The Peabody family involvement initiative: Preparing preservice teachers for family/school collaboration

A study was conducted to explore the impact of preparing preservice teachers to involve families in their child’s education. Four questions guided the study: 1. What are the attitudes about parent involvement activities of teacher education students and graduates after completing a parent involve-ment parent training program? 2. Which strategies and approaches did student teachers and classroom teachers think are important and feasible? 3. Which strategies and approaches did classroom teachers actually use in their schools? 4. Were there differences in the parent involvement attitudes and practices between preservice teachers who completed the program and those who had no specific training? Three groups of preservice and inservice teachers were asked to com-plete surveys that addressed attitudes, feasibility and preparation factors for nine parent/school involvement activities. The first two groups represented stages in Peabody’s Family Involvement Initiative: preservice teachers who had just completed a parent involvement course and students who had just completed their student teaching. The third group were certified teacher