This guide covers important guiding principles and overarching tips as well as specific conversation starters teachers can use.

Use this series of short 1-2 minute videos to introduce family members to English Learner Education. Available in English, Chinese, Haitian Creole, Portuguese, Spanish, and Vietnamese.

Learn about high school improvement efforts at three Boston schools — East Boston High, 2023 School on the Move Winner, and two finalists, Boston Green Academy and Fenway High.

Learn how to use 5-10 week cycles and a family workshop model to engage family members more deeply in literacy development. The FELA toolkit includes a introductory video, step by step guide; planner for teachers; family, student, and educator commitment sheets, phone scripts, and other resources. Reading tips are available in English and Spanish.

Session materials from DESE’s 2019 MTSS Leadership Institute. Note: Some materials are based on the 2018 Massachusetts MTSS Blueprint which was updated in 2025.

This short blog by Maria Paredes (nationally known her work on parent teacher home visits) provides quick reminders on ways you can make open house, back-to-school, and curriculum nights more interactive and meaningful for family members.

This playbook includes a framework for assessing current family engagement, with practical examples and strategies for building a strong partnership with family members that fit a middle schoolers needs and developmental level.

Use this online toolkit to reflect on and refine family communication practices that support the full range of families you serve.

Use this collection of guidance and online tools to help students grades 6-12 explore options and plan for life after high school.

A toolkit to help early childhood care providers, families, and schools support the transition to Kindergarten. Available in English, Cape Verdean Creole, Haitian Creole, Portuguese, Chinese, and Vietnamese.

Use these materials and training modules to orient staff and family members on the role ELPACs play and how to start and manage them

This online module provides tools, practices, and resources to help schools serve students with limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFE).

Use this interactive blueprint to explore four pillars blocks of effective support for English learner success

A treasure trove of resources for school staff, youth, and families including tip sheets and training tools, webinars, “Know Your Rights” flyers, postsecondary transition support tools, and much more.

This blueprint helps schools and districts develop school-community partnerships to support youth experiencing homelessness and their families (McKinney-Vento support).

The Better Together training module helps educators think about and do family partnership. The module is based on the Massachusetts Family, School, and Community Partnership Fundamentals. It includes research, family voice videos, practice spotlights, and a Fundamentals Reflection Process Tool Kit school and district teams can use to identify the next stage or level of their family school partnership.

This cookbook is the result of the Massachusetts Wraparound Zone Initiative, an initiative aimed at helping schools tackle both academic and non-academic barriers to student learning, and includes recipes for strengthening school culture, creating strong student success teams, engaging family members as partners, building community partnerships and coalitions, and much more.

This module provides users with an interactive learning experience so that they can learn what they need to know about the special education process. While this guide is geared towards families, it will be useful to anyone who needs to know more about topics like referral, evaluation and eligibility (among others).

Access session materials from the 2018 LEA event on topics including creating a pipeline of diverse educators, developing multi-tiered systems of support, equitable access to high quality curriculum, bilingual education, ensuring racial and cultural equity, effectively engaging families, student mobility, approaches to addressing students’ mental health needs, integrating social emotional and academic learning, and more.

DESE’s October 2019 Leading with Access & Equity Conference had a great line-up of sessions! Access all conference materials here.