Handout 5:
Self-Assessment:
Partnering with Families

Instructions
This checklist will help you identify your strengths for working in partnership with families, as well as ways you might grow and change. Place check marks in the boxes next to the questions you rate as strengths. Then, think about what you currently do and what you would like to improve on.

Family Partnership Agreement Process. As part of the ongoing family partnership, staff must offer parents opportunities to develop and implement individualized, family partnership agreements.
Do you:

Routinely work with families to identify their strengths and supports?

Support a family's ongoing growth and development?

Consider the culture and the unique characteristics, situations, desires, and needs of each family when providing
      support?

Allow families to choose when, where, and how to be involved with Head Start?

Complement and support pre-existing family plans?

Suggestions for Growth or Change:

1)

2)

3)

Revisit! Review! Revise! Staff-family partnerships are not one-time events. Instead, partnership opportunities and activities continue throughout the family's enrollment in Head Start. As the family grows and develops, the staff-family relationship may evolve into one that requires more or less contact depending on the changing desires and needs of the family.
Do you:

Regularly meet with families to revisit, review, and revise their goals and plans for achieving them?

Review with the family their strengths, supports, interests, needs, and progress?

Work with families to overcome challenges and setbacks?

Identify and reinforce family achievements?

Follow up with the family to determine whether the kind, quantity, and timeliness of services received met
      the family's expectations, needs, and circumstances?

Celebrate the family's successes?

Suggestions for Growth or Change:

1)

2)

3)

Approaches for Working with Families. Contact with a family may be formal or informal and can include regularly scheduled meetings or spontaneous conversations as the parents are involved in program activities.
Do you:

Help families achieve family partnership agreements by jointly establishing strategies, responsibilities, and
      timetables?

Allow the family to be the senior partner?

Regard family members as experts about their family?

Serve as a resource for supporting the family?

Use formal approaches, including team meetings, written plans, correspondence, or home visits?

Allow the family to choose the site of planned visits (the family's home, or community settings such as a
      church, a park, or a recreation center), as well as the date and the time?

Work with families in a casual, easy, or relaxed way, including 'checking in" with parents by phone, talking with
      parents at unexpected times, sending notes home with a child, chatting with parents at the end of the day, or
      inviting parents to be involved in program activities?

Strive to be both flexible and creative?

Suggestions for Growth or Change:

1)

2)

3)

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