School-Family Partnership Strategies to Enhance Children’s Social, Emotional, and Academic Growth

Schools and families have essential roles to play in promoting children’s positive development and academic performance. When educators and parents work together as partners, they create important opportunities for children to develop social, emotional, and academic competencies.

This brief provides educators with strategies to promote children’s social, emotional, and academic development using school-family partnerships. We begin with an overview of social and emotional learning (SEL) and school-family partnerships (SFPs) and a discussion of the important relationship of SFPs and SEL, which we illustrate with examples from an SFP framework. We conclude with suggestions of how educators can immediately begin to apply these strategies to build and nurture successful SFPs.