I have two reasons for being engaged with Parent Teacher Home Visits for many years—one’s personal and one’s professional. I work for the National Education Association (NEA), and we have a long organizational history with PTHV. I direct the Center for Professional Excellence and Student Learning within NEA, and we know how vital family engagement is to student learning.

Parent Teacher Home Visits is an organization that NEA endorses in our community schools work; we partner with parents for future home visits, and we stand behind PTHV’s methodologies. I love how PTHV empowers educators to visit families in pairs and encourages not just teachers but educational support professionals as well. So it’s an easy organization to partner with professionally, and NEA has done exciting work with PTHV over the years. I’ve also seen my colleagues’ outstanding work with Parent Teacher Home Visits. So it was a no-brainer to join the PTHV board. It’s an absolute privilege to be involved and support this work and that vision for quality education.

Before I worked at NEA, I was a teacher for a long time, and I can speak to the power of home visits. I taught in middle school. It was a beautifully diverse middle school, just all kinds of students and families, and a large refugee population. While I was there, we had a significant influx of Ukrainian and Moldovan immigrants, a population I didn’t know much about. Some of the Ukrainian boys were getting into a lot of trouble. One day I was down in the principal’s office, and one of the boys’ mother had come in. I was just chatting with her, and she asked, “Can you come over and have dinner at our house, Mr. Coons?” Imagine my surprise, but I said okay!

My wife and I showed up; we had made a plate of brownies and set out to visit this home. It was such an eye-opener for me as an educator. We went into a tiny apartment with a family of 10 children. We ate with them and afterward, we ended up sitting with the dad. He showed us pictures of their home in Ukraine. The boys were translating what their father was telling us about their home there and what they’d given up to come to America. To see this other side of the student who had had these behavior problems at school was amazing.

As we were leaving, the dad said something, and the boys translated it as, “Mr. Coons will be your dad at school.” From that moment, the behavior of these boys changed. When they got into trouble in other classrooms, I would say to other teachers, send them to my room. It was a way to keep them engaged, and it completely changed our relationship.

I have this and other experiences throughout my career that have taught me about the importance of meeting families. Not necessarily in school and not in a place where there is a power differential, but with families where they are. So when I heard about Parent Teacher Home Visits, it was an automatic yes. You see the importance of coming in and visiting with the adults in the students’ lives and finding out what their hopes and dreams are. And most importantly, not coming in with an agenda. It’s transformative for everyone, especially in the lives of educators. It challenges the stereotypes and helps them to see the whole kid and the whole family.

Scaling Home Visits

One of the ways we are committed to scaling Parent Teacher Home Visits is through our work at the NEA. For example,  NEA has a commitment to community schools, and one of our organizational priorities is to help scale the six pillars of community schools, that is, through improving culturally competent curriculum, high-quality teaching and learning, inclusive leadership, positive behavior practices, coordinated and integrated wraparound services, and family–community partnerships. We’re thinking about how to get these out into the system. Parent Teacher Home Visits is a strategy that NEA can partner with to develop those partnerships that see families as assets and partners in the work. And we can use those partnerships to raise greater awareness about home visits. 

I’m also encouraged by how PTHV has been thinking outside the box, especially in response to the pandemic. Not everybody can offer a physical home visit, and so creating the virtual engagement that mirrors the in-person engagement and engage families in new ways, I think is a real growth area for PTHV. 

The Next 25 Years

Twenty-five years from now, I expect to see Parent Teacher Home Visits recognized for its expertise on best practices for engaging and connecting educators with students, homes, and families. I hope that the organization will continue to think of new and groundbreaking ways to connect with families. They’ve started down that path.

I also hope every college of education teaches prospective educators the importance of connecting with the families and communities of their students and that Parent Teacher Home Visits is on the shortlist of strategies for how to do that. This is a really hard profession. There are not enough hours in the day to have a truly student-centered learning environment. I worry that for a lot of educators, the realities of the job keep them from being as engaged as they wish they could be. Parent Teacher Home Visits is a strategy in which you get to live your ambition, to make it a reality to really get to know your families and the communities you serve. It’s a way to bring your heart back into teaching. It’s a reminder of why you’re doing this hard work.

I think Parent Teacher Home Visits is also a great teacher retention strategy, especially for new teachers because I know it can be lonely when you first get into it. This is a way to rejuvenate yourself and be reminded of why you became a teacher in the first place.