Dr. Stephany Cuevas, an Assistant Professor of Education in the Integrated Educational Studies (IES) program, releases her second book,  “Everyone Wins!: The Evidence for Family-School Partnerships and Implications for Practice.”

Ramping up from a research project that began in 2019 during her time at Harvard Graduate School of Education, Dr. Cuevas and her colleagues put together a collection of research-based books on family engagement and practice. She describes “Everyone Wins!” as “an in-depth systematic literature review translated for educators. My colleagues and I reviewed the most up to date research on family engagement, chose the strongest and more representative studies, ones that move the family engagement conversation forward, and put them in conversation with one another.”

Dr. Cuevas new book release, “Everyone Wins! The Evidence for Family-School Partnerships & Implications for Practice.”

The Impact of Family Engagement

The main take away Dr. Cuevas hopes readers will gather is the impacts families can have on education and other community developments. She shares, “my goal is for everyone working within an education context to consider that family engagement is essential for student success: families, schools, and communities need to partner and collaborate to ensure that all our students’ needs are being met.”

Examining the Core Values of Educational Spaces

“Everyone Wins!” asks its audience to examine the mission and vision of educational spaces as it relates to students’ success. Dr. Cuevas notes, “family engagement is not just a ‘practice’ that can be checked-off as complete through activities like parent nights and open houses at schools.” Instead, she asks audiences to revisit the value system of an educational space, and see how family engagement can be embedded into areas that include schools, after school programs, and out-of-school contexts. 

The book is thoughtfully divided into chapters that focus on the benefits of family engagement as it relates to different stakeholders including, students, educators, families’ institutions, and communities. 

Dr. Cuevas shares her final thoughts, “I am very proud of this book because it truly connects research to practice by speaking to a broad audience, including educators, parents and families, administrators, policy makers, researchers, community leaders, and others invested in the well-being of our students. It breaks down the challenge of the inaccessibility of research and highlights the importance of school-family-community partnerships.”

“Everyone Wins!: The Evidence for Family-School Partnerships and Implications for Practice” by Karen L. Mapp, Anne T. Henderson, Stephany Cuevas, Martha C. Franco, Suzanna Ewert, is now available by Scholastic.