Make It Mindful: An Education Podcast

In this episode of Make It Mindful, Seth talks with Judy Paulick — associate professor of teacher education at the University of Virginia — about a question her field has never really studied: what home visits mean to the families receiving them, not just the teachers making them. Her team has just begun data collection on a new W.T. Grant Foundation-funded study following 25 teachers and 75 families to find out.

Together, Seth and Judy explore why the impact of home visits on families has gone almost entirely unstudied even as the impact on teachers has been documented for years, and what her new study — following 25 teachers and 75 Latine families — is designed to find. They talk about what her team learned checking back in with teachers seven and eight years after their first home visits, how she teaches student teachers to hold general cultural frameworks and specific family identities at the same time, and what a simulated home visit — complete with a live actor animating an on-screen avatar — can and can't replicate. Judy also gets candid about how she checks her own bias as an advocate for a practice she's spent her career studying.

Key topics:
  • New W.T. Grant Foundation study on the family experience of home visits
  • Why family-side impact has gone unstudied while teacher-side impact has been documented
  • Seven-to-eight-year follow-up focus groups from the 2018 home visits study
  • Teaching cultural humility and cultural frameworks without stereotyping individual families
  • Active listening, comfortable silence, and building trust across cultural difference
  • Simulated home visits: role plays and the "interactor" avatar training tool
  • Checking researcher bias as an advocate for the practice you study
Links & Resources
Guest Bio: Judy Paulick
Judy Paulick is an associate professor of teacher education at the University of Virginia's School of Education and Human Development, where she studies how teachers learn about their students and families through home visits and how that knowledge shapes classroom practice. Her team has just begun data collection on a new W.T. Grant Foundation-funded study following 25 teachers and 75 families to examine, for the first time, what home visits mean to families themselves. Earlier in her career she taught elementary school in Compton, California, and served as an educator in the Peace Corps in Tonga; she holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University.

About the Host:
Seth Fleischauer is the founder of Banyan Global Learning and host of Make It Mindful: An Education Podcast. Through Banyan, he designs live virtual programs that connect K-12 classrooms to global peers and expert facilitators — building the kind of structured, human-centered learning the podcast explores. See https://www.banyangloballearning.com/programs/global-cohorts

Creators and Guests

Host
Seth Fleischauer

What is Make It Mindful: An Education Podcast?

Make It Mindful is a podcast for educators and school leaders who think seriously about how learning is changing and want to explore what to do next. Hosted by Seth Fleischauer, founder of Banyan Global Learning and former classroom teacher, the show covers three territories: what AI actually changes about teaching and learning, what it takes to help students connect meaningfully across cultures, and the human conditions — belonging, awe, trust, emotional regulation — that learning depends on regardless of what else changes.

Guests include district administrators, researchers, clinical psychologists, curriculum designers, and classroom practitioners. Conversations are long-form and honest. Produced by Banyan Global Learning.

# Clean Transcript — Judy Paulick (Return Episode)
## Make It Mindful

*Note: All timestamps from [00:00:53] onward are recalculated approximations*

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[INTRO — recorded separately] [00:00:00]

Support for Make It Mindful is brought to you by World Savvy, partnering with K-12 schools, districts, and community leaders to prepare youth to thrive in a complex, interconnected world.

We are proud to feature Svitlo School - a free, extracurricular online school in English, that has educated more than 3,000 Ukrainian children since 2022. Children learn from native English speakers in the UK, US and across the world. Visit SvitloSchool.com to learn more about volunteering.

Welcome to Make It Mindful, the podcast about how students learn, who they're becoming, and how new technologies and global experiences reshape teaching. I'm Seth Fleischauer, founder of Banyan Global Learning. Today I'm joined again by Judy Paulick, associate professor of teacher education at the University of Virginia. Judy returns to the show as she and her research team begin data collection on a new study following 25 teachers and 75 families — the first real attempt in this field to ask not just what home visits do for teachers, but what they mean to the families on the other side of the door.

This episode of Make It Mindful is brought to you by Banyan Global Learning.

At Banyan Global Learning, we design structured live experiences that connect classrooms to the world.

Banyan Global Cohorts is a 4-week journey in global competence. Classrooms join an international cohort of 3–4 schools and meet weekly during regular class time for facilitated, 45-minute sessions built around a compelling Big Question.

Students explore global contexts through virtual field trips, exchange ideas with international peers, and create a final digital artifact that expresses identity, perspective, and connection across cultures.

If you're curious about what this could look like in your classroom or school, we'd love to talk. You can find us at banyangloballearning.com.

And now here's my conversation with Judy Paulick.

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**Seth** [00:00:01]
Judy, welcome back to the podcast.

**Judy Paulick** [00:00:08]
Thanks so much.

**Seth** [00:00:10]
It is great to have you here. For anyone who wasn't a part of or didn't listen to our first conversation — you are an associate professor of teacher education at UVA, where you train elementary teachers with a focus on family engagement and culturally sustaining literacy instruction. We talked last time about home visits, specifically this idea that when teachers go into students' homes with the right mindset, they come back not just with more information, but with a fundamentally different relationship to who that child is. That episode became one of our most listened-to. So I'm very excited to have you back and understand where your work is today. Thanks so much for being here.

**Judy Paulick** [00:00:53]
Thank you. I'm delighted to be back.

**Seth** [00:00:55]
So a lot has happened in your research since we last spoke. What is on your mind right now? What is occupying your thinking?

**Judy Paulick** [00:01:03]
So I'm continuing to think about how we can encourage teachers to really get to know children and families, especially those with identities different from the teacher's, and then how we continue to encourage teachers to use what they know to inform their teaching and make their classrooms safe, welcoming, and challenging for every student — but especially for students with marginalized identities within the US context, which has shifted since I was last on the podcast.

Since we last spoke, my team and I have begun data collection with 25 teachers and 75 families. The data collection itself starts today. It's in a school district that traditionally does home visiting, so we're studying what they do and the impact those visits have on families and on teaching. Our work before was smaller scale, and some of it was us training teachers to do it in contexts that didn't traditionally do home visiting. This is a slightly different approach, and it gives us access to families.

**Seth** [00:02:18]
And my understanding is that this hasn't necessarily been studied before — this impact on families. There's been research on the teacher side, but not on the family side. So why hasn't it, and why now?

**Judy Paulick** [00:02:31]
No, it really hasn't. I think it hasn't because it's challenging — getting access to families can be difficult. We're working specifically with Latine families, so there's also a language piece, in terms of ensuring we have a team of bilingual researchers. And I think the field has, to this point, really focused on the impact on children of family engagement, rather than thinking about the impact on families themselves.

**Seth** [00:03:17]
Do you have an early indication, or a gut feeling, about what you think that impact might be? Obviously people are dynamic systems in and of themselves, let alone family systems, so any given intervention is going to land differently. But have you seen any trends in what this impact is of a teacher coming into your home, meeting you and your student, typically before the school year starts? Is there a best practice there?

**Judy Paulick** [00:03:56]
Yeah, it's typically at the very beginning of the school year. The organization that has sustained and supported this work across the country — the Parent Teacher Home Visit Project, which we talked about last time — suggests a visit at the very beginning of the school year and then another one in January. A lot of schools just do the one at the beginning of the year because the visits themselves are resource-intensive. They have a week in September, National Home Visit Week, that starts next Monday, where schools across the country try to do as many home visits as possible.

I think having the home visits early in the year helps establish the relationship between the family and the teacher. We've heard from folks in our previous study that there are drawbacks and benefits to doing it very early on — in the study we did in 2018, a lot of the teachers went in October, which was great too, because the classes were settled by then and things weren't still shifting the way they can in the first eight weeks of school.

In terms of our inclination — we really don't know, because there isn't research on this yet, so I don't want to speculate too much. But anecdotally, I think families for the most part are appreciative of being listened to and seen, and it feels different when it happens in a home visit. And the home visit doesn't have to happen in the home — it can happen in a community center, a library, on the family's porch. Sometimes that's helpful for families who'd prefer not to have strangers in their home. And it seems like families then feel more empowered to be in the school space, where, for some families, that space hasn't historically been comfortable. When you build relationships with people, they feel more comfortable being in the spaces where those relationships can continue.

So we imagine that families who experience relationship-building, asset-framed home visits will feel more comfortable engaging with the school going forward — working side by side with the teacher in support of the child, rather than the relationship feeling combative, which it sometimes is between parents and educators. We'll know more in about a year. Our assumptions, and the kinds of questions we're asking, are really about how productive, comfortable, and useful the home visits are for families.

**Seth** [00:07:53]
Would you consider yourself an advocate of home visits? And how do you check your own bias when it comes to discovering the real story of whether these home visits are having the impact you hope they might?

**Judy Paulick** [00:08:13]
Yes, I'm definitely an advocate of home visits — I think I probably proselytize, if that's a word. But I think that's the beauty of building a study with rigor: the data we're using are surveys that have been validated in other studies. I have research partners who aren't as fully dedicated to home visits as I am, and the work goes through a very rigorous peer review process. I don't think any researcher is agnostic about the topics they study, so acknowledging our positionality and our biases is important. We're answering specific questions, and we get to choose, for the most part, what those questions are — but then we need to use the process we detailed in our research protocol to answer them. That gets checked at multiple points — in the proposal process, and in any peer-reviewed publication we put out.

**Seth** [00:10:02]
One of the things you said at the top was that you're always thinking about how teachers can get to know students with different identities. Say I'm a new teacher, in my first five years in the classroom, just getting my legs under me in terms of how to do this whole teaching thing. What is special about relationship-building when students have significant differences in identity from the teacher, versus other types of standard relationship-building?

**Judy Paulick** [00:10:39]
I think this is my favorite question. There are so many pieces that make up somebody's identity, and the cultures that go along with each of those identities. I think a lot of our teachers don't necessarily have the space and opportunity to explore their own identities and their own ways of seeing things — what's "normal" and "good." Having that chance, especially in a home visit, gives them an opportunity to really listen — to hear family stories, their experiences, their challenges, their assets, all of what makes them them. That allows teachers to see realities different from their own and to build relationships based on the trust you build by listening to people.

By being present and engaged, they're demonstrating their own trustworthiness — and that helps build the trust that undergirds the relationship. It continues because you're working together with the family in service of the child. If you can do that from a place of trust, you have an opportunity to really support the child in a way that also honors the family's multiple cultures. Our team isn't assuming that because a family is Latine, they share all the same values and cultural models — a family is also all of the different pieces that make it up. So in those twenty-five minutes with each family, the teacher is learning about that family in ways they can use to inform their work, but they're also building trust that will carry through other kinds of interactions over the course of the year.

**Seth** [00:13:16]
There are so many questions that could be asked in this situation — you're talking about half an hour, an hour, with a whole family, to try to get to know not just the student but the context the student is living in. How do you know which questions to ask? And is there a right way to listen — how does someone practice listening, presence, and engagement in a way that builds that trust?

**Judy Paulick** [00:13:56]
They're such great questions. I don't know if these are the best questions, but the ones we train on were built off the Parent Teacher Home Visit Project model, which I use with the student teachers I work with at UVA — they all do a home visit as part of their training. Questions like: what are your hopes and dreams for your child? And then, if the child is present: what are your hopes and dreams for yourself? What kinds of things do you like to do together as a family? How do you spend your weekends or holidays? What was schooling like for you, as parents? Those kinds of questions often lead to additional stories.

The listening itself is really about eye contact, the "uh-huhs" and "yeahs," occasional connections to the teacher's own life and experience — without centering the teacher. It's a conversation, a discussion, and we practice it. When Parent Teacher Home Visits trains schools, they practice using role plays and some scripts. The other thing that's been really productive — and this is where being in the home can help — is asking about something in the home: a photograph, a piece of art, the fridge with the magnets and stuff on it. All of that can be a great basis for questions about the family. Teachers need to know what to look for, and what to pull from that, so we spend time talking about cultural models — how different groups may approach the same thing through a different lens, and being able to see what those lenses are.

**Seth** [00:16:39]
To what extent are you teaching about specific cultures versus teaching cultural frameworks? I ask because you could come into a home visit thinking, "these types of families generally prefer this type of interaction" — but as you said earlier, there are multiple identities within any given family. To what extent do you toe that line between wanting to be informed about general best practices for a given culture, and wanting to be respectful of the idea that any given family might have constructed their identity differently?

**Judy Paulick** [00:17:22]
Yeah, I think it's both-and. We look at general things families might approach differently — cooperation versus competition, approaches to time and timeliness, what hygiene includes, how pets or animals are treated in the family — a wide range of how those can look different. That's a lot of what we do. But then, in my work with my students, we also read a lot of picture books, because I'm training them for elementary literacy, so it's very appropriate to spend time there. Those books are windows into cultural models that are totally varied — if I bring in forty different books that all feature African American families, there's a huge variety, because of all the other social identities within those families. Same with forty books featuring Latine families. So — both — is my answer to your question.

**Seth** [00:18:58]
One more question about active listening before we move on. Are the hallmarks of active listening culturally universal? You mentioned eye contact — and I was thinking about how, in certain cultures, a white teacher might read a student looking away as disrespect, when that student's cultural norm is actually to look away out of respect. So you mentioned eye contact and follow-up questions — I imagine there's a point where follow-up questions start to feel like prying. To what extent are these practices flexible or adaptable to the particular cultural context?

**Judy Paulick** [00:19:49]
The main disposition I want my students to bring into home visits is cultural humility. Part of that is knowing they're not necessarily going to know off the bat if something they're doing is offensive, but they can be aware of the possibilities of things that might be offensive — or endearing, if that's the opposite. They're going to mess up, and that's okay. Knowing they don't need to be perfect in other people's spaces is important — look and see if shoes are lined up in the hallway, and if so, offer to take yours off; look to see where the family is guiding you to sit.

But the fact of the matter is, for most of my students — and most teachers in the US — they have dominant identities, and the majority of families in the US have marginalized cultural, ethnic, or linguistic identities. So families generally have a much better sense of what the teachers' ways of knowing and being are, because they've been deeply exposed to it — it's the water they're swimming in. In general, families work to make teachers feel as comfortable as possible, but teachers need to be aware of what they might do that could be uncomfortable for families. It's a bit of a dance — it requires the teacher's awareness and the family's flexibility, and it's all very human, so it's sometimes messy. Part of active listening is also letting there be silence sometimes — which can be a little awkward for everyone, but letting the visit be quiet for a bit can be really productive, because it creates space for the family to shift or add to the conversation.

**Seth** [00:21:36]
I see how valuable those ideas are. I do think it's easier said than done to say "it's okay that it's uncomfortable" — especially for younger teachers. We've got Gen Z teachers now, a generation that doesn't want to interact with the clerk at the grocery store, let alone the parents of a student they're teaching, let alone stumbling over a cultural issue, which is its own third rail of embarrassment. How do you build resilience in teachers — not just to hear that it's okay to be uncomfortable, but to actually live in that discomfort in a way that helps them transcend it?

**Judy Paulick** [00:23:50]
Well, they're all in the middle of their student teaching when they do this, so they're already experiencing all sorts of discomfort every day — they're learning and growing. Starting from the beginning of teacher preparation with the idea that we're all fallible, learning, growing creatures — we're going to practice, take risks, mess up — and introducing that slowly from the start of the program is helpful. I know that's not a luxury everyone has; for in-service teachers already in the classroom, it's a different story. But the rewards they can reap from those relationships, even from messing up, are real.

I remember when I first started teaching — my classroom experience was mostly in Compton, California, and most of my students' families spoke Spanish as a first language. I'd taken Spanish in high school and college, but I wasn't close to fluent. My families really appreciated my attempts, and laughed at me — and it was great for building trust. I share those stories with my students: it's that humility of "I don't know everything just because I'm the teacher, and I respect your language and your ways of knowing and being." You don't want to do it in a way that's disrespectful, but relationships are what they are, and I think resilience is built through experience, practice, and reassurance.

I've now had, I think, seven or eight cohorts of my own students go through this — they each do one home visit, so it's very low-stakes compared to what our teachers in the studies are doing with all of their students. But having that practice, then reflecting on it with fellow students, with me, and with their mentor teachers, has been overwhelmingly positive. Especially with time afterward to keep interacting with that family and child in the placement classroom — the benefit is so clearly apparent that it matters to the child, and that comes back into the classroom.

**Seth** [00:27:04]
Last time we talked about how a teacher's ability to describe a student really shifts after these home visits — from very one-dimensional characteristics to something rooted in more context and nuance. How does that benefit the teacher-student relationship?

**Judy Paulick** [00:27:31]
Part of how it benefits the relationship is that it actually impacts the teaching, from what we can see and what we've been hearing — the teaching becomes more relevant to that student. Say a teacher goes out and realizes the child's family does a lot of gardening, or works with animals, and then brings that back into the classroom — uses examples that are relevant, asks the student to tell the class about it. The child feels more comfortable in the classroom, which lets them contribute more, show up differently — and that continues to build trust between the teacher and the child. When the family hears about it, it builds trust between the teacher and the family too.

This past year we went back to teachers who'd participated in our 2018 study and talked with them — I was able to get seven of the eight teachers back for a series of focus groups, to hear what the home visiting, seven or eight years ago, meant for their practice moving forward. Part of what they said was that it impacted not just what they taught, but how they taught — how they responded to individual children's challenges in the classroom. Sometimes you have a child who's very spirited in the classroom because that's how they are at home, and sometimes you have a child who's very spirited in the classroom because they don't have space to be that way at home — and you might approach those differently, in terms of how you engage the family in supporting the child. So from what we've heard, it's both what teachers teach and how they work with children's dispositions and behaviors.

**Seth** [00:30:45]
Yeah — I'm hearing two big categories. One is simply that a strong teacher-student relationship built on trust — on feeling seen, on details and vulnerabilities understood on both sides — helps the learning environment, because the child feels safe enough to explore. I'm also hearing a relevance piece — one of the biggest problems in education today is that kids see a real disconnect between their lives and the classroom, and if a teacher actually sees their life, they can draw those connections.

You have a tool I find really interesting — a simulated home visit — which isn't quite seeing their life, but I have a hard time imagining what that actually is. Can you take me through it? What is a simulated home visit, and how does it help here?

**Judy Paulick** [00:31:52]
Okay, so there are sort of two categories. We know, in teacher preparation, that having teachers engage in approximations of practice, with feedback and support along the way, can be really helpful — something contained enough that you can practice and get feedback on. A home visit is great for that, because it's a twenty-minute-ish experience, anywhere from ten to twenty-five minutes. So one option is small-group role plays in teacher preparation classrooms — you give the group a description of a child, they spend time thinking through a protocol for a home visit in general, how to approach it, what kinds of questions to ask, and then they do the role play while someone else takes notes using the protocol, and they discuss it afterward. You do those over time so people build skills, give each other feedback, and everyone gets a chance to try the different roles. That's one, lower-tech option.

The other option is a virtual simulation. The way that works is there's an actor, called an interactor, who's a live person animating the voice of an avatar that shows up on the screen — and that avatar is a parent, a standardized parent.

**Seth** [00:33:43]
All right. So the other way of doing it is where you have a live actor, called an interactor, animating an avatar that shows up on the screen as a parent for the teacher candidate to interact with. The teacher candidate has some information about the child and best practices for conducting a home visit going in. The interactor has a script, with a set of possible responses for however the teacher candidate responds — so if the candidate says, "I don't think Katie is feeling uncomfortable in class," the interactor has something like a response tree to choose from. What it does is make the experience very standardized — as the teacher candidate, you get to try out a home visit with somebody who's live-ish, but standardized.

This is great for research, because it's standardized — it's not necessarily preferable for training teachers, because there's value in it being live too. Generally, the teacher candidate then gets a chance to get coaching from someone who watched that interaction — a live coach gives feedback, and the teacher candidate tries again right away. That builds resilience: "okay, I messed that up, I'm going to shift and try this other approach and see what happens."

*[Judy Paulick]*
An opportunity for self-reflection, and maybe a reminder of best practices for a home visit. So the simulations definitely have benefits in terms of standardization, and being able to do it multiple times without a small group of teacher candidates just doing the same thing over and over. We've used them for research — I don't use them anymore for my own teacher candidates, but I know there are programs that do, especially quick-launch programs that don't have the luxury of a full year to work together. Having your teacher candidates jump into a simulator, try a home visit a couple of times, get some feedback, and be at least a little prepared can be helpful. In our own live teacher prep program, we're able to do multiple role plays and then have students actually go out and do a home visit.

**Seth** [00:36:51]
If you had thirty seconds in an elevator with someone, and they asked you about your work, what's the one thing you'd want to communicate to people who may not have much experience with home visits?

**Judy Paulick** [00:37:17]
I'd want people to know that although home visits can feel scary, especially to new teachers, they're such low-hanging fruit for demonstrating a teacher's willingness to engage with families — it's really just about going into a home, centering the family, and listening.

**Seth** [00:37:43]
And what's your biggest wondering about this work right now?

**Judy Paulick** [00:37:51]
I'm really excited to learn what families think of this — whether we're right that families feel heard and seen, and that they appreciate what teachers are doing to build the relationship, and that it helps them similarly let their guard down and be willing to trust teachers and build a trusting relationship. Or maybe it's not true — maybe it turns out this felt really intrusive, but families felt like they had to do it anyway. I don't know for sure that families will tell us. We'll see — hopefully the study design gives us a range of families in each of the classrooms we're studying.

**Judy Paulick** [00:38:24]
In the study we're doing now, of the 25 teachers and 75 families, we're also going back to observe the teachers teaching, and doing additional interviews with them in the spring. In our previous work we've asked teachers how home visits impact their teaching — I don't know that we'll see direct evidence, in the three lessons we're observing, tracing straight back from a home visit in the fall to teaching in February or March, but it'll be really interesting to see what the teaching looks like, and to have the chance to observe it directly and talk to teachers, instead of just talking to teachers about their teaching. So I want to know that too.

**Seth** [00:39:27]
Judy, thank you so much again for being here today. We'll put some relevant links in the show notes, but we really appreciate you coming back and having another conversation, and we admire and respect and appreciate the work you're doing with teachers to enable them to know their students and families better. Thank you so much.

**Judy Paulick** [00:39:36]
Thank you. Thanks for such amazing questions.

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[OUTRO — recorded separately]

That's a wrap on our conversation with Judy Paulick. Her earlier work showed that a single twenty-minute home visit changes how a teacher describes a student — from mood and ability to actual context: interests, culture, what's happening at home. What's new is that her team is now finally asking the other half of that question: what does the visit mean to the family standing on the other side of the door. We'll have links to Judy's research and the Parent Teacher Home Visits project in the show notes. Thanks for listening to Make It Mindful, and we'll see you next time.