When I first started home visits back in my second year of teaching, I was so shy back then and afraid because I didn’t know how to start conversations and would ask myself, how am I supposed to do this? But then I remembered the training gave us guidance on this. It was in 2012, and I went on my first visit to one of my student’s homes and was super nervous. Because my colleague already had one of the students’ brothers in her class, and she already knew the family, it helped a lot.

Once I had completed a few home visits, I understood it was all about having a regular conversation with someone. I told myself that I could do this. One thing that also made it a lot better was that the students’ parents were often feeding me and giving me food to take home. They didn’t have to, of course, but how cool is that?

Some Memorable Visits

I remember going on a home visit, and the family’s house was so beautiful. I told the parents how much I loved their house, but they responded by saying they bet mine was even nicer. I politely told them that it wasn’t, that I lived in a one-bedroom apartment. I was surprised they genuinely thought teachers lived in mansions.

Another memorable visit was when I visited a couple of years ago with a mom who repeatedly declined home visits. One day, I helped her understand that I wasn’t coming to her house to see how her family was living. I made her feel safer by mentioning that my house was sometimes messy, too, as I didn’t have time to clean during the week. She agreed to a visit finally, and when I went, I understood why the student was missing school a lot and why the mom didn’t show up. I discovered that the dad had been deported, causing the mom to have to work every day. Her only time off was Sunday evening, when she had the time to clean, do the laundry, and go grocery shopping. That was a lot to handle.

One thing I love about home visits is that I get to know the parents and stop making assumptions about why a parent is not involved, why a student misses a lot, why the child sometimes behaves the way that they behave in class, or why I never see the parents, and why the parents don’t answer my calls.

During that visit, we had a good conversation, and I mentioned the names of people she knew but didn’t know lived close to her. I encouraged her to reach out to them so they could help each other. That was the year when more than 50% of my students had single mothers. I let her know they could partner up, for example, by taking turns bringing the kids to school and taking them home.

I also shared that she could have his older siblings sit with our student and go over some of his lessons. I gave her worksheets that she could use and taught her some strategies to use when teaching him, and she said she could go through them on Sundays while she did the laundry.

She did all those things, and I noticed that her son started coming to school more often, and he became less shy, started talking more, got more comfortable around the other students, and started progressing academically. He started learning letter sounds and writing a little bit.

Academic Outcomes

About five or six years ago, I started taking advantage of the second visits to offer all parents strategies to help their kids academically. I teach English Language Acquisition – Spanish, and I would notice on literacy nights many parents were too embarrassed to admit they didn’t know how to help their children. With home visits, you get one-on-one time, and they can open up. I would explain the concepts like teaching syllables and working with high-frequency words. We make so much more progress after that.

This year I’ve done two visits with all my families, and the results showed up immediately in our testing. On one of our annual tests, 15 of my students came out as advanced, meaning above grade level, scoring at levels I hadn’t seen before; I was so proud. Four were “green,” meaning their results were satisfactory. Three were yellow and two red.

My Hopes and Dreams for the Future of Home Visits

I love doing home visits. I learn so much from parents, and parents start to feel so much more comfortable interacting with me and the school. They don’t see you as a teacher anymore. They start to see you more as a friend. I would love to see and share more stories of home visit successes because they are so encouraging. And I’d love to do three home visits each year: one right at the beginning of the year, a second visit in January or February at the halfway point or after assessments, and then one toward the end of the year to talk about what parents should do over the summer to ensure the kids stay on track and don’t fall behind.