Parent Teacher Home Visits is celebrating 25 years of building trusting relationships between schools and families. To commemorate our Silver Anniversary, we are sharing the stories of close friends, partners, and allies who have helped make PTHV what it is today. Watch this space regularly to see more “impact stories.” In this Q&A post, learn about how Dr. Karen Mapp, senior lecturer on education at Harvard University, became acquainted with PTHV and why it became a model she champions.

Q: Dr. Mapp, how did you come to learn about Parent Teacher Home Visits, and how did you get involved?

Dr. Mapp: Anne Henderson and I had come to Sacramento in the early years and met Carrie (former executive director of PTHV). We had a meeting with PICO, and they were formulating the idea that became the Parent Teacher Home Visit Project, which was based on an organizing platform of one-on-one meetings. One-on-one meetings have a particular dynamic where you come in respectfully. You come in with a solidarity mindset. From that dynamic and culture, Parent Teacher Home Visits was born. We learned how it would work.

Another time, I came back and went on some visits with Yesenia and Carrie. I went on a high school home visit and an elementary school visit. I also got to witness a meeting in which a teacher talked with a student about the visit. I was just sold because, of course, my research was all about how you build relational trust with families. People had been asking me, “Okay, we get the concept of relational trust, but how do we put that into action in real-time? How do we cultivate relational trust?” I felt like the home visit model that Parent Teacher Home Visits was using was the way to go. As we all know, there are a lot of different kinds of home visits. They’re not done with the kind of respect toward family voice that PTHV’s are.

Q: Tell us what you remember of those early home visits. What did you learn, and what impacted you?

Dr. Mapp: Well I had done my doctoral thesis on a school in Boston where home visits were a part of what they did. Now, they didn’t know about the Parent Teacher Home Visit Project at the time, but they had the same kind of relational visit as their core purpose. Then I think they were introduced to the model coming out of Sacramento, and they just folded that in. Their principal was also an organizer and Peace Corps guy. He had this kind of Paulo Freirean mindset about the importance of seeing people as people and treating people with respect. So I was very interested in this whole concept of trust and trust-building. When I saw the model out of Sacramento, I felt it was an excellent way to operationalize the building of trust between families and educators. So when I went on those home visits, I actually paid a lot of attention to the teachers and how they were when they went on these visits.

The parents were just floored with the care and the love, and the respect. I remember that very well. It was very powerful to see how very quickly those years of distrust and trauma that some families experience at the hands of schools all evaporated when there was a home visit.

I also saw home visits that weren’t done in the home. I saw home visits that were done in other places, like libraries, and in one case, a home visit at a McDonald’s. Here in Boston, the Lee K-8  school had adopted the Parent Teacher Home Visit model, so I got to see even more home visits with those teachers. I remember the powerful impact those visits had on the teachers. Many of them said that a lot of the biases and misconceptions that they had about families were completely destroyed when they went on home visits. They were very emotional. They would cry and talk about how they realized how they had biases against these parents and thought the parents didn’t care. And then, when they went to the homes and heard the parents talk about their commitment to education, it was really mind-blowing for a lot of these teachers.

Q: Let’s stay with teachers for a moment and talk about their professional development. What do you think needs to be done to better support teachers to understand family engagement?

Dr. Mapp: It’s important to train our next generation of educators to do this work in a way that’s effective. We know from research that what effective means is that there’s a relational component that has to be embedded into this practice. I think that anything that organizations can do to work with the next generation of educators, whether in a teacher prep program or leadership prep program to introduce these concepts and these effective practices is really important. You know, a lot of teachers talk about being scared of families because no one ever trained them on how to do this work. Nobody ever advised them. And, quite frankly, they’re nervous about it. So anything any of our organizations can do to be there for those new educators to show them the way is critical.

I have a course on family and community engagement, and PTHV is definitely one of the things that we talk about. Students need to be exposed to research, theories, the various frameworks, you know Kathy Hoover-Dempsey, Joyce Epstein, for a good foundation. And then what I do is introduce Parent Teacher Home Visits to them as a strategy. I say, “Okay, you’re going to take these theories, along with the Dual Capacity-Building Framework, and you’re going to put them into practice. Now let’s talk about some practice models that embrace all the theories we’ve talked about.”

Q: As you’ve witnessed the origin and evolution of Parent Teacher Home Visits, do you have hopes and dreams for the future of the organization? For the future of the practice? What do you see when you look 25 years ahead?

Dr. Mapp: Sometimes, I see that people don’t understand Parent Teacher Home Visits is a model, and that it has components to it. I’ve seen people take the idea, and they decide they’re not going to do one part of it or another. They are not following the non-negotiables. They say, “We’re going to do this, or we’re not going to do that.” The next thing you know, it’s not the model, and it’s not done with fidelity. They don’t understand the importance of this as a relational practice. They see it as a way to basically inform families of things—not a two-way kind of conversation with families. I’d like to see more done in this area to ensure fidelity and ensure that teachers and schools understand the power of each one of those steps. I’ve been to the training, and it’s very powerful. Just the conversation in the training around difference and respecting difference is so important. You can’t just hear about home visits and run out and try it. You have to have some training, and you have to set it up to be practiced with fidelity.