 |
 |
 |
Vol. 28, No. 1
April 2025
Tools to Strengthen Your Practice
To help transform its child welfare system, North Carolina has developed clear, well-organized practice standards. These standards describe in behaviorally specific terms how staff should engage and work with children and families and how supervisors and agency leaders should support workers and create conditions for success. Our state's child welfare practice standards are divided into five essential child welfare functions: communicating, engaging, assessing, planning, and implementing.
The practice standards aim to ensure everyone in our field shares the same picture of effective child welfare practice and is working to make that picture a reality. To help realize this vision, NCDHHS DSS provides training on the practice standards to all child welfare staff. NCDHHS DSS also offers the following tools for assessing and strengthening your performance:
These tools will help you evaluate the extent to which you are successfully incorporating the practice standards into your work. They can be used as self-assessment, peer review, or 360-degree evaluation. A self-assessment is a solo evaluation of your practice, your behaviors, and your attitudes. Peer review is an evaluation of your practice by others who do similar work. In a 360-degree evaluation, you solicit feedback on your practice from a variety of individuals, including leaders in your agency, your supervisor, and your peers. Some 360-degree evaluations also include client feedback.
Action Planning
Both tools provide space to identify specific actions for improving your practice. For example, if after completing the supervisor assessment, you conclude that you could do better with providing feedback on your workers' documentation, you may add to your action plan to take the course, Supporting Effective Documentation: A Course for Supervisors on NCSWlearn.org.
Practice standards assessment results can be integrated with professional development plans (PDPs). These are individualized plans for building your level of competence that you would regularly discuss with your supervisor.
Fidelity Matters
These tools are valuable in helping professionals focus on applying fidelity to the practice standards. Fidelity means we are all implementing practice standards, as intended. If everyone shares this focus, agencies should see greater consistency in the way staff are implementing, communicating, engaging, assessing, and planning with families. This, in turn, will help provide high-quality services and achieve positive outcomes for families. We want families to have a safety-focused, trauma-informed, culturally humble, family-centered experience no matter who their caseworker is.
From Assessment to Competence
Competence is having the necessary knowledge, skills, or abilities to perform a task.
Achieving competence in the field of child welfare takes time, effort, and persistence. It also requires a lot of support, most importantly through regular supervision that includes an exchange of observation and feedback from work peers, families, and training.
Resource
For more information on implementing practice standards, visit the previous Practice Notes article, "Creating a Standard for Engaging Families."