Partnering with Parents in Education
Partnering with Parents in Education
New book explores how educators and families can work together to support children’s learning.
Clinical associate professor Paul Thayer is the coauthor of a new book, Family Engagement in Education: Inclusive Approaches for Creating Collaborative and Equitable School Communities (Routledge, 2026). Thayer, a faculty member in the Child Life & Family-Centered Care program at BU Wheelock, hopes this new book will help educators reframe their relationships with parents and other caregivers and lead to more effective partnerships in support of students.
We recently sat down with Thayer to learn more about this book and the inspirations for writing it.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q&A
with Paul Thayer
BU Wheelock: Your new book explores ways to engage families in students’ education. Why is this important?
Paul Thayer: One of the problems is that many teacher education programs don’t really address working with parents. And so, a lot of times you have either younger professionals or students in school who feel intimidated by parents and feel like they can’t talk effectively with parents.
You may be interacting with parents in these brief moments in the hallway or at an after school pick up, and then maybe one or two parent sessions, you know, the open house kind of thing at the beginning of the year. They’re not your students, and they’re not a client—but they are partners in education.
BU Wheelock: Can you elaborate more on this idea of parents being partners in education?
Paul Thayer: Students’ parents are partners in education, but you can’t partner with someone that you know very little about. So you have to know enough about the parents’ lives—what’s important to them, how they interact with their kid—and figure out what makes them tick.
Because teachers who are comfortable with parents and who incorporate parents into things like curriculum, for example, tend to be much more effective in teaching because they are thinking about what’s important to families and how they can partner together to support kids.
BU Wheelock: What can educators do to build positive relationships with families?
Paul Thayer: One of my favorite quotes is, “The difference between an interview and an interrogation is time.” Just because you invite a parent into a room doesn’t automatically mean that they’re going to be able to contribute in a way that’s valuable, if they feel intimidated or pressured, or if time’s too short.
We’re way too focused on efficiency in all sorts of professions. I’ve often thought of that because if we feel like we’ve got to jam everything into a short time frame, it does create discomfort on the other person’s end. And when people are not comfortable, they tend to not be open or not talk about things that make them uncomfortable.
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