Solution Focused Practice in Schools

80 Ideas and Strategies

Yasmin Ajmal, Harvey Ratner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138640221
• eBook ISBN: 9781317266037
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Solution Focused Practice is a change-focused approach to enabling people of all ages to make progress in their lives by emphasising what is wanted in the future, amplifying successes and highlighting the capacities and skills available to support progress.

Grounded in the reality of the day-to-day challenges of school life, Solution Focused Practice in Schools: 80 Ideas and Strategies offers dynamic, practical, down-to-earth and jargon-free applications of the Solution Focused (SF) approach that can create energy and movement in even the toughest of situations.

From working with individuals to considering organisational developments, this book explores the SF approach using numerous examples and sample questions that can be adapted for any situation and whether the time available is long or short.

The reader will gain ideas about how to:

• move beyond 'don't know' responses in individual discussions with students to create dialogues where difference and change can occur
• invite classes into constructive conversations about building the classroom environment that brings out the best in students, whether there has been a concern or not
• address key issues such as confidence, motivation, resilience and dealing with set-backs
• build detail around potential and effective futures in coaching, consultations and meetings
• support the development of policies and procedures at an organisational level
• support solution-based conversations using play, role play, video and other creative techniques.

This book is an excellent resource for managers, teachers, SENCOs, mentors, counsellors, coaches, psychologists, social workers and all those who work in a supportive capacity in schools to promote the learning and well-being of both students and staff.

Part 1 Introduction to Solution Focused Practice

1. What is Solution Focused Practice (SFP)?

SFP is a change-focused approach that helps people find ways forward from difficult or challenging situations by focusing on what is wanted in the future and what is already working. For more than 30 years ideas first encountered in the world of therapy and counselling have been developed in creative and inspiring ways by education professionals. The interest in solutions rather than problems, the future rather than the past and people’s resources rather than their deficits provides a structure which is aspirational and economical of time and resources. The adaptability of SFP is particularly apt for the school setting, offering a framework for developing constructive dialogues at an individual, group, class and organisational level. Within the context of diminishing budgets and over-full agendas, SF thinking offers a pragmatic approach to the discovery of solutions and new possibilities.

Many of our best ideas about tailoring SFP to the school environment have grown out of collaborative work with school staff. Our current practice and understanding has benefitted from the suggestions and pertinent questions they have posed. A constant feature of staff feedback on their use of SFP is the energy-giving effect of focusing on what is working and what is wanted, regardless of the task at hand.

Throughout the chapters there are numerous examples of how a SF approach can be incorporated into the busy day-to-day work in the classroom and the wider school context to support staff in cultivating the kind of school culture that they wish for the students and themselves. Readers will see a range of options for expanding or contracting discussions in relation to the time available including many examples of 5 minute conversation frameworks. At the heart of each chapter is the process of learning and exploring with students and staff the conditions that bring out the best in them in finding a way forward. It is never certain which questions will be useful until they have been asked, but it is hoped that examples from across the primary and secondary age ranges will boost the confidence of staff to explore and to experiment.

2. A brief background

The ideas contained within this book originated from the work of a creative group of researchers and therapists at the Brief Family Therapy Center (BFTC) in Milwaukee, established in 1977 by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg. That the team included researchers was of immense importance to the development of the approach because it meant that from day one the team were checking whether the techniques they were employing were actually working. One of the most original of their innovations was the Miracle Question, which followed someone telling Kim Berg that her problem was so overwhelming that ‘it would take a miracle to sort it out’:

• Suppose that one night, while you are asleep, there was a miracle and this problem was solved. How would you know? What would be different? (de Shazer 1988: 5)

Rather than examining the problem, the aim of their work became to explore a person’s life after the problem had been solved. Once described, it was then possible to look for those times they were already achieving this. Whatever was happening at these times were called ‘exceptions’ to the problem rule and could therefore form the basis of a solution. With this combination of future focused questions – how the person would know the problem had been solved and exception questions – what they were already doing about it – the team were able, by the mid-1980s, to announce that they had developed a new model. Instead of studying problem behaviour and trying to change it, they focused on solution behaviours and how to promote them. They subsequently devised the technique of a scale, from 0 or 1 to 10, as a way of elaborating the degree of progress that their clients had already made towards their goals.

Later developments

Since those pioneering days, the model of SFP has developed in different ways and BRIEF in London has been at the leading edge of these developments. For example, they have emphasised the importance of starting initial meetings with what has become known as the Best Hopes Question (Ratner et al. 2012):

• What are your best hopes from this meeting (discussion or piece of work)? How will you know our work together has been useful?

This leads to a modified version of the Miracle Question, known as the Tomorrow Question, to clarify in detail what the achievement of those hopes would look like, the person’s ‘preferred future’ (Ratner et al. 2012: 93):

• Suppose tomorrow you found that you had achieved those hopes, what would be the first thing you’d notice yourself doing that would tell you that?

In keeping with this focus on the preferred outcome, ‘exceptions’ have been recast as ‘instances’: instances of the preferred future already happening (Ratner et al. op cit.).

3. Summary of practice

Current SFP would incorporate some or all of these elements:

• Finding out what is wanted – the difference or outcome – from the work to be done
• Exploring the ‘preferred future’ – the detail of what will be happening when the outcome has been achieved
• Identifying the instances of success – times the preferred future is already happening – and ‘building on what is working’
• Denoting progress on a 0–10 or 1–10 scale – what has already been done to get to a certain point
• Noting possible signs of further progress towards the preferred outcome
• Summarising the work – often in the form of compliments.

4. Fundamental SF skills

The SF tradition has given us particular skills for change-focused conversations in schools.

Be pragmatic: focus on what people do

• What will ‘getting on with your work’ look like? What will you be doing?
• Suppose I was walking round the school, what would I see and hear that would be the evidence of student’s showing respect towards each other and staff?

This emphasis on action does not mean feelings and emotions are ignored. Feelings and beliefs influence actions, and vice versa. When students talk about wanting to feel happier or more confident, we often say that other people can’t see inside their heads and so will continue to ask:

• How will people know that you are happy?
• When you are more confident, what will they see you doing?

A common answer might be ‘I’ll be smiling’. However, ‘smiling’ is only one of the many criteria by which their happiness will become known to others. The intention is to build as much detail as possible. ‘What else will tell them you’re happy?’ helps to bring obvious and less obvious ideas into view.

Adopt an interactional approach

This idea, originating from systems thinking, looks at how people in a situation influence each other. Thus, when people talk about changes happening, we can also enquire about how their actions will impact on others, and how the actions of others will then affect them. We might, for example, ask a student to think about the following sequence:

• What their fellow students will notice differently about them when things are going better …
• How they will know the others have noticed …
• And then what effect that will have on them.

Consider the following conversation with a 9-year-old boy called Freddie whose behaviour is causing concern at both home and school. Freddie is talking about having a good day in school. The practitioner asks Freddie to think about what this will look like. Freddie thought the first thing his teacher would notice is that he would say ‘good morning’ to her in the corridor before school started.

Practitioner:	It’s Monday morning and you see Miss Harris and you go ‘Good morning Miss Harris’. What’s she going to do when you say that?
Freddie:	She’s going to say, ‘Good morning’ back.
Practitioner:	Will she?
Freddie:	Yeah.
Practitioner:	Will she be surprised?
Freddie:	Yeah.
Practitioner:	Would she be pleased?

SF questions are by and large open questions that help people to discover things about themselves. These are questions that can’t be answered with a single word (like ‘yes’ or ‘no’) so that the answer can be used to feed back into the ongoing conversation. However, as can be seen in this extract, at times a closed question can be used to lead into an opening up question.

...

Freddie:	Yeah.
Practitioner:	How would you know? You know your teacher well now don’t you? How would you know that she’s pleased?
Freddie:	‘Cos she has a voice when she’s angry, when she’s upset, when she’s happy.
Practitioner:	Ok. So she’s got different voices, yeah …. And so what voice will she use on Monday?

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• About the authors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1: Introduction to Solution Focused Practice
• Part 2: How will we know we are at our best? Conversations with whole classes
• Part 3: Individual work
• Part 4: Coaching, consultations and meetings
• Part 5: Working with groups around specific issues
• Part 6: Creative adaptations for younger children
• Part 8: Solution focus in Zanzibar: A case study
• Index