Conversation tool for parents of children at home.

Conversation tool for parents of children at home.

In the autumn of 2018, Ondersteuning Passend Zorgaanbod (OPaZ), together with IPW and Significant, organized four workshops. What do parents need to take the lead again? The project group started working on that question.

“Based on our own experience and the experience of people in our network, we first identified the problems and needs of parents. Based on that, we started developing a conversation tool for parents: the Sprint card.”

Five participants developed the Sprint card together: a conversation tool for parents of children at risk of dropping out of school or who need support to keep attending school. The Sprint card is a handy tool to organize an alternative to multidisciplinary consultation and to prevent talks with education and care institutions from failing.

About the Sprint card

The Sprint card is based on persona Sem. Sem can learn well, but due to his social limitations and sensitivity to stimuli, regular or special education is not a good environment for him. In practice, finding a suitable solution for young people like Sem is not easy. The method of the Sprint card is a mix of scrum techniques and the planning method from The Great Methods Book by Sasja Dirkse-Hulscher and Angela Talen. It also includes techniques that encourage out of the box thinking. Roughly, the Sprint card has three goals: parents take the lead, child central, and real progress.

Goal 1: Parents take the lead. The Sprint card gives parents a leading role in preparing for and during a conversation. Because a Sprint talk is led by a parent (or an independent moderator), a fair and transparent setting arises, making it easier to stay in control of developments.

Goal 2: Child central. The Sprint card gives parents tools to take their child as the starting point for talks with the different parties involved. This automatically makes it easier to work toward a tailored solution.

Goal 3: Real progress. Third, the Sprint card aims to reach the right solution faster. Because of the process size, parents and children often wait long for a solution. More than six months is unfortunately not rare. The Sprint card helps shorten this large process. Fast steps help limit educational delays and negative effects on emotional, mental, and social areas.

Inspiration model and guide

The Sprint card is ready for use now. It serves as a guide: you can go through it from start to finish or use only the parts that work for you.