Strategies for Effective Health and Safety Dialogue

NEA Toolkit

To help promote health and safety in schools, the NEA Health and Safety Program partnered with the Right Question Institute and the Brown School of Public Health to support families, educators, and students with strategies for effective communication around health and safety issues. We’ve produced a training module—Pathways for Effective School-Family Partnerships: A Strategy for Productive School Health and Safety Dialogue—that can be used by individuals or by groups. It is based on the Right Question Institute’s Question Formulation Technique (QFT), and the training module is facilitated by Luz Santana and Naomi Campbell of the Right Question Institute. Although structured around family engagement, the documents and strategies you’ll find below can be applied to engagements with students, other educators, and others. Keep in mind that although the training focuses on health and safety topics, it can be applied to any subject.

By: National Education Association

Published: April 6, 2023

This resource originally appeared on NEA.org

Online module: Pathways for Effective School-Family Partnerships: A Strategy for Productive School Health and Safety Dialogue

This training module prepares participants to use or to lead others in using this strategy to have effective conversations on health and safety topics and other issues. The module runs for 35 minutes, with additional time needed for exercises.

Teaching Template: “Supporting your children in school: Six steps for asking better questions”

The Teaching Template is a simple 3-page teaching template for parents or other family members to use to go through the steps of the QFT. The person filling out the template will choose a topic they would like to focus on, produce, improve, and prioritize their own questions. The template is designed for use in one-on-one teaching contexts. If you are looking to facilitate a group experience, consider using the “Facilitating the QFT in groups” PowerPoint.

Check out the RQI Online Module Teaching Template here.

Teaching Template Facilitation Guide

The Facilitation Guide is a guide for how to walk an individual through the teaching template. It includes instructions on how to introduce the process and some guidelines for supporting someone through each step.

Read the full Teaching Template Facilitation Guide here.

Facilitating the QFT in groups PowerPoint presentation

You can use this PowerPoint to facilitate the Question Formulation Technique when you are working with groups. That could include groups of parents, community members, or educators. The instructions on how to facilitate are in the “notes” section below each slide.

Download the Powerpoint presentation.

The above materials are available under a Creative Commons Sharealike license, meaning you can freely use and adapt them for non-commercial use as long as you credit the Right Question Institute as the source.