Dr. Cynthia Franklin discusses therapeutic intervention in schools in HI’s Faculty Fellows Seminar on Health, Well-Being, Healing
By Saralyn McKinnon-Crowley and Clare Callahan
As Professor and Associate Dean for Doctoral Education in the School of Social Work, Dr. Cynthia Franklin currently works with at-risk students, most visibly at Austin’s Gonzalo Garza Impendence High School, where she implements solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT). Developed by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg in the late 1970s, SFBT, as Dr. Franklin described it in the HI Faculty Fellows Seminar, is “a brief therapeutic intervention”—taking place over only four to six sessions—that strives so build solutions to patients’ current and future problems, on the individual level and within “groups, families, communities, and organizations.” Specifically, SFBT works through the co-construction of meaning between patients and therapists and specific action-oriented techniques.