Few people would disagree that strong partnerships between schools and families matter. Research has consistently linked family–teacher collaboration to better academic outcomes, improved wellbeing, and stronger relationships between schools and communities. Yet many beginning teachers report feeling underprepared to work with families. That is especially true when working with multilingual families or families of children with disabilities.
A new systematic review in the Review of Educational Research provides the first comprehensive overview of what we actually know about preparing future teachers for this aspect of their profession.
Jamie Day and colleagues screened over 7,300 publications but identified only 27 empirical studies that examined how teacher education programmes prepare preservice teachers to collaborate with families. That finding alone is striking.
It becomes even more remarkable when looking at the focus of those studies. Most concentrated on families of children with disabilities. Far fewer examined multilingual families, and only two looked at the intersection of both: multilingual families of children with disabilities.
The review does not identify a single best approach, but two models appear repeatedly.
The first is Family as Faculty. Rather than merely discussing parents during teacher education, programmes invite parents to become part of the teaching process itself. Parents share their experiences, participate in discussions, co-teach sessions, and help preservice teachers understand what collaboration looks like from the family’s perspective. Across several studies, this approach was associated with more positive attitudes towards families, greater confidence, and stronger communication skills among future teachers.
A second promising approach is service learning. Here, preservice teachers work directly with families over an extended period in authentic settings. These experiences appear to help future teachers develop a deeper understanding of families’ lives, become more culturally responsive, and move away from deficit-based assumptions.
The review also highlights a range of practical learning activities. Teacher candidates take part in simulated parent conferences and Individualised Education Program (IEP) meetings, analyse videos of home visits, and even participate in ethnodrama, where performances based on real family experiences prompt discussion about family–school partnerships.
Overall, the findings are encouraging, but the authors remain appropriately cautious.
The evidence base is still relatively small. Many studies rely on small samples and qualitative methods. Most examine what preservice teachers say they have learned, while only a handful ask families how they experienced these partnerships. Even fewer follow graduates into their teaching careers to see whether these skills actually translate into classroom practice.
The review’s main contribution is therefore not that it identifies the single best way to prepare teachers for working with families. Instead, it reveals how fragmented this area still is in many teacher education programmes. Family engagement often appears as a single lecture, a stand-alone assignment, or a guest presentation. The available evidence points in a different direction: future teachers seem to learn much more when they build sustained, authentic relationships with real families during their preparation.
That conclusion should not come as a surprise. Nobody expects teachers to master classroom practice simply by reading about teaching. Working with families is no different. Future teachers are most likely to develop these skills by practising them.
As so often, the review confirms an intuition while also exposing how much we still do not know. It identifies several promising approaches. But it also makes one thing clear: preparing teachers to build effective partnerships with families deserves a much stronger research base than it currently has.