Scaling for Success

One way in which we support people in Solution-Focused work is using a technique called Scaling. Scaling is typically used to bring to light what someone is doing right in order to solve a problem or for professional development purposes.

Scaling is based on a concept familiar to us all: on a scale of 1-10 something is ______.  Recently, I was asked to scale on a health questionnaire for a work wellness program .  The questions went something like this:

On a scale of 1-10
...how happy are you with your overall health?
...how much stress do you experience in a typical day?
...how much do you value your personal health?

We are all very familiar with this kind of scale, often used on feedback forms and assessments to gather facts.  In Solutions-Focused work, the scaling questions starts out very much the same, but the heart of the technique lies in the follow up conversation. We ask the 1-10 question to get the baseline number which is noted and used to ask the more salient questions of:

• What did you do right to get to this number?
• What can you continue to do to make the number just a tiny bit better?

In the case of solving a problem, asking these two follow up questions shifts the spotlight from what's not working to what the person is already doing right as a foundation for progressing to the next level and solving the problem.  Let's make this very concrete now, and illustrate the steps:

1. Pose a question using a 10 point scale (1 being the absolute worst and 10 the absolute best) to assess where the person perceives themselves or the situation.
2. Repeat the number the person gave and said why X and not X-1? What are you doing right?
3. Based on what's working, what might you do to go from X to X+1?

Pretty straight-forward, right?  Now let's put this in a real-world scenario. Let's take a common situation in which one staff member is not getting along with another. Here's how a conversation might go:

Question: On a scale from 1-10 how would you rate the relationship with Sally?  1 is so terrible you can't even stand to be in the same room as her and 10 is that you have a relationship of mutual respect and you collaborate on a nearly daily basis to be better teachers.   How would you rate your relationship?
Answer: Probably a 3.  I haven't walked out of the room when she walks in, but I've been close a few times.

Question: 3, that's interesting.  Why a 3 and not a 1 or a 2, someone must be going right?
Answer: Well, like I said I haven't walked out of the room even though I wanted to.  And sometimes she has good ideas that I use in my classroom, but what bothers me is the way she talks down to me all the time.

Questions: So you said that you haven't walked out of the room, that tells me that you have some good self-regulation skills when it comes to managing your frustrations with Sally. And you said that she has some good ideas that you also use in your classroom, so that's another great thing to draw from.  How do you think you might use these 2 good things to move the relationship just one small step from a 3 to a 4?  What would that look like?
Answer: I guess I could ask her for some ideas on this unit I'm doing next week.  And I think that I might try telling her about how the activity I did last week went, since I got that idea from her classroom.

Of course the sample above is a concise best-case scenario, and despite your likely reservations (I know you're thinking it's too good to be true), it really is as simple as this. People new to this technique will veer into the negatives quickly and your role is to continue to quickly bring them back to illustrating what's working or might work.  Also very important here is to continue to bring the person back to what they can do to make this work, and stay away from the focus of how someone needs to change. I frequently remind my staff, "you can't change the other, you only have the power to change yourself, so let's bring this back to what you can do improve the situation."

As you see, with this line of questioning we’re intentionally not asking for a huge monumental change here, just for the person to start to imagine a teeny tiny inkling that something might change.  This bring us to a basic assumption of Solution-Focused work If something’s working do more of it. So with scaling we shift the person's thinking from the negative and problems and instead what works so they can do more of it.

Another basic tenant that sometimes arises from scaling is If it’s not working do something different. A Solution-Focused conversation can help bring to light new approaches to a situation that might also apply.  Solution-Focused practitioners believe that everyone has had experiences in their life that have been successful from which solutions can be derived.  Using the case illustrated above, this staff person must have some relationships that are successful, so we may be able to lead her to apply solutions from other relationships to this one.

Stay tuned for the next post - using scaling for professional development.

No Playing with your Food: Finding Solutions not Defeat in Rules

Like many other programs, each year we conduct an very thorough new staff training to orient our newbies to the ins and outs of our program.   It’s my role to orient them on everything Education/classroom related in our program: curriculum, lesson planning forms and practices, education related policies and procedures and so on.

During the Curriculum & Education training this year, I struck a nerve with a new teacher.  As I was talking about the role of food in our program I explained our policy on “no playing with food.”  I gave the history of the Perry Preschool Project (AKA as high/Scope) and how this philosophy on food came about.  The essential idea is: when there are people going hungry in your community and in the world, you do not play with food, as it is a life source and some people are going without.  Courageously, this new teacher spoke up and said “I grew up poor, we had 3-to-a-bed and never purchased new clothes or toys.  But my parents gave me rich learning experiences by letting me play with beans, rice, flower, salt, and other food items.  I will not short change children by taking away valuable experiences they can have with measuring, texture, filling, emptying, weight, and other stuff just because these kids are poor.”  

Wow, what a moment I had here!  In the past, I would have begun some sort of diatribe on the value and virtue of this philosophy.  I would have stood my ground, assertively, but also tried to win her over to my viewpoint.  But, not the Solution-focused, Olivia.  This was my time to play!

I capitalized on this moment to begin a Solutions-focused journey with the brand new staff. I started with appreciating her for speaking up and said “I have mentioned to you before I have training in using Solutions-focused techniques.  Let’s take a minute and apply them here. Instead of looking at this problem - "no playing with food," let’s look at our solutions.  To do this, I would like to begin by uncovering our objectives when we give children food to play with.  I heard you say (as I write these terms on the marker board): weight, texture, measurement.  What other concepts are children learning when they play with food items?” The three staff members in the training went on, “viscosity, 1:1 correspondence, fine motor...” and so on.  

I followed this up with “these are things that MUST be present in all good early childhood classrooms, and you clearly know this and want to provide these important experiences to children.  Now let’s envision that you have access to every non-food item you could ever want. You had all the scales, measuring cups, bowls, buckets, sieves, spoons, etc. you could ever want. Now let’s brainstorm a list of items you can use to meet these same objectives” Within 3 minutes we had a list of 25 things that could meet this.  I then asked, “is there anything on the objective list that would not meet your aims, so you would have to substitute with food items?”  The answer was no, and the response was  a genuine "thanks!" from the teaching staff.

With Solutions-focused techniques, I had an opportunity to shift the focus in the room away from the problem (the negative) to the solutions (the positive); where the mood in the room might have gone sour, instead we got to build on a real emergent learning moment together.  Had I chosen the strategy of “I’m the boss and these are the rules,” the new staff would have been in a place of defeat at only the 3rd day of work, believing they might never win.  But instead by envisioning our desired outcomes we got creative together had an extensive list to pull from and a positive and excitement that lead us to the next training agenda items with our minds and hearts open to possibilities.

Focusing on the Solution: Building a Bully-free classroom

Here I sit at my desk, feeling relieved to have finished a task that had been looming over me for days.  With this task complete, my mind is free to wander.  It glides into the future, where soon there will be classrooms abuzz with children and teachers meeting and reuniting after a long summer break.  In these buzzing classrooms I see happy teaching staff engaging with children. And in this moment of wandering, I flashback, to a classroom with staff that embraced Solutions Focused work this past year.  (Ironically, SF work is about breaking away from rehashing the past, but looking into the future for answers.  But that’s for another post.)

In the 2010-11 school year I had a brand new teacher, Ellie*, in a classroom of 15 3-to-5 year-old children.  Alas, we all know that first year teachers never have it easy.  Unfortunately, Ellie had it particularly tough – in her classroom was a child, Jessie*, who encountered a significant trauma early in the school year and as a result of this he would take to great fits of rage – throwing things, running and screaming in the classroom, trying to run away, biting, hitting, on and on and on.  In our program, we work closely with local mental health agencies and therapists to support children like Jessie.  Throughout the year we had endless meetings looking to identify the precursors to the behavior, to locate the reasons for the distress, and minimize the occurrence.  Yet, despite all our hard work things continued to get increasingly worse throughout the school year.  The school year ended with our hearts heavy as we knew we had failed Jessie, but certainly not of a lack of trying.

In the 2011-12 school year, Ellie was ecstatic to return, happy to have had the dreaded first year of teaching behind her and confident that her own learning would make for a better second year.  And for the most part this was true.  Until, sadly a few months into the school year, Ellie discovered that a once sweet and shy boy had become the class bully. Upon learning this, Ellie sprung into quick action, informing me of what she was witnessing and being told by children and parents.  Ellie knew she needed to start by supporting this boy, Aron, and made sure to communicate with his family.

We began by handling this situation in our typical fashion: meetings with Aron’s parents and our mental health staff and partners to discuss the “problem” of bullying. We learned that he was being bullied by older kids in his neighborhood; so clearly feeling powerless on his home turf, he is looking for power at school where he is one of the oldest. As we talk with the family we hear the family talk in negative terms and tones about their son: he doesn’t like to read, he’s too active, hes rebellious and makes faces at them when they ask things of him.  His mom rarely makes eye contact with the teachers and appears shameful, as if she might be feeling that her parenting skills are in question. Together we make a typical plan to look for the problem behavior and stop it. We also decide to set up situations in which we think Aron can take on leadership roles have power. We decide we will attempt foster friendships with other children by setting up play scenarios for him with children who are more passive and likely to follow his lead.  

On the surface Aron’s behavior seems to get better over the next few weeks.  The teaching staff no longer hear him teasing other children. But we also notice that the set up peer play quickly dissolves.  And then the worst happens: Aron’s parents come to pick him up at the end of a school day and they hear another child call Aron stupid and fat.  In response to this, Aron’s father tells Ellie, “You call me in for meetings and tell me my child is a bully, and then let my child get bullied?  The next time you call to tell me my son is being bad, I’m going to tell you ‘he’s just doing what he needs to do to get by.’” Of course, Ellie is devastated and concerned about how she is going to make this work for Aron and his family.  She knows she has some considerable rehabilitation work to do on the relationship with this family.

In a follow up meeting with Ellie about a week after the name calling incident, I ask how this is going.  Ellie describes it to me as “managing day-to-day, in the moment, but no permanent solutions.” And this is when I know that something different needs to be done.  We need to move away from trying to manage the problem behavior and begin to focus on what we want for Aron and all children in this classroom.  I ask Ellie and her teacher’s assistant to envision a classroom that doesn’t have bullying;  What does this classroom look like?   As they talk about a bully-free classroom, they talk about children who don’t just say they’re friends, but children who demonstrate friendship.  Children seek to help one another, demonstrate genuine care for one another. Children tell each other how they feel truthfully instead of avoiding one another or squabbling.

From here we identify three areas the teaching staff believed would be successful for Aron and the whole class - their vision for success.
1.       Community building and responsibility to one another - When children say “you’re not my friend” (or the like) teachers ask children to explain what the other child can do to be a friend
2.       Family connection/relationship rebuilding
o   Call Aron’s family to share with them what the teaching staff will be doing to help him be successful in the classroom
o   Connect with the family at least twice a week to share Aron’s successes at school
3.       Aron’s responsibilities and needs
o   Telling Aron that he is a friend
o    Teachers looking for moment’s when Aron acts out of kindness and telling him what they saw
o   Pointing out to Aron what other people do to be a friend to him

Two weeks later, Ellie called me (as my office is located off-site) with an excitement in her voice that is palpable.  She told me that from the very next day that they tried this new approach, Aron was a different child: he began playing with other children and the play lasted for substantial amounts of time without issue; he began offering to help the teaching staff with classroom maintenance duties; he was carrying himself differently, with this shoulders back,  head held high and making eye contact (in the past they staff had commented on how he slouched and refused eye contact with teaching staff); Aron had even hugged the teaching staff when he left school the very day Ellie decided to call me with the updates.  This was truly a monumental change for this boy.

But the change didn’t stop with Aron, his parents began interacting differently with the staff too.   Mom also started making eye contact and smiling with the teaching staff.  She too carried herself with confidence.  The teaching staff told Mom that they had noticed that Aron had high-level early math skills that they hadn’t seen before, and credited her for it.  She confessed that she likes to work with him on math because she knows he’s good at it and it’s one of the few things he’ll sit down to do with her.

And Ellie had some amazing things to say about her own process.  “We get these images in our head as how kids are and now I’m realizing that they change.  It requires a lot of patience and remember everything’s not going to change overnight. Thanks for helping me see things in this way.  It’s the little things that make such a difference.”

And this small change just kept on reaping benefits.  Soon the entire classroom culture had changed.  Before Ellie and her TA spent most of their time dealing with small conflicts between children, but soon children were playing together more peacefully and could be overheard telling each other how they could be a “friend.”  Children were less likely to lash out at one another and the teaching staff attributed this to children interpreting other’s behavior as someone’s attempt to be a friend, not to be malicious.  It was as if someone had replaced the entire roster of children enrolled in the class with different ones.  And all because the staff had the courage to envision what could be in their classroom, instead of what wasn’t working.


*All names changed to protect confidentiality.

After a bit of a hiatus (closing down one school year, enjoying the quiet of the summer and preparing for the next one), I am back at my SFEC work.  My last post posed the following challenge:

Look for one, just one, "problem area" in your work (and honestly, it doesn't matter what your work is).  Challenge yourself to remove the problem from your thinking and ask "when I (or this) is successful, it looks like this ____________".

I post this here again for you to think on as I finalize crafting the next post that chronicles the amazing success of one teacher, one child, one family and one classroom when the staff dared themselves to move beyond the problem and consider what success looks like.  Stay tuned for a post within the week!

That which you focus on gets larger

Solution-focus works starts with the following very simple statement "That which you focus on gets larger."

In graduate school, one of my most outstanding professors, Dr. Bill Goodwin (we all still miss you!), proposed a similar idea as the "Yellow Volkswagen Theory". Everyday yellow Volkswagen Beetles drive by you and you never notice.  A friend says, "Hey, there's one of those yellow Volkswagens!" and points one out as is passes.  From then on, you see them everywhere, as if no one in town had one until that day and now just about every-other-person in town owns one. When you bring something out of your subconscious and into your conscious mind  you will begin to see it every where.  Some call this a "self-fulfilling prophecy."  The key to Solution-focused practices in your work is simply shifting you focus to looking for those yellow Beetles: what works.  In my work as a supervisor, this small shift has a profound affect on the way Early Childhood Teachers see their classroom, families, children and colleagues.

Current practices in Early Childhood Education (ECE) often seek out and isolate the "problem", whatever it may be.  Once identified, the problem is dissected until we have uncovered every small part of the problem, sometimes even tying in things that aren't part of the problem. Let's use a familiar example of this: child in a classroom is biting peers during the school day.  In typical practices, we watch this child and look for every instance that they bite, we do this with the intent of finding precipitating behaviors.  We believe that by uncovering these precursors, or triggers, we can intervene and prevent the biting. However, more often then not we find the biting occurs more frequently. We then find no clear pattern to the biting because everything seems to cause this: transitions, peer play, desires, hunger, frustration, happiness, and so on. The biting continues and we can't stop it because the classroom is full of perceived triggers.  This i because we are looking for the problem: biting. If that which we focus on gets larger then when we look for biting we'll see it more and it'll happen more, as we are unintentionally reinforcing the occurrence of the behavior by looking for it.

So what if we apply the Solution-focused the same principle in a different way? What happens when instead of looking for biting, we look for  what the child, and the other children, are doing when the are not biting? When we uncover what makes a child successful, in this case not biting, we then can approach this child from a strengths-based perspective. We can verbally illustrate to the child, ourselves, colleagues and parents the successful experiences in the classroom. And when and if the biting happens again, we now have uncovered the child's successes as a key to changing behavior.

I leave you here to work on this: Look for one, just one, "problem area" in your work (and honestly, it doesn't matter what your work is).  Challenge yourself to remove the problem from your thinking and ask "when I (or this) is successful, it looks like this ____________".

Stay tuned for the next blog post which will involve: Real-life classroom stories of success when focusing on solutions

Where it all began

One’s life is a journey of many kinds.  Professionally, I have journeyed as a teacher, a mentor and a supervisor; these paths overlapping and over-laying one another time and time again.  This blog is an illustration, my interpretation if you will, of my own professional journey as a supervisor and mentor to Early Childhood Educators.  It is not just the journey I wish to document, but to provide a place for me to reflect and tease out meaning so that it might be a teaching tool for all who spend time here.  This blog is a place for real-world scenarios and reflection; a place to challenge myself and those who care to learn, taking lessons in the process.  

As an Early Childhood teacher for nine years, I had a similar journey to most others, but also different in that all of our paths are our own. The first year: BRUTAL; the second: slightly-less brutal and the subsequent ones had their challenges, but inevitably got easier with time as I reflected, learned and taught. I was lucky to find a constructivist teacher training program which was rooted in deep dialog and self-reflection. I was even luckier to continue with this program and supervisors that cultivated in me talents I never knew I had, and presented me with grand opportunities. I owe a debt of gratitude to Boulder Journey School, all of the staff, particularly A, A, & E for never giving up on me (even when I was a complete brat).

Now, in my fourth year as a supervisor of 17 teaching staff, I have had a journey that has taken me to unexpected places.  Once again, the first year: BRUTAL; the second: very-slightly-less brutal; but the third was just as hard as the second and the fourth was shaping up to be the same.  Until I found myself in a very unlikely class: Solution-focused Supervision and Management.  This 8 hours changed my professional life.  

This blog is about my redefined bath of supervision using what I’m calling Solution-focused Early Childhood Education.

Here I will share techniques, successes, struggles, questions and thoughts about my application of Solution-focused work in the Early Childhood setting.  When I first began applying these techniques in December of 2011, I had no idea that changes that were to come, and so quickly.  For those that use and embrace these ideas: even the smallest adaptations to your practice, whether a teacher or administrator, will astound you.  

Please follow me on this journey and dare yourself to take these risks with me.  I promise, and I’m not one for empty promises: You will be a better person and practitioner without hardly trying at all.

And, before closing my first post, I must say: I owe a debt of gratitude that I can never fully express to those teachers that worked with me in my four years as an administrator.  I would never have become the person I am today, had they not been my “guinea pigs” and opened themselves up to take these risks with me.  Thank you one and all!