Engage Every Family: Five Simple Principles

Reach beyond theory and engage every family in student success

Family engagement increases student achievement but how do schools connect with families who don’t participate yet? Educators can easily become frustrated trying to reach the disconnected and often fall back to engaging the already engaged. Is it possible to win over everyone? Discover how to move beyond theory to change your culture for better family engagement and student achievement. Through practical steps, reflections, and case studies, you will discover and address:

• How and where family engagement breaks down, and
• How to create a truly inviting culture for successful community and family partnerships

Leader, teacher, speaker and best-selling author Dr. Steve Constantino has a long and distinguished career in leadership and bringing innovation to educational and business organizations.

Steve is internationally recognized for his work in family engagement and his innovative, non-conventional, entrepreneurial and outlier approaches to leading organizations and acquiring impressive results. As a master of the stage, he has captivated thousands of teachers, administrators, school board members and business people from the United States and around the world.  His amazing keynote presentations and workshops have been featured in local, state, regional, national and international conferences. With the gifts of storytelling, humor and the knack for telling it like it is, Steve is a much sought-after speaker and leadership consultant because he is the rare combination of someone who can both lead and teach others how to lead.

Steve’s work quickly gained national prominence and soon he began traveling the United States speaking and working with all types of educators, school board members, and businesses to promote sound practices in the leadership of organizations and the leveraging of family engagement as an essential element in increased academic achievement for all students and workforce productivity for businesses.

As a result of his experiences and his practical approach to engaging families, Steve has authored four books on the subject. His first book, Making Your School Family Friendly (NASSP, 2002) was published after being selected by the National Association of Secondary School Principals and the MetLife Foundation to create the first-ever family friendly schools national symposium, held in Washington DC. 

His second book Engaging Every Family (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003) soon followed. This book expanded on the conceptual framework of the four domains of family engagement. In 2008, Steve released his third book 101 Ways to Create Real Family Engagement (Engage Press, 2008). Steve’s fourth and newest book, Engage Every Family: Five Simple Principles is published by Corwin Press and quickly became a bestseller

Steve began his career as a teacher and moved through the ranks to district superintendent. At the state level, Steve held positions as Chief Academic Officer and Acting State Superintendent. Today, Steve is an Executive Professor in the Educational Policy, Planning and Leadership Department at the William & Mary School of Education and continues to accept numerous invitations to speak and consult with schools, districts, states and business organizations around the world.