CO-CREATING A SCHOOL CLIMATE RIPE FOR STUDENT SUCCESS: A COLLABORATIVE STRENGTHS-BASED APPROACH

Students presenting with ADD, bullying and explosive behaviors, self-destructive behaviors, and social skills difficulties can be a challenge to manage in school settings. To further complicate matters, the teachers may feel like the parents do not support them and the parents may feel that the teachers ‘don’t really understand’ their kids and ‘how best to manage’ them. In some cases, students may pit the teachers against their parents. These conflicts or splits among the adults only serve to disempower the teachers and further fuel and maintain the students’ problematic behaviors. Unfortunately, the sparkling moments or the times when the students’ exhibit positive and responsible behaviors go unnoticed because they don’t fit with the dominant school problem-saturated story.

In this “hands-on,” practice-oriented workshop, school administrators, psychologists, social workers, and teachers will learn a collaborative strengths-based approach that capitalizes on the strengths and resources of the student, the parents, the teachers, and other involved school personnel to rapidly co-construct solutions together. As a result of attending this workshop, participants will come away knowing how to:

• Establish cooperative relationships with even the most challenging and disruptive students
• Strategies for fostering collaborative partnerships with parents
• Craft and select questions that elicit student, parental, and teacher expertise, realistic learning and behavioral goals, and co-create compelling future realities
• Conduct school team and multidisciplinary meetings that tap the expertise and past successes of the student, parents, teachers, and other involved school personnel for solution construction
• Co-develop with students, the parents, and the school team solution-determined individual educational plans
• Guidelines for designing, selecting, and tailor-fitting behavioral change strategies
• Use externalization of the problem rituals to empower the student/school team to conquer it
• Use goal-maintenance tools and strategies to consolidate student gains and to constructively manage inevitable slips
• Increase meaning and purpose in students’ lives through providing opportunities for school and community involvement in service work and prevention projects
• Run Stress-Busters’ Leadership Groups with at-risk students

The workshop format provides information-rich didactic presentation, use of videotape examples of change strategies, and skill-building exercises.