The EASE Process: Increasing Educator Reflexivity to Foster Family-Educator Collaboration

Abstract

Family-educator collaboration results in enhanced outcomes among educators, families, and, most importantly, students with disabilities. Collaboration of this nature, however, does not always occur for many reasons, including tension that arises when family and educator microcultures differ and result in communication breakdowns. Reflexivity is one approach to improve family-educator collaboration by enhancing a shared sense of trust and understanding among families and educators. For this reason, the purpose of his paper is to present EASE, a four-step reflexivity process for educators to interrogate their complex microcultures and consider the influence of those microcultures on collaboration with students and their families.