Martine van der Pluijm

107 How can teachers build partnerships? mommy’s shoes when you’re at home? This is an example; we talk about these things together.” Three teachers of the group of 12 teachers that participated in the professionalization activities followed most of the steps, but not those to expand language. Some of their reflections showed how they needed more time to develop their roles in the previous steps. Teacher 11 said: “ I think we’re helping parents to become familiar with their role. And I think we should do that. Sometimes I use modeling. It’s pretty difficult, showing parents how to have dialogues with their children. And for the parents, it’s all really new.” Teacher 12 explained how difficult it was to have dialogues with children: “ I do model sometimes (to show how to prioritize language). But toddlers often hold back in the dialogue, and then there is no interaction.” The two teachers who only partially participated in the professionalization activities did not follow the steps to support oral language during parent-child activities. One of these teachers had regular parent meetings without the children. This is not in line with the underpinning principle of AHL to involve parents and children during oral language support. Teacher 8 did not follow this step of involving parent and child together and explained: “Parents don’t have to play a game in my presence. I think that’s patronizing, in a certain way. And that’s not intentional, but parents could experience it that way. And I really don’t want that .” Teacher 10 conducted parent-child activities and supported parents to prioritize oral language, but without following the previous steps of the program. She reported: “ We organized language activities, so parents could see how we work at school and how we stimulate language development at school .” We calculated pretest and posttest means for the class inventory list scores that teachers ( n = 13) gave for the parents (i.e., mother) of each pupil ( n = 187) in their classroom. Teacher 8 did not complete her class inventory list due to illness. The data for parents of her classroom could not be included ( n = 21). To allow for an analysis of teachers’ progress by the factor ‘parental education level’, the means of teachers’ratings for parents for each of the three education levels were split, resulting in three observations per teacher. Table 4.2 shows results of the repeated measures ANOVA (using educational level as a factor) for teachers’ progress with parents in their classroom on AHL Step 1 [Assess the HLE] and Step 3 [Build reciprocal relationships] based upon mean scores per teacher. According to Table 4.2, teachers significantly improved their insight in parental knowledge and literacy skills, one of the aspects of Step 1 [Assess the HLE] ( F (1, 33) = 4.259, p = .047, d = .33). There were no overall significant improvements in insight in the HLE, the other aspect of Step 1 [Assess the HLE] , and Step 3 [Build reciprocal relationships with parents], although the latter effect approached significance ( F (1, 32) = 2.986, p = .094, d = .19).