Family Dialogue Journals: School-Home Partnerships That Support Student Learning

by JoBeth Allen, Jennifer Beaty, Angela Dean

This honest, clearly written, and accessible book shows how to use Family Dialogue Journals (FDJs) to increase and deepen learning across grade levels. Written by K–12 teachers who have been implementing and studying the use of weekly journals for several years, it shares what they have learned and why they have found FDJs to be an invaluable tool for forming effective partnerships with families. Learn from first-hand accounts how students write weekly about one big idea they have studied, ask a family member a related question, and then solicit their writing in the journal. Through these journal entries, they share their family knowledge with classmates while actively engaging with the curriculum. In turn, teachers extend the academic discussion by writing to each family and incorporating their funds of knowledge into classroom lessons—writing about everything from the use of thermometers to life in Michoacán, Mexico. Family participation in the FDJs is remarkably high across ages, ethnicities, and economic realities.

“This is an incredibly readable book that is highly useful for teachers, teacher educators, and university researchers interested in this powerful practice. The descriptions of the classrooms are riveting and exemplify the kind of teaching we would all like to see in every classroom.”
—Kathy Schultz, dean and professor, Mills College

“Family Dialogue Journals is a beautiful, socially conscious book offering so much wisdom for curriculum, classroom norms, and creating learning-focused contexts. Readers will be immersed in classroom contexts, teachers’ decisionmaking processes, and practical advice about how to foster a humble, genuine, ongoing dialogue built upon mutual respect and openness with their students and students’ families. Family Dialogue Journals doesn’t just demonstrate the power of interpersonal relationships, it links those dialogues and relationships directly to curriculum and supporting students’ critical literacies of both community and academic ways of knowing and being Family Dialogue Journals is a beautiful, socially conscious book offering so much wisdom for curriculum, classroom norms, and creating learning-focused contexts.” 
—Stephanie Jones, professor, University of Georgia

160 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 20, 2015

About the author

JoBeth Allen retired from the University of Georgia in 2014 where she loved teaching, writing, and codirecting the Red Clay Writing Project where all of us met. She relishes spending more time with her family, including grandchildren Grace, Luke, Mia, Cora, and Anikin. Her educational passion now is work with undocumented immigrant students pursuing higher education in the face of institutional and societal barriers.