This paper examines the complexities of building family-teacher partnerships in the literacy classroom. While research continues to support the need for family engagement in literacy learning, a number of contextual factors pose barriers to building such relationships, negatively impacting children, families, and teachers alike. While organizational approaches are needed to fully address this long-standing issue, we offer the lens of unconditional positive regard as an approach individual teachers might adopt in their own work. Unconditional positive regard supports educators to partner with families by focusing on emotional regulation, acknowledging agency over ideologies, and prioritizing shared goal setting. Recommendations illustrate how literacy educators can apply unconditional positive regard to leverage high-impact practices across elementary grade bands (K-5) in pursuit of building stronger partnerships with families.
Author Bio
Dr. Lindsay Stoetzel is an Assistant Professor of Literacy Studies at Grand Valley State University. She is interested in preservice teacher education and instructional coach development. She can be reached at stoetzli@gvsu.edu.
Ms. Jennifer Vanderground, M.Ed. Reading, is an Affiliate Faculty at Grand Valley State University (GVSU). She is interested in literacy education, serving as a classroom teacher, reading specialist, and private practice literacy instruction specialist. She finds great joy in working with students of all ages—assessing their strengths, mentoring their progress, and guiding them on their educational journey. In her current role at GVSU, she teaches both pre-service and graduate students how to support learners with language and literacy difficulties. Additionally, she is deeply committed to unraveling the complexities of literacy through the study of assessment practices and instructional strategies that benefit all K-12 students.She can be reached at vandejl3@gvsu.edu.
Ms. Karen Abraham is a visiting literacy faculty at Grand Valley State University, K-8 Literacy Coordinator for Muskegon Public Schools, and a retired Michigan Public Schools administrator and teacher with 33 years of literacy experience. Her work is focused on supporting teachers in literacy practices and designing functional literacy systems that produce literate students.
Recommended Citation
Stoetzel, Lindsay; Vanderground, Jennifer; and Abraham, Karen
(2025)
"Recentering Family-Teacher Partnerships Through the Lens of Unconditional Positive Regard,"
Michigan Reading Journal: Vol. 57:
Iss.
3, Article 6.
Available at:
https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/mrj/vol57/iss3/6
