Busy Educator’s Guide to

Culturally Responsive Engagement

Specific, easy-to-use tools to plan and implement effective culturally responsive engagement

​

Culturally Proficient Parent Engagement Planning Tool

• Start with this step-by-step planning guide that provides guiding questions, considerations, and examples to help you plan effective parent engagement that meets the needs of your diverse school community.

Structural Barriers Worksheet 

• Before developing an effective engagement plan, organizers and educators need to understand the barriers to engagement. This document provides a framework to help you think about and identify the barriers.

Considerations For Writing Documents to a Diverse Parent Community

• School and district communication are often written in ways that are confusing for many MCPS families. This document provides simple ideas on how to make your communication effective for a diverse parent community.

How to Create a Culturally Responsive Flyer

• Many parents assume that events are not for them. This tool provides some basic tips to ensure that your flyer conveys to parents that the meeting or event is being organized with their needs in mind. 

Considerations for Creating Culturally Responsive Parent Presentations

• Getting parents to a meeting is only the first step. If you want the parents to come back, the meeting must feel worthwhile to the parent. These considerations are designed to help the presenter consider easy steps to making the meeting more effective for the participant.

Creating Culturally Responsive PowerPoints 

• PowerPoint presentations often use slides with lots of words and charts. Most parents, however, do not understand all the words and numbers. This is especially true when English is not the parent’s first language or when literacy is low. Simply translating a slide from English will not help most families. These slides provide some suggestions on how to create culturally responsive slides. 

Organizing and facilitating Culturally Responsive Parent Focus Groups

• This is a sample agenda that helps organizers and facilitators think through all the steps to organize and lead effective focus groups