Making Family Engagement Stick: Family Engagement Lab + Center for Literacy and Learning
About This Episode
What makes a family engagement initiative become part of everyday practice instead of one more thing for schools and families to manage?
Dr. Elisabeth O’Bryon of Family Engagement Lab and Carolin Purser of the Center for Literacy and Learning (CLL) explore what it takes to make change stick. They discuss why resources need routines, how family support differs across subjects like literacy and math, and what their partnership is teaching them about connecting family engagement more directly to instruction.
The conversation also explores the challenge of scaling this work across schools and districts without losing the relationships and local ownership that make it effective in the first place.
Chapters
- 0:00 — Welcome: Elisabeth O’Bryon and Carolin Purser
- 0:51 — Why good resources don’t change practice on their own
- 3:08 — What’s missing when a strong resource fails to take hold
- 4:35 — Supporting families without overwhelming them
- 6:53 — Does family support look different in literacy and math?
- 14:14 — What separates initiatives that stick from the ones that fade
- 16:28 — Connecting family engagement to instruction: the CLL and Family Engagement Lab partnership
- 20:32 — The challenges of statewide reach
- 25:16 — Scaling the work without losing local ownership
- 27:07 — Wrap-up
Resources
- Family Engagement Lab — Elisabeth O’Bryon’s organization, which helps schools make families partners in student learning.
- The Center for Literacy & Learning — Carolin Purser’s organization in Louisiana.
- Louisiana Statewide Family Engagement Center — The statewide family engagement work CLL leads, discussed in this episode.
- Implementation Series, Part 1: The Missing Instructional Layer — Where the series starts.
- Implementation Series, Part 2: Why Good Ideas Fail Quietly in Schools — Why promising initiatives lose momentum.
- Implementation Series, Part 3: What Happens to Family Engagement When Instructional Practice Changes? — Elisabeth O’Bryon and Rayna Flye on bringing families along when math instruction changes.
