We know that culture and climate are big priorities for a lot of districts. Thoughtexchange is a quick and efficient way to dig deeper into the voices and perspectives of your community so you can take meaningful action, regardless of whether or not you’re administering mandatory Culture & Climate surveys.

Exchange Goals

Identifying your goals at the beginning of the process gives you guidance as you design your exchange and discover your results. Consider the progress you’d like to make and how you’ll use your results.

Recommended Questions

Broad Questions

• Community-wide (see below for complete exchange template for this question) - What are we doing well and what can we do better to ensure a positive culture and climate in our district? 
• Leadership/Internal - What are some important conversations you need to have in your schools to craft a positive culture and climate? 

Drilling Down (maybe you already have a specific problem you’re trying to solve)

Belonging and Inclusion

• Student conversation  - I feel welcome and included at school when...
• School or District-wide - What are some things we are doing well to promote belonging and inclusion and what can we do to continuously improve? 

Safety

• What are we doing well and what can we do to improve safety in our school?

Social and Emotional Well-being

• What are some of the most important things we can do to support student’s social and emotional well-being at school?

Recommended Introduction:

To learn about crafting your own introduction, click here. Consider including a video introduction to make it more personal.

Introduction:

Dear Parents/Guardians, Students, and Staff,

We are excited to launch this exchange so we can continue to promote a healthy and positive school climate. School climate is the attitude or collective mood of the people in the school, particularly as it relates to their sense of safety and acceptance. Research has shown that when schools and districts focus on improving school climate, students are more likely to engage in the curriculum, develop positive relationships, and demonstrate positive behaviors.

We want to hear from you! What are we doing well and what can we do to improve our school environment for students and staff? Hearing from you directly will provide us with important perspectives as we work towards improving the climate for learning. 

This exchange will be open until DATE. Please share your thoughts and then rate the thoughts of others. 

Thank you for collaborating with our District on this important initiative.

Sincerely,

TITLE

Quick Tips:

1. This exchange is confidential. Your thoughts will be shared, but not your identity.
2. Please be polite and respectful as you share and rate thoughts.
3. If you see a thought that is rude, hurtful or identifies a person or group, you can report it by clicking in the upper right corner of the thought. All responses will be reviewed.
4. You do not need to rate all thoughts in this exchange. It is appreciated and recommended to rate around 30 over the time the exchange is open.

Recommended Survey Question:

Survey Questions give you the opportunity to better understand what is important to different groups in your community. 

Sample Question:

Recognizing that you may belong to more than one of the following groups, please select the one which you feel best describes your involvement with us:

• Parent/Guardian
• Staff Member
• Student
• Community Member

*You may also want to include a Survey Question to ask about building or school level

**New Feature! Participation Groups

Participation Groups allows you to break a potentially large conversation into demographic-specific groups. For a more in-depth explanation, click here.

If you would like to use participation groups, get in touch with us and we will get you set up.

Sign Up

We suggest keeping sign-up off to maximize participation.

Moderation

Deciding how to moderate depends on the specific needs of your district and community. Options include community moderation or machine moderation. If you’d like more details, read this help article. 

Discover Your Results

The Discover Dashboard offers several tools to help you dig into your results and take action. Once your exchange has closed, think back to your goals for your exchange and use those to guide what you do in the Dashboard. 

Some reflective questions that may help guide you include:

• What’s the progress I would like to make?
• Who do I need to share these results back with?
• How should I share the results for that audience?
• What do you see? Where is there agreement? Where are there differences? Where might you need to dig in deeper? 
• What are the quick wins to move forward?