Building Cultural Humility to Strengthen Family-Teacher Trust with Dr. Judy Paulick

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

• Judy Paulick — UVA faculty profile: https://education.virginia.edu/about/directory/judy-paulick
• Parent Teacher Home Visits — national organization supporting schools implementing home visiting programs: https://pthvp.org/
• Paulick, J., Lucas, M., & Hill-Maini, T. (2024). "Teachers Centering Families and Building Rapport During Home Visits." American Educational Research Journal. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/00028312231222270
• Palacios, N., Paulick, J., Kibler, A., & Blatt, A. (2025). "Humanizing Students: Teacher Reflections Before and After Home Visits." Teachers College Record. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01614681251347426
• Paulick, J. et al. (2024). "Examining Teacher Candidates' Responses to Parental Disclosures During Simulated Conferences and Home Visits." Action in Teacher Education. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01626620.2024.2442328
• Paulick, J. et al. (2024). "Factors Influencing Kindergarten Families' Perceptions of Home–School Interactions." Infant and Child Development. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/icd.2540
• Paulick, J. et al. (2026). "Seeing Students Anew: How Relationship-Building Asset-Framed Home Visits Deepen Teachers' Understanding of Bilingual Families." Language, Culture and Curriculum. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01434632.2026.2654080
• Paulick, J. (2022). "Power Dynamics and Positioning in Teacher Home Visits with Marginalized Families." American Journal of Education. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/721872

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