Solution Focused Approaches to Promote Effective Home–School Partnerships

This chapter is about creating effective conversations between school and home. We can often find ourselves in conversations that go round and round talking about problems leaving everyone involved feeling negative, hopeless and helpless. Sometimes this kind of over-analysis leads to complete paralysis. ‘If the problem is so big what on earth can I try to do about it?’ We can, however, choose to talk in different ways that are more optimistic and respectful. Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) offers options that focus our perceptions, thoughts and language on exploring competencies and solutions rather than exploring problems.