A group of MSW students and I are currently working on providing
life skills training to children from Delray Neighborhood house. The
center is required to follow the Life Skills Training manual (EBP based)
provided and required by the Skillman Foundation. The manual has different
worksheets students can use to learn the different skills. These worksheets are
very boring (even to me). We visit the center on Fridays; so after a full week
of school, it would be unconscionable in our part to expect them to fill in
these sheets. Furthermore they will have nothing to do with it even if we
tried. In addition there is variance in cognitive skills in the group. Some of
them struggle with focus and others have other behavioral difficulties.
Furthermore I have discovered over the years that children are more
sophisticated than we give them credit for. The most efficient way of teaching
and learning is in the context of a situation, not from worksheets, especially
when it comes to teaching social skills.
Nonetheless the manual does come with a useful “skeleton” of
information that we need to cover in life skill training. What I see happening
in the situation I describe above is the gap between research and practice
Sexton, Chamberling Landsverk, Ortiz and Schoenwald (2010) discuss. What
the manual is missing is an effective practice and implantation that also
considers diversity.
The way we have approached life skills training in the center is
in a more communal way, as a mechanism of implementing the training. The manual
does a good job dividing life skills and uses the worksheets to teach one skill
at the time. (Science tends to be good at isolating parts in systems. The
complexity is in how those parts interact with each other.) In our visits we
focus on building a relationship with the children through group activities and
food sharing.
The DSM-V, I heard someone say, is not a baking cookbook, but a guideline. It seems that we are getting stuck in describing clinical interventions in a dichotomy ( “art” or scientific “formula”). I assume the same principle applies to EBP. I appreciate the explanation Professor Ruffolo shared in the beginning of semester regarding EBP. (I hope I do not miss represent what she said.) This is what I understood: EBP provides us with important guidelines and that it is the practitioner's job to fill in. With all this in mind, EBP interventions do require both art from the practitioner but based on scientific understanding of the building blocks of human behavior.
Hi Esmi,
ReplyDeleteI think this is an incredibly important thing to note in social work practice!! So many of the agencies we will encounter are using EBP, because it is required. It is the same at my agency - the Healthy Families Prevention Program. In order to become accredited by Healthy Families America, the program must follow strict guidelines based on EBP. They have had to change a lot of the way they do their work with their clients just because this is what the EBP suggests that they do. In working with them through this accreditation and watching how things have changed for them, I must agree with you and Professor Ruffalo that while EBP are good guidelines to follow, we must also learn to adopt our own method of what works best with out clients.
Thanks for your post!