Thoughtexchange is an efficient way to dig deeper into the voices and perspectives of your community and prepare for your yearly Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP). With Thoughtexchange you can engage a wide cross-section of your community and uncover key insights about their needs. The Discover Dashboard has all the tools you need to quickly understand if your LCAP goals align with your community’s needs, and where you could improve. 

Engagement Goals

Identifying your goals at the beginning of the process sets the foundation for designing your exchange and discovering your results.

Some reflective questions that may help guide you include:

• What’s the progress you would like to make?
• Who do you need to share the results with?

Recommended Exchange Questions

Here are some sample questions. Feel free to choose and customize a question that will help you meet your goals.

• What are some things you think our schools are doing well and what are some things we can focus on in order to improve?
• What are the most important things to focus on as we continue our work to support all students?

Recommended Introduction:

For tips on 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. Your input will help us reflect on our success and progress to be made as a district. It will also inform our Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP). You can learn more about our current LCAP goals in the video. 

Our district is focused on the following priorities and welcomes your input about how we are doing in these particular areas:

• Insert district-specific goals here

Thank you for your contribution. Your input is a critical part of our focus on priorities in support of student success.

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. 
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 Questions:

Survey questions can give you a better understanding of what’s important to different groups in your community and help you tailor your communication to different stakeholders. 

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 survey questions that help you to show you have engaged different groups within your district, such as program participation and ethnicity.

**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 on 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, check out 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. 

For LCAP exchanges, it is important to align the exchange results with your current LCAP goals. You can do this using the theme tool. This lets you understand the conversation around your current goals, and identify gaps currently not accounted for in your goals. 

Understanding your results isn’t just about the theming. Some reflective questions that may help guide you include:

• What’s the progress you would like to make?
• Who do you need to share these results back with?
• How should you 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 or next steps to move forward?