This tool is designed by Westat Insight (formerly Insight Policy Research) and American Institutes for Research to help state education agencies (SEAs), local education agencies (LEAs), and other educators work as a team to move toward practices with high authenticity for family engagement—practices that leverage relationships with families and seek to engage meaningfully with them. By using a continuous improvement process, teams at local, district, and state levels will collaboratively assess current family engagement practices, identify gaps, determine improvement practices that align with the components of authentic engagement, and prioritize practices to implement. Teams will then create an actionable plan to monitor and adjust practices for continuous improvement with the goal of effectively engaging a diverse range of families and leveraging their lived experiences to improve school engagement and attendance supports and outcomes. Family engagement is a process, and this tool represents steps for teams to take
throughout this process.

Additional student engagement and attendance tools created by Student Engagement and Attendance Technical Assistance Center (SEAC) can be found on the U.S. Department of Education website.