Becoming Teammates

Describes a three-phase plan for elementary-level teachers to develop literacy partnerships with children's families. Becoming Teammates: Teachers and Families as Literacy Partners offers a bold new look at how teachers and families can work together to build family-school relationships that value and respect each other’s perspectives on literacy. Featuring the voices of parents, teachers, graduate students, and preservice teachers, Charlene Klassen Endrizzi’s book explores how families and educators can combine their resources to become essential teammates and partners in children’s literacy development. Endrizzi recognizes that family-school partnerships are a complex undertaking and offers suggestions for three phases of implementation. In Phase 1, teachers begin by extending to family members a variety of invitations to communicate—via surveys, ceremonies, and celebrations—thus building an awareness and understanding of the literacy learning that occurs both in school and at home. Phase 2 explores how teachers can initiate a two-way literacy conversation with families through dialogue journals, curricular newsletters, and literacy backpacks. The final stage has teachers forging partnerships with parents at Family Literacy Gatherings, during which they explain and demonstrate literacy beliefs and practices, discover and appreciate the families’ funds of knowledge, and acknowledge and nurture the emerging parent advocates. Endrizzi challenges teachers to take an active role in developing partnerships by considering a myriad of ways to build bridges of understanding with their students’ first learning partners.