Doing With, Not Doing To

Maria Serafim, Jan Dolstra and Annette Gray

Using Solution Focus Strategy Canvas in an Educational Setting

Maria Serafim, Director Public Schools NSW in Sydney Australia is the leader of more than 30 school Principals. She has been working with them (rather than “work on them”, as she describes) in a solution-focused way to bring out the best in their leadership and to help them focus on what matters most in their work.

She has used the Solution Focus Strategy Canvas [see the PDF article below for the background and use of this SF Tool] as a process to:

Develop clarity in the common goal of leadership to improve student outcomes; Introduce the principles and tools of Solutions Focus. What emerged was highly motivated School Principals who supported each other in regular conversations to share their collective wisdom and celebrate personal growth and innovation in their schools. You can see and hear Maria Serafim present on how the facilitation of this co-designed approach made such an impact on each leader personally and to the collective effectiveness of all.

The video, recorded in October 2017, is one in a series of SFiO Online Global Chapter meetings and was hosted by Annette Gray, for the Asia Pacific region.

Foreword

With this case study, presented as part of our Global Online Chapters, you can see and hear Maria present an excellent case on her work with School Principals and how she used the SF Strategy Canvas to create a collaborative and successful team.

In this session, there are four parts:

Maria presenting her case study and the SF Strategy Tool (around 35 minutes) Excerpts of the discussion in the two break out groups (around 20 minutes) Feedback and questions to the presenters (around 30 minutes) Some “take away points” (around 5 minutes) The video content will provide you with a wealth of ideas for using SF in education and also in other organisations. It also provides you with some tips on, and challenges of, running an online chapter!

Finally, we have included below the article referred to in the video, Solution Focussed Strategy Canvassing, by Adie Shariff and Ali Abington, for you to understand this tool better. We thank Ali and Adie for permission to reproduce this in our journal.

Watch: Doing With, Not Doing To

pdf: Solution Focused Strategy Canvassing: An Approach To Enabling Collective Effort in Making Strategy Happen