lot of different tools on this website. The other thing I wanted to share with you is the community. So when you go to the NAFSCE homepage, and you log in, this is what you’ll see and you can click on communities, you can go to your community, all of your communities and then find the reframing community and click on that.

Sherri:

When you go in there, you’ll find the latest discussion posts. Here’s one from Marissa. She wrote about framing fails. So this is, again, a tool or a resource that all of you can use so that you can practice using some of the frames and some of the tools that we shared with you in these sessions. So I think now we’ll open it up to questions and answers. So you should be posting questions in the Q and A box but if you want to share a question with us live, raise your hand and Alice will promote you and you can ask Marisa a question. So while we are waiting, here is a question from Julie Salm. I hope I said that right, Julie.

Sherri:

“Thinking about ways to practice this, could we maybe have a few follow ups with smaller groups where we can work together on talking through some of the examples? For example, you guys could give us a statement, we could all talk about how to reframe it to better communicate, is that something you could support us with?” Marissa, do you want me to take this one?

Marisa:

Yeah, I mean, I would love it. It is a matter of us and NAFSCE and our funders working together to make it happen.

Sherri:

I would also say that’s what the community was established for, so that we could do that. We could absolutely try and organize some opportunities to maybe meet on through that community, where people could like, self-organize into groups to talk about particular frames or particular communications and ways to reframe them. Absolutely, please log on to the community and we will happily make that happen for you. I just want to reference the chat box now because somebody commented about my lovely holiday hat and I just want to say, thank you for noticing Stephanie. I do enjoy the holidays, so I really appreciate that.

Sherri:

Okay, here’s one from Nalia. I hope I’m saying that right in Nalia. “Oftentimes, financial challenges make communicating with teachers impossible or reduced to a minimum level by parents who must work to provide basic necessities for the family. We may need to approach fulfillment of this need in a new way, such as creating a pool of volunteers to serve as surrogate parents charged with the main purpose of standing in for those parents who are unable to make parent-teacher conferences, et cetera, on behalf of their child or children. These surrogates can be drawn from students studying to become social workers, or family members or friends designated by the parent to serve as his or her representative.”

Sherri:

“These surrogates would update the parents as they represent, keeping them abreast of their child’s academic performance level and ID areas where a tutorial help is needed.” Marisa, do you want me to tackle this one? Do you want me to-

Marisa:

Yeah. That would be great. I mean, there’s a communications component to that but I think there’s also a lot of NAFSCE work, that’s a big part of that.

Sherri:

Well, I’ll tackle the NAFSCE part first and then, if you want to comment on the communication pieces. I would say first of all, that we can’t define families as just biological parents, that we need to think about families in a broader term so often that includes extended families or other relatives that can step in when biological parents or surrogate parents are not available. So I think that’s one thing that is helpful to think about. I also think that, as we think about engaging families, and I totally get, especially for working families, it’s really hard to participate in some of the events or activities that schools offer during work hours.

Sherri:

Schools need to work hard to do work with families outside of their hours, and at times when it’s more convenient for families. That is a challenge with teachers having families of their own and teachers unions, I get all of that, but unless we can offer multiple opportunities for families to engage and think about them engaging outside of school and outside of school hours, it’s going to be really, really tough. So, thinking about engagement in different ways, I think will really help with that. Marisa, do you want to speak about the communication.

Marisa:

Yeah, I mean, sort of the thing that I got out of that comment was that … so it’s about talking to educators about this and then, as you were saying, we sort of need to explode this idea of what is family and think about how community is family in some ways. I think that value interdependence, along with that sort of explanation would be really useful and talking about like, it’s not just that there’s parents and teachers are interdependent. It’s that we live in a connected world, where our whole community is interdependent, and if our children are going to do well, across various ways, we all need to rely on each other to make sure that happens.

Marisa:

So I do think that frame would actually work really well. Of course, it’s not going to do the whole explanatory part, but it’s going to sort of get people onto that, “Okay, this is why you need to care about this.”

Sherri:

Excellent. Janie, early on, asked us to slightly touch on the Space Launch metaphor. So do you want to just give us another just like real quick rundown on that?

Marisa:

Sure. Sure. So I mean, sort of its fundamental level, is that you’re talking about family school, and community engagement is similar to or like a space launch. It’s a group of people who have a lot of expertise, coming from different places to launch a spacecraft or a spaceship or an astronaut, I think you can use a number of different ways that is similar to the child or the student, coming together and working collaboratively, starting early. So, sort of all the aspects of what people know, whether 100% accurate or not about what it takes to launch a space launch. So, you have to get together early. You can’t launch a rocket after one day, right?

Marisa:

So just like with family, school and community engagement, you need to start early in the school year, you need to start early in childhood. It is about a group of people who have different forms of expertise, collaborating, partnering, working together over a period of time, very closely, just like with family, school community engagement, you have families, schools, and members of communities partnering collaboratively over time. So that’s that sort of like mapping that you can do together. There’s different aspects of it, so I think you can be really creative with the things that we know about space launch and thinking about how it relates to family, school and community engagement and launching student’s … children’s development, et cetera in successful ways in however you want to define that.

Marisa:

It might be academic success but it might be well being, or other terms that aren’t just about academics.

Sherri:

Yeah, I think that’s one of the reasons why space launch is so useful, right, because your goal doesn’t have to be the same thing. You can use that metaphor with a variety of goals. The important thing is, there’s a team of experts coming together to work on a solution to make that launch happen so that the goals can be met.

Marisa:

Yeah.

Sherri:

It’s beautiful, just like you, Marisa.

Marisa:

I didn’t even have a filter on

Sherri:

You don’t even need it. Here’s a question from Julie. This is referencing the schools or families on the interdependent slide. Julie says I work in a unique setting. Our school is residential and I was pushed away from using things that refer to our school as family because there was apparently a good deal of pushback when they did that before, basically our students spend more time with us than they do at home and our families have already given up a piece of their family by sending their child here, so we don’t want them to think that we’re replacing, really we aim for extending their family. So I’m trying to figure out how to bring that back in a way that is received in the way that we intend suggestions.

Marisa:

Yeah. So just to be clear and the thing that I was talking about in the slide is that part of the reason why interdependence works so well with educators, is that educators tend to think of their school as a family, right? The school building itself is sort of a home and a household, et cetera, but I can see how as you ran into, that being problematic for people outside of the school building. So I don’t think is that you need to refer to schools, as families, as part of your communication. What you’re doing is just getting educators on board, because they have this way of thinking already and you’re sort of queuing their understanding.

Marisa:

If it’s problematic to use that term, for people who are outside of the school for the families, for other folks, I wouldn’t necessarily use the word families, but I talked about interdependence, and the fact that as a community, we all rely on one another, we all want our children to do well and be successful and to be happy and we all rely on each other to make that happen and these are the ways that you do it. So yeah, I’m not sure that … I don’t think you need to bring family back into it actually. I think you can just use that value of interdependence to communicate the same things.

Sherri:

Excellent. I also think this might be a good time to remind everyone that you don’t have to use every frame with everybody that you should pick and choose the ones that are going to work best with the audience that you’re talking to, right?

Marisa:

Yes, absolutely and there’s going to be times when … so you want to understand who your audience is, and what you … you are going to know, works with them much better than say, I will work. I will know. So understand your audience and don’t try and shoehorn in a frame, that it doesn’t work for that context or it doesn’t work for that length of communication. Ideally, over all your communications, you will use all of these frames at some time or another, and if you can use them together, fantastic because that really ups their power. A very important thing though, is to use frames consistently, right? So it might be that only two or three really work in the world that you’re in.

Marisa:

That’s fine but make sure you’re using them over and over and over again, because the power of framing comes in doses. So the higher the dose, the more likely you are to change people support to improve their understanding, to change their attitudes. So that’s a really critical part of it.

Sherri:

Also at the same time avoiding the traps. So it’s not just about using the frames, but also avoiding those traps. So if people go to the Fam Engage website, there is a page where you can print out what those traps are and do what I do and just tape it above your desk. So whenever you’re sending out emails or letters, or anything like that, it just gives you a constant reminder of some of the things you really need to avoid.

Marisa:

Yeah.

Sherri:

Here’s a question from Sandia. I hope I said that right, Sandia, “For many immigrant families, family engagement looks very different or sounds new. Do you have strategies how to support them to understand family engagement and its importance and positive outcomes for their child and their family?”

Marisa:

Yeah. I mean, I think that with immigrant families, it is an interesting situation, because the framing recommendations that we make are very much centered in American culture, and shared American culture and the shared ways in which Americans think about different things, which with immigrant families, it’s going to be somewhat different because they’re coming from a different culture, right? So things that might work great with people who are native to this country might fall kind of flat with people who have a different understanding. So I think it does go back to that, you know your audience definitely better than I do and it might take some exploration with them to see what frames or what versions of the frames work.

Marisa:

I think there … because I do feel like just having been somewhat immersed in this world for a while now, there are so many people who are working with immigrant communities and I don’t know, if there’s sort of a community of practice that NAFSCE is involved with at all or that really is a chance for people to kind of bring in their best practices with using these frames, do they work? What are some other good strategies? I think that would be potentially helpful.

Sherri:

Yeah, totally agree and we could absolutely work on that in our reframing community. Although there are other communities on the NAFSCE website that are working with immigrant families that may not be focused so much on the reframing, but that is definitely a place where we could bring this as well. Here’s a great one from Cynthia Grace. She says, “How can we help an administrator or principal embrace parents, families and community members as essential partners and envision a healthy relationship, instead of their view, that principals and teachers with a high level academic degrees know best, and they feel a top down rollout is the only way the school community can operate? How can I use space launch for an opportunity to launch a new and collaborative vision for our school?”

Marisa:

So I just want to make sure I … so it’s how to talk to communicators who think … I mean, to educators who have that sort of more top down perspective as opposed to a bottom up and how would you use space launch to do that?

Sherri:

Yeah, I think that’s what she’s asking.

Marisa:

Yeah. Okay. I just wanted to make sure that I was catching it. Yeah, so that’s a really good question in terms of using a frame for a specific audience and I think it definitely could be very helpful, although there’s also some sort of professional concerns that you want to think of, because it sounds like there’s the tension around sort of education and management and stuff like that, that’s going on there. So I’m not sure I have an easy answer to that. I think that using space launch will be really helpful but you’re going to want to think about are there other frames that could also potentially be helpful?

Sherri:

I was thinking interdependence might be a good frame to use here too.

Marisa:

Yeah, sorry. Interdependence came to mind right away and I didn’t say it out loud but I think interdependence probably with space launch would be really helpful. The others are more … a lot of them are a little more focused on the public and maybe want to be particularly useful in this case, but I think also just the power of explanation in really, really clear ways, is just an overarching framing recommendation. So taking the equity example, for instance but thinking about how you could use that same strategy to talk about what is important in this case, is something that you could try as well.

Sherri:

I love that. I think we have time for one more, there’s only one left. So that should work out really well. No, we have two. Okay, we’ll do both of them. This one is from Gloria and I think this is a NAFCSE question. She says, “On your website, you notice that one should focus on systems, programs, policies, funding or group actions rather than on individual heroes or recipients? I’ve been using individual testimonials for years now, why is this not the best approach and can you provide a story example that focuses on systems, programs or policies to make a point? What makes this focus stronger than individual storytelling?” So Marissa, do you have anything for that or do you want me to take a stab at it?

Marisa:

Well, why don’t you … and then, I’m thinking it through. So yeah, why don’t you go ahead and-

Sherri:

Okay. I’ll go first and then if I’m wrong, you can fix it.

Marisa:

Okay.

Sherri:

So Gloria, I would say this, from my perspective, because I started my career doing advocacy on a statewide level, and my experience was, it’s great if you have one person who can tell a story and people love that. It’s not that you shouldn’t do that but if you really want to make change on a larger scale, then you have to focus on things like systems and policies, and funding opportunities and things like that to really impact things for a broader community. A lot of the work that I did when I first started was advocacy for families that had kids with special needs, and what I found was we would go to meetings with families and advocate for a particular kid to get curb cuts at their school building, for example.

Sherri:

That’s not a good example. Let’s say they needed technology to understand the school texts. In the end, we might be able to get technology for that one kid but none of the other kids knew we were out there, and there were other kids in that building that needed that technology, but because they didn’t have that storyteller that went with them to the meeting, to advocate for it, they were just out of luck. So I think if you think about, don’t stop doing that, I think that’s a really good thing to do but when you think about making change, that’s more systemic or broader scale, you really need to change the way people think overall and that is hard to do one person at a time. Marisa, fix that.

Marisa:

No, it was awesome. It doesn’t need to be fixed. I mean, it’s exactly the sort of thing that we say, which is individual testimonials are really powerful but their power can kind of go in the wrong direction, because then people identify so much with the individual and make so many assumptions about that individual, that it actually can be counterproductive. They seem, for lack of a better term, like an individual, right? So that person has these specific characteristics or managed to do these things or whatever and it’s hard for people to … Sorry, first my kid and now my cat are in the screen. It’s hard for people to extrapolate to others and to the systems that people are embedded in.

Marisa:

So whenever you have those testimonials, make sure that ideally at the beginning, and at the end, you’re giving context, so that you can see that this is an example. It’s not the person. It’s an example of a condition or a situation. So yeah, what you said Sherri.

Sherri:

I agree with what you said too. I think it is really hard when you hear a story about the one person not to think that person is awesome. It’s too bad, everyone else isn’t like that.

Marisa:

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, there’s been social science research that shows that cognitively it’s difficult for people to extrapolate when they only hear one person’s story.

Sherri:

Yeah and then our last question is definitely a NAFSCE question. Seyad and I apologize for saying that wrong, because I’m sure I did. She asks, “Has NAFSCE thought about providing train the trainer program that is tailored supporting immigrant families?” So that is not something that NAFSCE typically does but we have members that are members of NAFSCE that do offer that kind of training. So I would say, connect with some of the other members in our communities, particularly members of the immigrant families groups, and you can put a question out there and ask if anybody is providing that train the trainer program, and I guarantee they will respond, and if they don’t, then feel free to write to me directly and I will find you something. I think that’s it. We’ve answered all our questions, Marisa.

Marisa:

Fantastic.

Sherri:

I want to say thank you, because you are not just a delight to listen to and learn from, but also you have done a tremendous job of helping us understand what these frames are and how we can work with them to really change the way people think about family and community engagement, and I also want to say a huge, huge thank you to Barb Scherr and Karmen Rowland for attending all three sessions, and being willing to be interviewed before and after, to share their thoughts about reframing this conversation and a thank you to Alice Clark, who makes everything happen at NAFSCE. Without her, we would all just be … I don’t know, we wouldn’t be doing much. It’s all Alice.

Sherri:

Thank you, everyone for joining us today. Please be sure to join our community. All of us, Alice, Marissa, Lisa, and I will be engaged in the community and populating some content occasionally and responding to what you populate. It’s really a good opportunity for you guys to connect with each other and to connect with people in other states who have also gone through the Reframing Institute, because we have people in Massachusetts that finished up recently that are in there, and we’ll be adding Ohio in February. So thank you all so much for your time and attention. I hope everybody has a Happy Hanukkah. Happy Christmas. Happy Holidays, however you celebrate. Thank you for coming and have a wonderful day.

Marisa:

Thank you.