This study investigates barriers to facilitating family-school partnerships with immigrant families as identified by teachers in an urban school district with high rates of immigration. Participants consisted of 18 elementary teachers who identified predominantly as Hispanic (38.9%) or non-Hispanic White (33.3%), were frequently bilingual (55.6%), and were mostly female (94.4%) with an average age of 36.5 years. Participants engaged in focus group interviews that were transcribed and open-coded. Barriers to engagement for immigrant families fell into 3 broad areas: language and culture, family resources, and families' undocumented status. Many teachers attributed the barriers preventing parental collaboration to school policies (94.4%) and ineffective communication strategies (83.3%). Teachers also identified barriers as emanating from the families themselves, including families not attending school functions (88.9%) and being unresponsive to school-initiated communication (72.2%). Teachers noted that many families lacked resources necessary for school engagement (88.9%) and were hesitant to become engaged with schools due to required screening procedures (55.6%). Overall, numerous barriers to effective family engagement were identified, several of which are directly related to immigration and residency status. Given the strong evidence suggesting that family engagement in education mediates risk for children of recent immigrants, strategies to foster meaningful engagement for all families are desperately needed (Naughton, 2004). Roles for school psychologists to facilitate effective family-school partnerships are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

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An increasing amount of attention and public funding has been dedicated in recent years to the field of Early Childhood Education and the expansion of early childhood programs in the United States. Program quality in early childhood is evaluated based on program-level structural features and instructional support (e.g. problem solving, feedback, and language modeling), but quantifiable measures of structural and process features do not necessarily equate to quality instructional interactions. Questions remain about the presence and strength of socially constructed power dynamics found in pedagogic practice. This case study seeks to illuminate interactions between children and teachers in federally funded Head Start classrooms, teachers' views of children, and influences to novice project work using the Project Approach. The project work served as a frame for viewing interactions between teachers and children as mediated by varying degrees of power and control of teacher-child interactions at the classroom level (identified as "socio-structures"). Questions investigated were the following: (1) What are the socio-structures inside these Head Start classrooms before and during the implementation of the Project Approach? (2) How do existing socio-structures relate to teacher-child instructional language interactions during the implementation of the Project Approach?

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