Dr. Julie Sweetland: Strategic Framing for Schools

In this episode of SchoolCEO Conversations we speak with Julie Sweetland, a sociolinguist and senior advisor at the Frameworks Institute. She shares how leaders and advocates can use strategic framing and communications to have more productive conversations around complex issues. You’ll learn practical strategies for framing issues, understanding different audiences and viewpoints, avoiding common communications pitfalls, and making conversations with your community more constructive. 

Julie Sweetland, Ph.D. (@jsw33ts) serves as a senior advisor at the FrameWorks Institute, a nonprofit organization that studies how issues are framed in public conversations and how that impacts outcomes. She has over a decade of experience in education as a teacher, instructional designer and teacher educator focused on issues of language, race, learning and professional development. Julie holds an MA and PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University. 

FrameWorks has a number of valuable, actionable resources on their website including these:

• Framing 101
• Changing the Narrative on Public Education
• Reframing Family, School, and Community Engagement
• Reframing the Education Conversation through a Core Story Approach
• Talking Teachers and Teachers’ Unions

Main Discussion Points:
- What framing is and why it’s important for driving productive public conversations (07:00)
- Common barriers to communication (e.g. not understanding your audience’s assumptions) (11:15)
- Strategies for overcoming polarization and partisanship (18:15)
- Don’t remind people of misconceptions or problems you want them to forget (25:50)
- Using the “bridge and pivot” technique to redirect conversations (31:10)
- Core framing narratives: individualism, fatalism and otherism (35:45)
- Why crisis framing rarely motivates action and change (40:10)
- Leading with solutions vs introducing problems first (43:47)
- Using stories to illustrate systems, not just individuals (hero vs landscape framing) (48:44)
 

Key Quotes:
“Framing is about making intentional choices about how ideas are presented.” (7:31)
“Never remind someone of something you want them to forget.” (25:47)
“Crisis framing is not helpful unless it is an action you need somebody to take right that moment, and they only need to do it, like one time.” (39:29)
“People do not generalize from that hero to the support systems around us.” (on hero framing stories) (50:35)

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