Family engagement in schools is important for the success of all students, but especially critical with parents of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students. Building-level administrators and teachers are in a unique position to serve as the agents to create positive, strong relationships with families. This chapter presents a qualitative case study of an exceptionally diverse elementary school located in an area with an increasing CLD population. Through multifaceted interviews, focus groups, and observations, four overarching themes emerged: (1) creating a positive, supportive, welcoming environment to support families and cultures; (2) building relationships and purposeful communication as core values; (3) teacher training, roles, responsibilities, and support; and (4) the importance and impact of community partner relationships. These themes along with their implications for school practices that promote effective school-family-community relations and connections to extant literature are discussed.

Family engagement in schools is important for the success of all students, but especially critical with parents of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students. Building-level administrators and teachers are in a unique position to serve as the agents to create positive, strong relationships with families. This chapter presents a qualitative case study of an exceptionally diverse elementary school located in an area with an increasing CLD population. Through multifaceted interviews, focus groups, and observations, four overarching themes emerged: (1) creating a positive, supportive, welcoming environment to support families and cultures; (2) building relationships and purposeful communication as core values; (3) teacher training, roles, responsibilities, and support; and (4) the importance and impact of community partner relationships. These themes along with their implications for school practices that promote effective school-family-community relations and connections to extant literature are discussed.

Teacher professional development and education programs are enhancing job-embedded experiences to address the disparity between theory and implementation. Simultaneously, higher education is now offering online courses to attract geographically distant educators, especially in high-needs fields such as teaching English Learners and Culturally and Linguistically Diverse students. There is a need to investigate what online teacher professional development and education programs can do to promote teachers’ application of what they learn. This pilot study utilized the Inventory of Situationally and Culturally Responsive Teaching (ISCRT) to investigate 23 in-service teachers’ culturally responsive teaching (CRT) practices before and after receiving online coursework and coaching. When compared to the control group, treatment teachers’ scores on four of the five ISCRT standards—Joint Productive Activity, Language and Literacy Development, Challenging Activities, and Instructional Conversations—as well as the composite were statistically significant. Findings suggest online CRT coursework with complementary instructional coaching supports teachers’ implementation of new knowledge and pedagogy.

The authors seek to illustrate how teachers can create a space of inclusive interaction through the development of curriculum and instruction that evidences culturally sustaining pedagogy and disciplinary literacy. In considering these two concepts, the authors also turn to the tenets of social and emotional learning to establish a framework for developing curriculum and instruction that acknowledges the complexity of the classroom space as a subculture. This consideration is not only crucial to making disciplinary discourses relevant, but also illustrating how curriculum and instruction play a critical role in students' learning as well as how they understand and locate themselves in the world that surrounds them. The goals of this chapter are to offer a framework that can help educators develop curriculum and instruction that supports students' emerging knowledge of the discipline, connect disciplinary knowledge to students' multiple discourses, and provide a pathway for generative SEL within and outside of the academic discipline itself.