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Family-professional partnership is integral to the effective functioning of our educational system, especially when students with disabilities are educated in inclusive school settings. Families of students in inclusive schools whose children have disabilities work with a wide range of service providers, and these families need to understand the overall alignment of the services and supports in order to navigate them (Kervick, 2017). Although partnership between families and professionals helps ensure that each child receives a free and appropriate education to facilitate positive student outcomes (Newman, 2005), these partnerships are often not realized (Blackwell & Rosetti, 2014; Haines, Summers, Turnbull, & Turnbull, 2015; Mandic, Rudd, Hehir, & Acevedo-Garcia, 2012). In this article, we discuss the benefits of family-professional partnership, education policy aimed at fostering such partnership, barriers to the formation of strong family-professional partnership, and contemporary frameworks attempting to address these barriers. We then introduce a multidimensional tiered system of support to comprehensively guide inclusive family-professional partnership practice, research, and policy.
It is important to note our reasons for choosing the terminology we use throughout this article. Although terms like “involvement” and “engagement” are commonly used when describing interactions between families and professionals, we intentionally use the term “family-professional partnership” to stress the importance of reciprocal relationships to which families and professionals both contribute and from which they both benefit. In addition, we deliberately use the term “family-professional partnership” to emphasize that partnership involves family members beyond parents only. Nevertheless, policy and research often refer to parents rather than family in regard to partnership. Thus, we encourage our readers to consider all relevant family members by blood or marriage (e.g., siblings, extended family members), as well as “chosen family,” when thinking of partnering with families and to consider authentic partnerships to be those that are reciprocal and benefit both families and professionals.
Family-Professional Partnership: Benefits, Policies, Barriers, and Current Frameworks
Research demonstrates that strong family-professional partnership benefits all educational stakeholders (Henderson & Mapp, 2002) through improving student achievement, behavior, and attendance (Bryan & Henry, 2012); increasing educator efficacy (Lawson, 2003); and reducing maternal stress (Burke & Hodapp, 2014). Family-professional partnership can increase trust among the entire school community (i.e., all people involved in the school) (Tschannen-Moran, 2014), an outcome that also leads to increased collective efficacy...