This WIDA Snapshot offers an introduction to building trust, one of the six ABCs of Family and Community Engagement. The ABCs of Family and Community Engagement are six key considerations for educators who support multilingual learners and their families and communities.
Building trust in action: Engaging with multilingual learners, families and communities
Building trust is a foundational component for family and community engagement. This WIDA Snapshot offers ideas and resources for building trust with multilingual learners and their families and communities, whether you’re just starting out or looking to strengthen existing relationships. We invite you to explore the following videos, tools and resources and choose one or more to try out in your context.
Take a moment to engage with this brief introductory video and use the guiding questions to reflect and deepen your knowledge about building trust.
Building Trust Introductory Video Transcript
Guiding Questions
- How do we build trusting relationships with multilingual learners and their families and communities? What resources are we devoting to this? What resources do we need?
- What might make a multilingual family feel unwelcome in our program, school or district? How can we address this?
- What are the needs and goals that our multilingual families have that can be met through building trusting community partnerships? How will we build and sustain these partnerships?
Building Trust Through Conversation and Action
Explore these two videos of multilingual families and their children talking about how ongoing conversation promotes trusting relationships between schools and their families and communities. We invited our collaborators to speak in their preferred language, so this video features families speaking in Somali, Spanish and English. To access subtitles in English or the speaker’s spoken language, use the CC/Subtitles button or download the transcript.
Family/Student Part 1 Video Transcript
Family/Student Part 2 Video Transcript
Engage with the following video of educators sharing how they build trust, including questions they suggest for ongoing conversations with families.
Voices of Educators Video Transcript
Use the Conversation Card Template and Questions for your ongoing conversations with multilingual learners, families, community members and other educators:
- Conversation Card Template
- Student Questions
- Family Questions, all translations
- Community Member Questions, all translations
- Educator Questions
Building Trust Over Time
Naira, a multilingual learner school-community liaison, and Pushpanjali Sengupta, a WIDA Fellow and multilingual facilitator, build trust through dialogue and action in ways that center multilingual families’ voices. Engage with Naira’s vignette, Pushpanjali’s video, and the coffee chat template to gain ideas for building trust that you can try out in your context.
Building Trust in Your Daily Interactions
WIDA Fellow Madison Leech shares how her school has formed and sustained trusting relationships with families in the car line during pick-up and drop-off. How do you build trust in your daily interactions with families? What else could you try? Engage with the video for ideas about practices like getting to know the community connectors in your setting.
This illustration represents building trust. Families and educators are sitting at a table for a coffee chat – an opportunity for everyone to share food, tea and coffee, get to know each other, and share ideas.