Workshop 4
Solution-Focused Strategies for Working with Parents in Schools
This workshop provides practical strategies for working with parents in respectful ways that enlist their cooperation and support in resolving school-related problems. Solution-focused work builds partnerships and solutions by utilizing parent’s unique beliefs, strengths and resources. Based on innovative family therapy techniques and research on “what works” in helping people change, solution-focused strategies for working effectively with parents include: (1) using language in ways that promote cooperation; (2) developing creative resource-based interventions from the material supplied by parents; (3) building on exceptions to the problem; (4) reframing school and family problems in respectful ways that promote hope, cooperation, and solutions; (5) interviewing the “internalized other” in situations involving parent-student and parent-school conflicts (6) amplifying sources of hope and possibility in the most challenging circumstances; (7) working with so-called “resistant” or “disengaged” parents; and (8) integrating solution-focused principles and practices and various forms of parent work including parent-teacher meetings, parent consultation, counseling, and parent education programs. This workshop includes videotapes of actual sessions with parents and students, “live” onsite demonstrations, experiential exercises, practice activities, and real-world case examples designed to increase the practical relevance and applicability of training content.
Opening Exercise
Rationale and Principles of Solution-Focused Work with Parents
Building Cooperative Relationships with Parents
Interventions (Part One): Building on What Works (Even Just a Little)
· Utilizing Exceptions and Other “Natural Resources”
Interventions (Part Two): Changing the Viewing and Doing of Problems
· Reframing, Interviewing the Internalized Other
· Paradoxical Interventions
Empowering and Maintaining Improvements Whenever They Occur
Other Applications of Solution-Focused Practice with Parents
· Parent-School Meetings; Parent Education/Training Groups (Case Example: Behavioral Parent Training); School-Parent Communications (Letters, Notes)
CEU/Learning Objectives
Participants will learn how to:
· Build cooperative relationships with all parents, including so-called “resistant” parents
· Enlist parents in developing specific and meaningful goals
· Encourage parents to recognize and built on what works for them and their children
· Develop creative individualized interventions based on the unique views and resources of parents
and their children
· Invite parents to “do something different” instead of more of the same interventions
· Assist parents in empowering and maintaining their child’s improvements
· Apply practical methods of obtaining client feedback and adjusting the helping process
accordingly