The Corner CAFE Podcast: Ari Gerzon-Kessler

Nikevia Thomas: Hello everybody. This is Nikevia and Jessica from MAEC's CAFE and you're listening to the Corner CAFE podcast. Families, schools, and communities in Maryland and Pennsylvania are looking for strategies to increase family engagement. On this show, we sit down with family engagement experts to discuss the ideas, best practices, and strategies that they use so that the rest of us can do the same. So let's get started.

Jessica Webster: All right. Today we are thrilled to explore a powerful model for family advocacy and partnership in education known as Families and Educators Together, FET teams. Joining us from Boulder, Colorado is Ari Gerzon-Kessler, an educational leader who has dedicated his career to strengthening relationships between educators and families, especially those who are underrepresented. Ari's recent book On The Same Team: Bringing Educators and Underrepresented Families Together was recently selected as the gold medal winner for the Independent Publishers Book Award for Outstanding Education Books of 2024. It offers both a call to action and a step-by-step guide for building parent teams within schools and districts.

Nikevia Thomas: In addition to that, Ari leads the Family Partnerships department for the Boulder Valley School District in Colorado and is an educational consultant working with schools and districts committing to forging stronger school family partnerships. Ari has been an educator since 2000, having served as a principal and bilingual teacher. In 2006, Ari was a recipient of the Japan Fulbright Memorial Fund. As principal, his school received the Governor's Distinguished Improvement Award in 2013. His leadership efforts to strengthen partnerships with underrepresented families and dismantle unjust practices was featured in Education Week in 2015. Ari, it's fantastic to have you with us today. Thank you for joining us.

Ari Gerzon-Kessler: Thanks Nikevia, thanks Jessica. It's really great to join you today. Looking forward to our conversation.

Jessica Webster: Alright, so with that, let's get started. Can you start off by talking to us about your work and how it is that you became such an advocate for the necessity for these strong family educator teams?

Ari Gerzon-Kessler: Absolutely. Yeah. I absolutely found my niche with school-family partnerships. I started out as a teacher and part of what inspired me to teach was my four grandparents were all immigrants, and I really saw how schools, particularly public schools, had the opportunity to really create a pathway for the American dream and a more just society. And at the same time, I was really guided by the fact that my maternal grandmother, whose life story I wrote for my senior thesis in college, she really impacted me and she fled her home country at the age of 15. And due to discrimination by her own teachers could sense that she needed to start afresh in the wake of the antisemitism she grew up with and left her entire family. And basically that experience of seeing how she needed my mom as a young girl to navigate the school system, that was part of this inspiration of, as a teacher I want to be, especially as I was working mostly with immigrant families, I want to be an effective bridge to the school.

I want them to feel connected. I want them to feel heard. So those were the early seeds. And I saw in my early days as a teacher when a mentor said, "Hey, why don't you give a call to each family before the year starts to see the difference?" That was my third year in the classroom to see the difference it made in terms of relationships. I began to see the power of making some extra efforts in being more strategic and relationship-centered. So fast forward about 12, 15 years, I'm principal of a turnaround school and really seeing, coming into a pretty broken community where trust was extremely low and there'd been a very closed door approach to families. That bringing forward two main initiatives from my last principalship, which were a monthly award ceremony for character and academic strides that brought families in before school, invited the staff, and by the end of the year, 20-25 elementary students recognized each month. We'd brought in about 200 families, about half the school had been there engaging, seeing their kids celebrated, feeling more part of our school community. That combined with continuing the positive phone call system I had done in four or five schools early in my school leader experiences. Those two pieces were kind of inspirational. So when I, after a decade of school leadership said, "okay, I'm exhausted. I want something new." There was really that seed of "what's possible in a school community when partnerships are prioritized?" And I would also say when the opportunity to lead a family partnerships came along, I was also fueled by some regret. As I began to dive into some of the books in our field, I realized, wow, I worked with staff to design back-to-school nights with zero parents around the table. There were so many different regrets I had as I learned more. And that really inspired me to learn as much as I could about the field and then put it in the practice with the couple dozen schools I was working closely with. So that's kind of a short version of the arc of what drew me to this field.

Jessica Webster: Yeah, I say that all the time. "If I were to go back, I would be such a better principal knowing what I know now than I was." You were doing great stuff. It's not that what you were doing wasn't great, then you're like, "Oh, I could have done this too," or "I could have done this instead."

Nikevia Thomas: Yeah.

Jessica Webster: Absolutely. I feel the same way.

Nikevia Thomas: That's really great. Yeah, your perspective changes as time goes on. Speaking of perspectives, can you talk a little bit about family involvement and family engagement? So, people often use family involvement and family engagement interchangeably. And in your experience, do these terms reflect similar concepts or are there distinct differences in mindset and action that we should be aware of when we're using them?

Ari Gerzon-Kessler: Yeah, I love the question. It's actually something I've studied and thought deeply about and I get to see day in and day out. This school is much more caught in the traditional family involvement approach. This school is moving more actively towards engagement. And I was deeply impacted in my first year or two in my current role by Susan Auerbach's book around authentic partnerships. I think it's not, I don't know how well known it is, but it's really powerful some of the writing and research in there. And so yeah, Nikevia, I'd say to highlight maybe the five to 10 biggest points, I think many of our schools are still mostly wedded to involvement approaches. And that's where I get excited. How can we move towards the other end of the continuum? It's more based in a one-way, what is staff doing to reach out to families, not a two-way doing with. Involvement looks, I think more like school designed event versus what I was referencing a few minutes ago.

Ideally, what co-creating events with families, I mean, they're the experts on what's going to draw them in. It's regrettable for not giving them seats at the table. Involvement feels more exclusive of a couple parents holding a lot of influence and power. Whereas what I've seen at the schools where we've started these families and educator together teams is a much more inclusive voice for everyone. And then I think a couple other big pieces are involvement is more transactional, more about outcomes, academics, policies, whereas authentic partnerships and Angela Valenzuela's beautiful research on authentic care, talks about prioritizing the relational aspect of school community. So that creates a shift from a much more surface level trust to higher levels of trust between educators and families.

Jessica Webster: And those relationships are so key. I mean, I think the research on the impacts of true and authentic engagement on student achievement, on educator satisfaction, attendance, behavior, it's pretty powerful. And I think that the research really shows that attendance grades, test scores, they all go up, behavior incidents are going down, students' mental health outcomes are stronger. And especially in this day and age where we're kind of concerned if we're going to even have enough teachers and principals, we're talking about teachers feeling more supported, more likely to report higher feelings of job satisfaction, respect from their communities, which is really important I think. So then what's getting in the way here, like you said, I agree with you. I think a bunch of schools are stuck in that involvement, the traditional involvement model. What's in the way? What are the barriers here that keep us from building teams like you described in your book?

Ari Gerzon-Kessler: Yeah, I think that's really the crux of the challenge right now. And I would just add Jessica, I mean you just spoke to so many of the great outcomes of really prioritizing family partnerships as a strategy for all those outcomes rather than just this generic goal. And one of the things I am constantly working with is, and remember as a principal is, how easy it is for family partnerships, to truly do it in a deep way gets put on the back burner as we just stick with the more events focus. That's a piece I forgot with the last question is involvement's much more events-focused than ongoing collaboration communication. So I'd say in terms of barriers, yeah, this is a piece I knew I needed explore in the book because why are people going to invest in teams or a deeper emphasis on this work if there isn't a clear look at, "Well, what's standing in the way?"

So I would say mean a couple pieces that come to mind. One is that as educators we're utterly overstretched. It feels like everyone's asked to do one and a half to two people's jobs. And so just energetically and time-wise, there's so many competing demands. I say another barrier is time isn't allocated enough for learning about partnering with families more effectively, or I hope we dive in a little while more deeply, is giving staff time and engage in some of these best practices. And as you referenced earlier, there's also a barrier is the lack of training for educators. I mean, the research shows very clearly when MetLife surveyed teachers years ago, they said the area they felt least confident or least prepared was partnering with families. And I would just couple final pieces as I was just reflecting on this when I was at the National Conference on Family Engagement in Atlanta a few weeks ago, was the trepidation and anxiety a lot of educators feel around engaging with families from different cultures, races, linguistic backgrounds, and that we're still of course impacted by our own biases and sadly still educators who are holding deficit perspectives.

And two final pieces, I think one is it's of course easier and safer to maintain our status quo approach with families. It involves some significant risk to go do a relationship center kind of home visit or to reach out and naturally as a middle school or high school teacher in particular, call of family. And yeah, and I'd say there's also a lack of awareness about all the positive benefits you were just naming and all the ways it feeds into not only academic outcomes, but as University of Chicago research showed years ago, it's one of the five key levers to move from a good to great school or district. Yet sadly, it is pushed to the back burner because, and I get it because as a former principal, you're putting out the fires and you're focusing more on curriculum and learning. But one of my hopes is that over time, educators more broadly see the power of family engagement to propel so many of these great outcomes.

Jessica Webster: I think you're absolutely right, and I think the more we stay in that reactive mode, when we do build these partnerships, it helps us move to that proactive piece. And it just makes sense to me. Right? So instead of running around putting out all these fires, the fires aren't going to, not all of them, but many of the fires are going to be not starting at all or less intense if we can have these proactive relationships and all work together towards the same cause, especially when it comes to behavior and mental health and all the things that we know our kids are struggling, that the data shows our kids are struggling with and behavior is up, especially since the pandemic. And it just seems like, I know it takes more time. I a hundred percent agree with you. Initially, it takes more time, but I think you'll get that time back when you start these programs and you start really, really relating to families.

Nikevia Thomas: So you talked about status quo, and I think another way that people see that is we've always done it this way and there's a fear of deviating from what I know, it's comfortable, what we all know, it's comfortable, and then taking the risk to do something different and dynamic takes resources of time and money. So it's just different. And I think that that can be a stretch for people. But then there is-- sharing what we talked about Jessica before-- like people immediately go to what they lost, "What am I going to lose? What am I going to lose?" Can we talk a bit more about what they gained? What are the goals in Family and Educator Together teams? Could you explain what the goals are and what happens in these meetings?

Ari Gerzon-Kessler: Yeah, absolutely. And before diving into the teams, Nikevia, you really inspired me just to share two concrete school examples that I think really go with that piece of what you just brought up of. What does it look, what is the loss and the gain with the status quo? So one example and thinking about a K- eight school I worked with this past year and we talked about back-to-school night on these Families and Educators Together teams, when we asked families "What's something that could be different and improved and more meaningful?" They said back-to-school night and they said, "A lot of parents I know didn't attend because it wasn't as purposeful as it could be." And essentially they're not giving any extra time as we reinvent it. Essentially what families said was we came, we watched a video of the school leaders, a video that was not very engaging for them, and then the traditional teacher spiel about here's the curriculum.

Well, as we talked about it and drew on what a couple other teams had done at other schools was what if we send the curricular piece by video? Families can take it in. And then when they come in for that same amount of time, you can engage in activities that build connections between the families and with the teacher. And they can pose questions, make it more informal and interactive, which is what most families are telling us fosters more of a sense of the connection. So that's just one example of rethinking without a tremendous amount of new resources or time. Something that's going to be more meaningful for everyone because the educators themselves on the team acknowledged, yeah, the way we're doing it was kind of broken. It wasn't working. And I can share more later in terms of one thing that the team's created, but shifting parent-teacher conferences, which I've written and trained schools around.

We're not talking more time, we're not talking any extra effort, we're talking rethinking it. So maybe we'll come back to that. But yeah, the team was something that was a small project of mine early in my seven years in leading this family partnerships department. And by the fifth year I saw that they were so impactful that they gave us a vehicle to do this deeper work consistently and expanded the amount of parent and educator leaders doing this work that I began to realize this is where the magic, the meaning is really happening. So to answer your question explicitly in terms of goals and what happens, the primary goals are strengthening trust-based reciprocal relationships between educators and under represented families. Because for decades our district, like many was guessing what families that were more on the margins needed instead of just asking and reaching out and then listening.

Probably the biggest purpose is to engage in meaningful dialogue that centers family voices so that educators can discover more effective partnership approaches. It's also equipping families with tools to navigate our schools and access opportunities. And then there's a powerful piece of these gatherings give us space where we see community and collective agency being built between families, which has its own great impact on the school community. And then I would say, as I mentioned, it's cultivating more champions both on the parent side and the educator side that are highly effective at forging cross-cultural connections and making it so that family partnerships isn't just the job of the liaison or the principal or one or two great teachers, but this truly team approach. And then I say finally, and this was a piece that took us five years to really nail down was we also need to see change happening schoolwide as a result of these team's efforts, transformative action projects that put in place the best practices so that, because basically we got to the end of the fourth year of having these teams at about 10 schools and I realized, wow, beautiful connections are happening.

Everyone who's here is benefiting, but go down the hallway and look at how are the teachers who haven't been a part of it shifting their practice and there wasn't much change. So that sparked in year five, and we're now heading into year eight, this real clarity of in December and January we need to talk about with families and with educators, what should we shift in terms of practice that will ripple across the entire school community. So yeah, those are the seven, I'd say main goals. And yeah, do you want me to dive into a typical meeting or is there,

Jessica Webster: Yeah but before you do that, Ari, I just want to really amplify a couple of things that you stated there. First of all, what I hear you saying is we don't just start these meetings and then instantly everything's better. It's a plan that you build on year to year that you're continually analyzing and saying like, okay, this went really well. What are we adding? What are we doing differently? How are we systematizing it even more? That sometimes I think we as educators, you want to see that impact immediately. You're talking, your experience five years is when you started to be like, I feel really good. I'm starting to see these changes. So I just want to say that again because I think sometimes we're like, yeah, we did this and it didn't turn out exactly the way we wanted it. Let's scrap it rather than sticking with it and saying, okay, what was great about this? How are we continuing to do this? And that understanding it's going to take a while to get our feet under us and feel really good about what we're doing and build those consistent relationships with more families.

Ari Gerzon-Kessler: Absolutely. Yeah. And Jessica, you're reminding me, I mean there's this quote that's guided my work and continue to be reinforced. I think it comes from Stephen Covey. He says, "Change happens at the speed of trust and trust moves at the speed of relationships." And that has been such a teaching because I think a danger for many efforts, and our teams were guilty of this in the early years, is everyone wants to move to solutions so quickly and next steps and actions. And it was really powerful to see we need to be most effective to spend the first three, four months fully focusing on the building of connections and relationships and building the psychological safety. So yeah, it's been just really valuable to see how to scaffold it in a way that leads to a truly collaborative cohesive team.

Jessica Webster: Yeah. Okay. So what does this actually look like? What does the meeting look like?

Ari Gerzon-Kessler: Yeah, and Springboard for it was out of Joyce Epstein's pioneering work of this idea of Action Teams for Partnerships. Over these seven years, we've really refined Families and Educators Together. Gatherings are once a month, they're an hour and a half, they're now at 28 of our schools. Most meetings historically have been conducted in Spanish as our initial focus was on our Spanish-speaking population. It makes up 20% of our particular school district with simultaneous English interpretation so that everybody's involved, but of course what it says to families and the power of them getting to participate in their preferred native language. But now we have more than 10 teams where it's in English, we've got three or four different interpreters. Families are engaging in their preferred language, so hour and a half, and then we provide dinner and childcare. Each team is led by two to five educator and parent team leaders.

The aim was let's get at least five educators and five underrepresented family members and the school leader consistently in the room together. And if it proves to be 10 or 20 of each of those groups, wonderful. But some of the most intimate, rich conversations have been smaller, although we're always working on how do we recruit. And then in terms of the structure roughly of the hour and a half, which I of course go into depth in the book about, because it took us five years to really discover the secret sauce was, we connect over food, we know across cultures the power of breaking bread together. And then I pulled a lot from my social-emotional learning background, which was kind of my mom's life work. And we always do a team builder, kind of an SEL type activity that fosters laughter, energizes people at six at night when this is typically starting, and breaks down a lot of walls. And then we do an opening circle that brings in everyone's voice because that's critical to psychological safety when we're asking questions half an hour later of families that they've already felt comfortable bringing their voice as well as for educators who are speaking in front of their principal and families that they maybe don't know very well. And then essentially the heart of the meeting after some quick updates for families. Since many families continue to tell us, we don't read your emails, we don't. We value hearing it live.

The heart of the meeting is twofold. And the first part's more for families' learning, and that might be the role of the counselor, mental health supports, what tests do kids take and how can you support 'em? Knowing that many of our schools have not done enough to make the school system understandable and easy to access and partner with, especially for many of our immigrant families and underrepresented families. And then the center of the meeting, which takes the bulk of it is meaningful dialogue, which is typically us posing a few questions to families so that every educator in the room can essentially learn from families as the experts and that we can humbly take off our expert hats and really center voice to families. And that really takes us towards essentially the closing of the gathering where we bring everyone's voice in again, usually for just a single word, to capture how they're feeling as we wrap up this gathering. And I knew there was something special with these teams when I think 18 teams at this point a year or two ago. And every school--didn't matter which--the closing words around the circle were things like inspired, connected, uplifted, heard, seen, informed. So that's kind of the arc of a typical Families and Educators Together, team gathering.

Jessica Webster: That's so cool. And then, I mean, you feel so good after you're filled with all that positivity too, leaving the meeting

I'm inspired and I feel heard.

Ari Gerzon-Kessler: Well, and, you reminded me, Jessica, a couple of teachers I connected with last year said, they just said straight up, I don't like meetings and I definitely don't like night events. But with FET team gatherings, it's an exception because I leave feeling consistently uplifted. I touch on this in some depth in the book is we know from our teaching lives, great learning comes from great preparation. And so I spend an hour partnering every single month with every set of team leaders to design a meeting. So we're spending a full hour designing an hour and a half gathering compared to the norm. In my experience when I was leading meetings for staff as a principal, like, oh, it's tomorrow.

Jessica Webster: What do I need to put on?

Ari Gerzon-Kessler: And there's a kid who just pulled the fire alarm and we got to get this done in eight minutes. So that thought, that's probably one of the biggest lessons of being really intentional and carving out the time in that aspect is critical. Cause we're doing a lot of deep cross-cultural work where we want families and educators to be honest about where could we grow as well as celebrate what's effective already in place. But yeah, so that piece is really important too, what happens before.

Jessica Webster: But you're talking about the planning that goes into each meeting. What really struck me in the book was how much time you're spending you spend and devote in the book, even talking about how you build the teams, how you figure out who's going to be on those initial teams, how you recruit teachers, other district school members, leaders, planning the actual, that takes a really long time before you even start the first meeting, before you're bringing people together. You are so intentional about the planning. Can you talk to us about that in the recruitment process and what that looks like?

Ari Gerzon-Kessler: Yeah, I mean, I found in the earliest years, and it was mostly because the school leader wasn't as invested as we now you know, make sure that it's the school leader or someone else on the staff reaching out to me saying, we're hungry to start a team. They're not being convinced of it, that there's this strong buy-in before any sort of even recruiting begins. And I just saw that the more we set a strong foundation even in the spring before the team launches, it's critical in so many different ways. And so I think a couple key pieces of the recruitment is starting with the schools and specific staff members or parent leaders who are really ready to do this deeper work and are passionate and ready to commit the time and effort that it's going to entail. It's a couple hours a month in terms of leadership.

So it's not like taking on a part-time extra job, but it is in the busy lives of everyone. That's a key piece that they're hungry to do it. And then I have found, because we were talking about earlier in our conversation, the need for educators to know more about the why of family engagement done effectively, and I just did it, the five schools that are launching teams next fall is trying to do a really dynamic inspiring presentation educators on the why of family engagement best practices combined with why is this team so needed important and impactful so that it's not pulling their arms to get them to the meetings in the midst of the busy September when we launch the first gathering. So really planning this seed that this is going to be deeply purposeful and worth their time so that either they'll show up consistently if they're not leading or they'll come check out the gathering.

And then in terms of recruiting families, and again, the focus is really on underrepresented families because there's so much we can learn about creating a more equitable inclusive school where every family member, every student feels a sense of belonging and trust. And this is, I'd say in most schools it's primarily immigrant parents and caregivers, families of color, really a pretty inclusive umbrella, but families that have been often been or still feeling disconnected or marginalized from the school or where the staff just simply has not built enough trust. And that recruitment of families begins in August, informally in the spring in casual conversations if you want me to talk in greater depth. But we've learned a ton over the years of how do we get families in the door for a gathering that's unfamiliar at first, drawing on what's worked at different schools since they're that old adage, they're not going to come to us until we come to them. And that's why things, of course, like home visits are so powerful, but how do we propel them to want to give a precious night to come check out something that's brand new and has some risk to it emotionally in terms of vulnerability,

Nikevia Thomas: Who you pick for the teams or the team leaders are also a critical planning step for this group. So how do schools choose leaders for the team, and what roles do these leaders serve?

Ari Gerzon-Kessler: Leadership is one of the keys to success. Probably one of the top ingredients. The leaders we've learned over the years are selected in a couple different ways. Often after there's been the staff presentation I'll do for like 20, 30 minutes, the principal puts out the inquiry of who feels drawn to lead this and learn more about what leadership entails, and I want to walk the talk in terms of relationships. So I go out in the spring, even if there's a week or two left of school and meet individually with each prospective new team leader so that they feel well-informed, even more excited and just feel ready to take this on the following school year so they're not learning about what they've just signed up for when it's the first week of school. And sometimes a colleague at that school reach out with passion to start a team, as was the case at a couple of schools this past year.

So they're a natural leader and they might recommend other colleagues or the principal might. So I mean, it's usually a pretty democratic process in terms of whoever steps forward with passion, they become team leaders, but it's also based on knowledge internally of who would, and I would also say team leaders from the staff and from parent population at the school that have a strong capacity to build relationships across differences and that are also reliable, organized, and effective communicators, knowing that follow through and great communication is key. And I've seen where teams have faltered occasionally. It's often been because one of those is missing. And then, I mean, to answer Nikevia, the second part of your question around what are they signing up for? The major pieces really are the monthly planning hour to design the agenda. That's both the logistics and the content of how do we set up a really highly engaging next meeting.

They're also the facilitators, which is new for a lot of staff as well as parents where they're not, they're used to working with kids. They're not used to working, guiding gatherings of other adults, especially in front of their boss. And they then, I'd say the final major task is coordinating all of the logistics from food to childcare and those pieces, but it tends to only be a couple hours a month of additional time beyond the actual gathering. So it's fruitful that rarely do people say, I need to bow out of this. They find the meaning outweighs the commitment time.

Jessica Webster: Yeah, well, and I think I really appreciated the thoughtfulness and the level of detail that you provide to individuals who are interested in starting these teams. There's recommendations for the planning the spring before you have tons of checklists and meeting roles and action planning guides. You have sample calendars in this book and sample meeting agendas. It's just so comprehensive that you could pick this up and it's pretty much a play by play. I think it is the planning, but you're not reinventing the wheel. Leaders have a lot of support to do the extra work. Sometimes I think it's like you get a task and you're like, wait, there's no structure around this. I'm spending more time building a structure. So that I really appreciate about that. The one thing I found really interesting in planning the meeting, and it made me think of when we do group work with kids and we talk about how everybody should have a role, is that you delegate roles within the meeting. That part of that planning is saying who's going to be the greeter, who's going to be all kinds of different roles, not just who's up at the front facilitating the actual activities. There's many roles embedded in that. What are some of those roles and why was that so important for you to make sure that that's part of the team, of these team planning and part of the meetings themselves?

Ari Gerzon-Kessler: Yeah. Yeah. Thanks Jessica. Yeah, I love that question. And I would say to the first piece you said, part of the reason I wanted to be so detailed in mapping it out was the new teams that emerge each year. I've made this about 90% of my job. I see it's the vehicle for schools to do the deep work. And so they of course have me as this ongoing coach that can draw on other schools. And I'm aware a lot of districts and individual schools that would launch teams don't have that resource of someone who's able to devote that kind of time. So it felt really important to me. I obviously care deeply about this structure and what it means for families and for educators. So for me, it's kind like the book becomes the coach you may not have. That was kind of why I felt it was important to be so detailed.

And in terms of distributing leadership, I mean, one good example would be early on I saw that naturally best practices, we want to meet families as they enter the school. So if the gatherings in the library, you want to have a warm, welcoming face at the front door for so many reasons. But what I saw was a lot of team leaders, they're nervous, they're excited, they're anxious, they're needing to consult with each other around, okay, what are we going to do in this part, those final check-ins that are valuable to an effective facilitation. And when they were going to be the greeter at the door, they're then less prepared and feeling a little more hurried or at times even reading from our agenda instead of the more rapport building conversational approach. So that was one concrete of the different roles of asking a colleague or a parent to take notes, not trying to be the great listener, the facilitator.

And I would say that's still an area for many teams of improvement. I want to this coming year continue to say, you only become more effective the more you can draw on others. And I would also say particularly with activating new parent leaders, when we distribute some of the leadership to them informally in that year, often that leads to their greater dedication and commitment to showing up in the current year and often becoming leaders. So there's so many different benefits of distributing the leadership, and it allows the team leaders to be more fully present in a way that is just critical because they're learning a lot about facilitation on the spot, and there's so many things they're juggling. So helps to have more hands supporting.

Jessica Webster: That's right. You've kind of alluded to this a couple times with that continuous improvement, how do we do it better? Are there times that you're feeling like we put this whole thing together and our turnout is falling short of expectation? Sometimes I think we worry about that. We're doing all this work to make welcoming schools and we get fewer families than we wanted. What would be your key strategies that you found have been effective when that happens, when your turnout is short of expectation, and how do you get families to come consistently?

Ari Gerzon-Kessler: It's still a puzzle at a school or two, and it's always interesting to unpack what are we not doing? What has been done between staff and families that's making it hard to get families in the room? I'd say specifically for the teams, one is the staff engaging in other best practices between the gatherings that are cultivating relationship and trust and this reciprocity of like, Hey, you called me with positive news about my kid. Now I'm getting this invite to come to a Families and Educators Together gathering, and you're extending this opportunity to get to know you as my child's teacher better. So that's a critical piece. None of the more concrete strategies around recruitment work as well as an ongoing commitment to two-way communication and fostering stronger relationships. But then I would say, and this goes for everything around family engagement, not just these teams, is a multi-pronged effort to reach out to families.

So concrete examples, we don't just send an email, we might have the principal or team leader leave a voicemail. We'll then follow that up with a couple texts to families that feel more personalized through Talking Points or another app that translates across languages. A couple of our schools have gotten innovative, like kids take home a watch that their teacher or one of the leaders has put a paper watch that has a QR code so the family can just pull up the invite. So I would say five to six different approaches that align with what families have told us are the ways that they want to be communicated with. Because I would just say as a side note, if listeners just do one thing at the beginning of next school year, it would be ask families, how do you prefer to be communicated with and let that guide things.

So I'd say those are the keys. And then not over-emphasizing the number of participants while we want to continue to increase attendance. I was referencing earlier, some of the best meetings have been around, we're always in a circle. That was another big learning early on. If it's four or five parents, four educators, and the principal, lots of great conversation and change can unfold, so. So those are some of the key learnings in addition to staff getting involved, I'm thinking of a K-eight where, and it took us seven years to sadly think of this obvious approach, but the principal supported every teacher taking five minutes at the end of a staff meeting to go invite one family to our next. FET team gathering. We went from eight families to 18, just from that more personalized approach.

Jessica Webster: I think it's like a ripple effect too. So five families show up, but those five families have networks. And so even if a person's not coming to the meeting when they're at the grocery store or the dry cleaner or the park and another family is upset or complaining or I don't really know about the school, I'm frustrated about X, Y, and Z, that person then also has the confidence to advocate and say, well, wait a second. First of all, maybe what you're saying isn't accurate, and I have that knowledge to help because we just talked about this at our meeting or sounds like you'd really enjoy. You have some real concerns if you're welcome to come to this meeting. And we really get stuff done and they really listen to us. So even if that person doesn't follow through, they're hearing someone that they know and trust say, I trust the school. They listen. And so they may never show up at a meeting. They're going to start to internalize that message. I think a little bit more. That that's part of building community too. It's not always who visibly shows up at the meeting. It's also, or that person brings back, Hey, I was at the park and I heard some families talking about this at the park. We might want to address it. I think that can be really powerful too. They serve as more like brokers for those who still may feel like they can't come or have a barrier. They can't come, they're at work or they have a barrier that they can't overcome to be there.

Ari Gerzon-Kessler: Yeah. Well, and Jessica, quick story. I mean, you mentioned the park. It just me of a great example of that, of Lewisville Elementary School. About three years ago, we were having one of the initial gatherings, and we built just enough trust already that we were about to break into three small groups to talk about how does the school improve communication? How does it improve relationships? And I can't remember the third category, but two moms boldly raised their hands and said, we don't want to go talk about any of those pieces right now. We need to talk about transportation because our kids and the kids in our specific neighborhood live too far to walk in the snow, in the cold weather. But due to the school systems', questionable bus policies, there's no bus for them. And so that was the seed for five days later, the FET team leaders, myself, the principal, and four parents, including I think one that wasn't, to your point at the team gathering, talking about, and someone from our transportation department ultimately coming up with a solution that drew on a public county bus, not a school bus as the solution.

But that was just a beautiful example of when we actually create the space to hear their concerns and listen to what the true barriers are. Sometimes pretty easy solutions can leak forward,

Jessica Webster: And sometimes they're the ones that have it because they're thinking outside the box and we're thinking, we don't have enough bus drivers, or we don't have enough buses. And they're thinking, well, I take public transit and it goes right past the school.

Nikevia Thomas: Oh, wow. This has been good stuff. This has been a great conversation. So as we wrap up, we have a final question that we'd like to ask all of our guests. From your perspective, if a school wanted to adapt their current practices to engage and empower families as true partners at the table, where should the school begin? What is one thing that people can do today to begin building relationships of trust between families and educators?

Jessica Webster: And this will actually be your second, cause you gave us the first about how do you want to be communicated with? So we're getting a bonus. We're getting a bonus.

Ari Gerzon-Kessler: Nice. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I would say based on recent learnings across schools, the short answer would be identify one or two high-leverage practices for deepening family partnerships. So that might be implementing a two-way communication app. It might be as many of our schools now are doing positive phone calls, postcards, texts, home visits. Those are kind of my big three beyond the Families and Educators Together teams. And then the second part of that is once you've identified it, you have convinced school leadership or they're partnering with you to carve out time. And it could be as little as 10, 15 minutes for staff to understand the value and meaning behind this effort and give them the time so that they don't perceive it as one more thing, and they have it built into a staff meeting that we're canceling the last 15 minutes. So those are the two part one. And then the last thing I guess I would say is every day, see every interaction with families and caregivers as an opportunity to deepen trust. That alone as a constant mantra of, oh, this could be a moment where I can deepen relationships versus the transactional. What do I want from them? What do they need from me? To really think about how could I human to human deepen connection?

Jessica Webster: It's a whole paradigm shift. It's a whole.

Nikevia Thomas: It is.

Jessica Webster: The way that we do everything that we do goes back to how do we build relationships through this if it's curriculum-based, if it's things that we have with concerns about behavior, if it's whatever it is, it's really going back and thinking it's a total mind shift change to do this work effectively, systematically, and comprehensively at all levels.

Ari Gerzon-Kessler: Absolutely.

Jessica Webster: Yeah. Oh my gosh, thank you so much. I could sit here all day and talk about this.

Ari Gerzon-Kessler: Oh, thank you. Yeah, no, this is so enjoyable and uplifting and such great food for thought as we head towards the end of school year.

Jessica Webster: Yeah, and I will say, I told you before we even started, I've recommended this book to a number of colleagues already, and I really, really think it's just so practical and it really gives you something to think about. And I think even if you already have teams in place, there are things in this book that you can take and add to continuously improve the work that you're already doing that I don't know that we always think about. And so there's just lots of little pieces in here that I think you could plug and play some of this too, if you already have these teams in place. And I think that also makes it valuable. So I am so honored that you were able to join us today and talk to us about this book and really deepen our thought and our work and how we think about things as well. So thank you so much.

Ari Gerzon-Kessler: Yeah, pleasure. And I want to not only convey my gratitude for this opportunity to connect with the two of you, but also the work you're doing, I mean, the resources you share consistently has been an important part of my journey in these last several years. So thank you. I'm glad that we get to learn cross-state. Yeah, it's just been really informative and inspiring. So thanks for all you're both doing.

Jessica Webster: Well, let's continue to connect and we'll hopefully see you in Denver in October.

Ari Gerzon-Kessler: Yes, in October.

Jessica Webster: Well, thank you so much. And to our listeners, thank you for sharing a cup of conversation with us. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. So until next time, keep those meaningful relationships with families brewing. And don't forget to follow us on X at CAFE_MAEC.