Preparing Future Teachers to Collaborate With Families Contributions of Family Systems Counselors to a Teacher Preparation Program

Systemically trained counselors have a distinctive set of skills that make them well suited to prepare teachers to work with students' families. In this article, we discuss our experiences as family counselors in developing and teaching a required course in family-school collaboration to elementary teachers in training. We first describe the teacher dispositions that need to be developed to support such family-school relationships and the skills possessed by family systems counselors for promoting these dispositions. We then describe the course goals, instructional methods, and course activities, and report the impact of this course experience on our students and ourselves.