Martine van der Pluijm

94 Chapter 4 2011). An important reason might be that there is limited knowledge of which activities and strategies teachers can use with lower-educated parents to enhance interactions with their children (Van der Pluijm, Van Gelderen, & Kessels, 2019). Teachers often have limited information about families’ backgrounds (Banks & Banks, 2004; Denessen, Bakker, & Gierveld, 2007; Epstein, 1992; Manz et al., 2010), which may lead to a lack of understanding of the HLE of their pupils (Epstein, 2011; Hutchins, Greenfeld, Epstein, Sanders, & Galindo, 2013; Scott, Brown, Jean-Baptiste, & Barbarin, 2012; Van der Pluijm, 2014). Moreover, teachers have difficulties in engaging lower-educated parents in FLP activities and in adhering to the program principles (Powell & Carey, 2012; St. Pierre et al., 2003; Teepe, 2018), such as modeling, which is a technique used to deliver the program to lower-educated parents (De la Rie, 2018). Teachers’ activities to facilitate parents with suggestions to improve the HLE seem to be more tailored to the capacities of higher-educated parents (e.g., better literacy skills, prior knowledge) and less to those of lower-educated parents (Reese, Leyva, Sparks, & Grolnick, 2010; Van der Pluijm et al., 2019). A challenging aspect for program developers is to design programs that provide teachers with the knowledge and skills to use program principles adequately in their settings and to adapt these to characteristics of their parent populations (Naoom, Van Dijke, Fixsen, Blasé, & Villagomez, 2012; Powell & Carey, 2012; Van Steensel, Herppich, McElvany, & Kurvers, 2012). The disappointing results of FLPs for families that aremost in need and the call to tailor programs to families’ needs both resound in the latest appeals for partnership approaches (Anderson, McTavish, & Kim, 2017; Manz et al., 2010; Van Steensel et al., 2012). Unfortunately, many teachers experience considerable difficulties when working with parents with lower education levels and different languages and cultures (Bakker et al., 2013; Jeynes, 2010; Lusse, Notten, & Engbersen, 2019; Noel, 2016; Santoro, 2009; Waddel, 2013). Examples include problems understanding parents who do not speak the majority language and different interpretations of the roles that school and parents play in child development. Teachers might view these parents less favorably, leading to few initiatives of teachers to involve parents in their children’s development at school (Denessen, Bakker, Kloppenburg, & Kerkhof, 2009; Martin et al., 2006; Walker, 2019). There is a gap between the body of evidence that shows the benefits of SFPs and the poor number of practices implementing this knowledge (Desforges & Abouchaar, 2003; Epstein, Jung, & Sheldon, 2019; Epstein & Sanders, 2006; Walker, 2019). Although there is a growing number of initiatives to prepare teachers for SFPs, teachers are still insufficiently prepared during pre-service training (Denessen et al., 2009; Noel, 2016; Thompson, Willemse; Mutton, Burn, & De Bruïne, 2018; Van Schelven, Van Gelderen, & Beishuizen in preparation) or in-service professionalization (Epstein et al., 2019; Epstein & Sanders, 2006; Walker, 2019). Developers are challenged to design professionalization programs that involve teachers in