To help families play a more informed and active role in their children’s education, North Elementary School in Okeechobee, Florida, adopted WestEd’s Academic Parent–Teacher Teams (APTT) system.

APTT gives families concrete information on their children’s academic progress and provides them with skills, strategies, and resources to use at home with their children to reinforce targeted grade-level learning goals.

An R&D Alert article describes how this Florida school, and many others like it, have used APTT to engage families to improve student achievement.

Building on over four decades of research indicating that family engagement is one of the strongest predictors of students’ academic success, APTT takes a more focused and academically oriented approach than most traditional school–family-participation events.

“To be truly engaged in their child’s education,” says Pat McCoy, North Elementary’s principal, “parents have to know what’s happening in the classroom and know exactly what they can do at home to support learning.”

Read the R&D Alert article to learn more.