Martine van der Pluijm

87 Creating partnerships – a formative evaluation into the HLE should be part of the professionalization process. Stimulating teachers to have exchanges with parents about the HLE can further increase their insights. Gradually, teachers will be able to recognize the patterns of interaction during parent-child activities in classrooms. These observations can be used during coaching sessions to help teachers develop their skills to stimulate parental support, adapted to the specific characteristics of the HLEs of their pupils. A design-based research approach: advantages and limitations We prioritized finding solutions for problems that teachers encountered when building partnerships with lower-educated parents in support of children’s language development. To that aim, we employed a design-based approach. This approach combined three objectives: 1) testing the prototype on its usability for teachers and parents, 2) facilitating the collaborative learning process between stakeholders and researchers and, 3) systematically analyzing the results to modify the operationalization of the design (McKenney & Reeves, 2012). Because of this multifaceted and intensive process, this study was small scale and restricted to secure the involvement of lower-educated parents (e.g., selecting schools with mainly lower-educated parents, and the willingness of school teams to be involved in intensive collaboration). This approach had several benefits. One is the ecological validity of the design, evidenced by teachers’ and parents’ involvement in adapting the theoretical principles to their needs and by the suggested improvements to SFPs for stimulating parent-child interactions in the classroom. However, this approach also has limitations. The generalizability of the results is limited due to the small scale of this study, the specific conditions (e.g., urban context, selection of motivated teachers), and the absence of a control condition. Future research will have to show whether suggested improvements to the AHL principles lead to desired outcomes both on the part of teachers and of lower-educated parents. Suggestions for future research Future research should investigate the impact of the design principles in a renewed AHL program (incorporating the suggested improvements of the present study) on the behavior of both teachers and parents. This research should focus on increasing the generalizability of the use of the design principles in new contexts. The main aim is to investigate to what extent it is possible to implement a program that supports teachers to adapt the design principles to their contexts. Specific attention is needed for construing and applying instruments to monitor teachers’ delivery of the design principles and their enactment in parent-child interactions (De la Rie, 2018; Powell & Carey, 2012). Research should also investigate how this new teacher behavior impacts lower-educated parents’ interactions with their children. Instruments to investigate the quality of parental behavior and the quantity and quality of their language