What would change if schools approached immigrant families as people whose knowledge educators need, rather than people schools need to teach how to participate?
Federal and state policies shape many of the conditions immigrant-origin families face. Yet districts still make daily decisions about how families are welcomed, heard, and included in their children’s education. Schools commonly define family engagement through activities on school terms: attending conferences, responding to messages, volunteering, or helping with school and homework. These activities reveal only part of how families support children’s learning. Their aspirations, cultural and linguistic knowledge, migration experiences, caregiving networks, and understandings of their children’s abilities may remain invisible to educators (Palacios & Paulick, 2024; Smith et al., 2026).
Relationship-building home visits create an opportunity to alter that dynamic. When teachers enter families’ spaces to listen and learn, families can share knowledge that rarely appears in school records or formal conferences. Teachers may encounter dimensions of children’s competence and family life that lead them to see students anew. A change in how one teacher understands a student, however, is only the beginning.
Our Foundation-funded study, “Home Visits: Teachers’ and Latine Families’ Perspectives,” investigates how district-level home visiting with Latine families might improve teacher self-efficacy and classroom practices and examines how students and families experience home visits. The pathway from a home visit to improved academic outcomes is neither immediate nor guaranteed. Our team expect it to unfold through relational and instructional processes. When families feel recognized and respected, they may become more comfortable sharing information and concerns and collaborating with teachers and schools to meet their children’s needs. When teachers develop a fuller understanding of children’s lives and competencies, they may interpret students’ behavior and performance through an asset-based lens, communicate with families more effectively, and create classroom opportunities that build upon what children know and can do. Over time, these changes may contribute to more equitable academic experiences and outcomes.
Seeing Students Anew
In an earlier study at a dual-language elementary school, we examined teachers’ written reflections before and after home visits with bilingual families (Palacios et al., 2025). Before the visits, teachers often relied on what they could observe at school, including family participation, responses to messages and letters sent home, and children’s classroom performance and behavior. The visits offered a fuller picture: Teachers learned about migration histories and transnational ties, parents’ work, children’s caregiving responsibilities, and extended family networks. They also encountered forms of competence that were not always visible at school. Children translated across languages, cared for siblings, and drew on cultural knowledge that conventional measures rarely capture (Smith et al., 2026).
This knowledge sometimes changed teachers’ interpretations. A family perceived as difficult to reach could be understood in light of work schedules, language barriers, or prior experiences with schools. A child’s quietness, fatigue, or uneven performance could be situated within a more complete understanding of the child’s life. Teachers described communicating with greater patience and persistence and approaching families with fewer assumptions.
Together, these studies show how home visits can deepen teachers’ understanding of children’s interests, dispositions, cultural traditions, and transnational experiences (Palacios et al., 2025; Smith et al., 2026). In our ongoing analysis of follow-up interviews conducted several years later, teachers described an enduring shift in their perspectives, including recognition of the importance of relationships with families and their communities. This emerging analysis raises a harder question: When does changed understanding lead to more equitable experiences at school?
From Individual Encounters to District Practice
Existing research suggests that relationship-building home visits are promising. Studies have associated visits with family involvement, academic performance, attendance, and more asset-based teacher beliefs (McKnight et al., 2022; Sheldon & Jung, 2018). Our synthesis of the literature found stronger evidence for changes in teachers’ beliefs than for changes in culturally responsive classroom practice (Paulick & Palacios, 2025). That gap matters because changed classroom experiences are one pathway through which stronger relationships may eventually support academic outcomes.
Our funded study, conducted in partnership with Denver Public Schools and the national nonprofit Parent Teacher Home Visits, takes up that gap at the district level. Denver has made relationship-building home visits available across the district, creating the potential to reach families at scale. Yet visits may unfold differently across teachers, families, schools, and the relationships among them. Teachers may desire connection while carrying assumptions about family engagement, and families may remain uncertain about a visit’s purpose or whether sharing openly feels safe. Prior observational research shows that intentional preparation is needed to center families and build rapport across differences in identity and power (Paulick et al., 2024). Districts play an important role in providing that preparation.
Our longitudinal, descriptive mixed-methods study follows 25 first- and second-grade teachers and 75 Latine families across a school year. Using concurrent triangulation, we integrate surveys, interviews, teacher reflections, and observations of visits and classrooms. We examine how teachers enact and interpret visits, how families experience them, where participants’ assessments converge or differ, and whether teachers’ learning becomes visible in culturally responsive practice. Including both perspectives allows families to help define a meaningful visit, as teachers’ assessments cannot stand in for families’ experiences.
Opening the Black Box with Mixed Methods
Districts often document how many visits occur, which schools participate, and which families are reached. These indicators provide insight into access, but not whether families felt heard or relationships changed. The study’s qualitative components examine these experiences directly. Observations show who guides the conversation, how family knowledge is elicited, and how language and power are navigated throughout the visit. Interviews allow teachers and families to interpret the interaction from their own perspectives and in their own words. Classroom observations show whether teachers draw upon students’ cultural and linguistic resources and create opportunities for students to demonstrate competence.
The study’s quantitative components identify patterns across participants and time. We assess teachers’ culturally responsive teaching self-efficacy, gather teacher and family ratings of relationship quality, and quantify observed culturally responsive instruction. Integrating these measures with interviews and observations allows us to examine variation in these processes and assess whether participants’ accounts align with changes in relationships, self-efficacy, and practice. In other words, teachers and families may experience the same visit differently. Agreement can signal a shared foundation for collaboration. Divergence can reveal where good intentions did not produce reciprocity or where institutional assumptions shaped what a teacher heard. A mixed-methods approach allows us to identify these patterns and understand the variation within them.
What Schools Do with What They Learn
A visit may last only twenty to thirty minutes, but whether it contributes to lasting change depends on whose knowledge is recognized during that brief time and what the school does with that knowledge afterward. A district’s commitment to home visiting creates time and space for educators to learn from all families, and especially from immigrant families, whose experiences and ways of supporting children’s learning may remain less visible within schools. At the district level, that potential may be realized when schools use what educators learn to strengthen teacher preparation for working with culturally and linguistically diverse families, foster reciprocal relationships with families, and support classroom practices that draw on students’ cultural and linguistic resources.
References
McKnight, K., Venkateswaran, N., Laird, J., Dilig, R., Robles, J., & Shalev, T. (2022). Parent teacher home visits: An approach to addressing biased mindsets and practices to support student success. RTI Press. https://doi.org/10.3768/rtipress.2022.op.0077.2209
Palacios, N., & Paulick, J. (2024). Supporting Latinx immigrant children and families in the transition to elementary school. Child Development Perspectives, 18(3), 155-162. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12512
Palacios, N., Paulick, J., Kibler, A., & Blatt, A. (2025). Humanizing students: Teacher reflections before and after home visits. Teachers College Record, 127(4), 116-143. https://doi.org/10.1177/01614681251347426
Paulick, J., Lucas, M., & Hill-Maini, T. Y. (2024). Teachers centering families and building rapport during home visits. American Educational Research Journal, 61(2), 366-403. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312231222270
Paulick, J., & Palacios, N. (2025). Preparing for equitable family and community engagement through home visiting: Linking culturally responsive/sustaining pedagogy and developmental frameworks. Advances in Child Development and Behavior, 69, 255-278. https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.acdb.2025.07.007
Sheldon, S. B., & Jung, S. B. (2018). Student outcomes and parent teacher home visits. Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships, Johns Hopkins University. https://pthvp.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/student-outcomes-and-parent-teacher-home-visits.pdf
Smith, J. C., Palacios, N., Paulick, J., & Kibler, A. (2026). Seeing students anew: How relationship-building asset-framed home visits deepen teachers’ understanding of bilingual families. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2026.265408
