NEWS FROM THE COMMUNITY SUPPORT SKILL STANDARDS PROJECT
February 1, 1996
Development of the Standards
Project staff have disseminated the draft Community Support Skill standards to a limited group of expert users in addition to our formal validation activities to gather additional feedback to help us improve them. These users suggested that we should use graphics and outlines or executive summaries to make the content more accessible. These suggestions have been incorporated into our production planning.
Planning and preparing for production went slower than we expected but is nearing its final phase now. Project Staff want to thank all who have placed orders for the standards for their patience and apologize for any inconvenience due to production delays. Book layout and designs are complete, Our publication date has been rescheduled to March.
National Team Work
In October we convened a group of national experts in training and education to assist us in thinking about the kinds of support and strategies that educators and work-based trainers will find useful in their efforts to move from the skill standards toward full or partial implementation of the skill standards. We are deeply grateful to this group for their special contribution to our project.
Members of this task force were drawn from 12 different states and included educators attempting reforms at the secondary and post-secondary levels, state level administrators planning School-To-Work initiatives in the human services or responsible for state-wide training in the human services, the site coordinators from each of our four demonstration sites, employer leaders in work based training and experts in human services curriculum development. The team met for two days in Seattle to explore the pathways and barriers to implementation.
Instructors Resource Guide
Development of a proto-type for a computerized resource guide for using the Community Support Skill Standards is completed. Educational resources supporting two competency areas were collected and arranged in a computerized platform using a hyper-text linkage structure. Staff are now preparing presentation materials to illustrate the use of the guide to potential users and funders in order to seek additional funds to develop the guide for all competency areas.
National Dissemination and Recognition
Also in Seattle, project staff participated in the National Organization for Human Services Education (NOHSE) annual conference. A keynote message to conferees from Valerie Bradley, Principal Investigator, stressed the critical role of education in preparing workers to serve others with compassion, knowledge and expertise.
The Community Support Skill Standards Project received the NOHSE “President’s Award” for its contributions to human services education. Marianne Taylor, Project Director, accepted the award on behalf of Human Services Research Institute stating that the project has provided an exciting opportunity to recognize and affirm the importance of the direct service work force that is the backbone of human services work.
Other presentations of project activities were made at the Southern Regional Education Board’s annual conference in Atlanta in July, and the Northwest Tech-Prep Conference in Seattle.
Demonstration Activities
Planning for our implementation demonstrations continued in the late summer and sites at Nekton, Inc. in Minnesota in association with the University of Minnesota (Amy Hewitt, Site Coordinator), City University of New York in NYC (Bill Ebenstien, Site Coordinator), and the Technical College of New Hampshire in Berlin (Jackie Griswold, Site Coordinator) began their implementation in the Fall semester. Project staff conducted site visits to learn about demonstration experiences and provide technical assistance where needed.
Several tools were developed to assist educators with the implementation including a “Curriculum Analysis Matrix” and a “Course Planning Tool”. The Curriculum Analysis Matrix helped site coordinators to review their existing curriculum to discover its relationship to the skill standards - where courses did or did not cover the key competencies framed in the standards. The two sites with an existing human services curriculum found this to be very useful in re-thinking the content, sequence and structure of courses. The third active site, Minnesota’s Nekton, Inc., was developing new curriculum based on the standards so this kind of analysis was less relevant.
Educators were divided in their views of the Course Planning Tool which called for planning course strategies and resources at the “activity” level of our competency unit. All agreed that having a structured tool to assist with course planning was a useful support. Some teachers, we learned, prefer to work at a more global level, the “Standard” level and found planning at the “Activity” level to be burdensome and others liked planning at the Activity level. These differences in pedagogical approach seem to be more a function of personal style and preference since no approach emerged as more productive than the other.
It was affirming to project staff that the Community Support Skill Standards, which are hierarchically arranged from the more general skill/knowledge level to the more particular, are flexible enough to be used in a variety of ways.
At one post-secondary demonstration site, several teachers were initially uncertain about the relevance to their students (all of whom are employed by human service agencies) of some of the more complex and sophisticated skills outlined in the standards. After working with the standards with their students, they learned that some workers were expected to use these skills on their jobs.
In cases where workers were not “allowed” or “expected” to perform these skills, workers/students felt that they should be empowered to take on these challenges and welcomed learning about these skills. Instructors acknowledged that the standards helped them to become aware of contemporary interpretations of the direct service role in progressive work settings.
The demonstration activities also confirmed an intuitively apparent truth - that it is impossible to reach the “mastery” level in our skill set without both work experience and formal instruction. While many students in human services education programs do hold jobs within the industry, their work experiences are often not formally linked to their classroom activity. Some instructors found that the Community Support Skill Standards provide a guiding framework to create this critical linkage and agree that strengthening the link between school and work based learning provides enormous benefits to the student.
The School-To-Work demonstration in Lowell, MA will involve all 10th graders at a public high school in rural Massachusetts, Tyngsborough High School. Students will be introduced to the field of human services and will form teams to work on a service learning project involving a community based non-profit organization. Students will present their projects at a human services fair in the Spring.
This model will accomplish a variety of goals:
- provide a general introduction to human services work;
- involve kids in giving something back to their communities;
- provide initial expose to community based organizations
- Develop critical cross functional skill areas: team work, planning,
communication etc.
- Provide an introductory exposure to certain industry related skills
such as “Participant Empowerment”
What has been most exciting to project staff, especially with the recent addition of our School-To-Work site, is that our standards communicate effectively to educators at the secondary and post-secondary level and to human services employers. Each group has been enthusiastic about what they see in the standards and the potential applications within their unique environment.
At the work-based site in Minnesota, (Nekton, Inc., in collaboration with the Direct Service Training Initiative at the University of Minnesota) demonstration collaborators have used the standards to conduct program wide educational needs assessment. This permits the efficient use of scarce resources because the assessment yields critical information about which competencies are needed by all staff, enabling trainers to set training priorities and target small and large groups with similar educational needs.
At this site they are also discovering the potential utility of the standards for performance assessment. They have also found that using the standards has helped them to draw together separate program units into a healthier working relationship by offering a unified set of expectations and a common language about staff performance that describes many previously undefined skill areas.
Work at this site is also linked to an important Federally funded demonstration of the efficacy of relinquishing federal and state regulations in favor of federally and state approved agency defined outcomes and agency defined methods for achieving these outcomes. One method approved in this Medicaid waiver demonstration was the implementation of the Community Support Skill Standards for staff training because they capture progressive and contemporary human service work activities thought to be most linked to desirable program outcomes. The progressive nature of the standards was a deciding factor in their inclusion in this cutting edge demonstration.
This work is providing seminal knowledge about a critical and little understood area in human services: the relationship of staff interventions to desirable individual and programmatic outcomes,
All site coordinators and project staff agree that having a valid and reliable assessment tool would make an enormous contribution to the effective implementation of the skill standards. There is also agreement that such a tool must include a way of rating staff performance.
Project staff are developing and testing vignettes using case based reasoning and corresponding scoring rubrics to provide measures of mastery of aspects of the Community Support Skill Standards. We will be seeking additional funds to expand this area of research and development.
The complex nature of human services work demands test procedures capable of evaluating such complex operations as problem solving, synthesizing information to accurately assess strengths and needs, etc. Responses to simulations and other scenario based methods offer an assessment method that captures some aspects of performance testing without the prohibitive costs. Economic concerns are important in the human services field where employers are less likely to pay for testing costs.
Certification Efforts
Interest in national certification for direct service workers is strongly supported by workers, students, and educators and unions It has been more difficult to develop a positive consensus for certification among employers.
Some very large and progressive employers with whom we have worked in this project are very positive about the potential for the stabilization and development of the work force that certification offers.
Also, with the advent of “managed care” in the human services arena, providers seeking to become managed care management or service organizations are very interested in a generalist certificate and training program that would assure the competency of staff coming from diverse educational and work backgrounds. Such assurances are important to the kind of quality control and efficiency necessary in managed care arrangements where direct service occurs across a wide span of control and supervision and accountability to agreed upon outcomes is stressed.
Support for certification efforts has been rallied through project connections with several demonstration site coordinators that have helped shape the agenda of the Direct Service Interest Group in the American Association for Mental Retardation in the developmental disabilities sector. Matching funds and in-kind contributions for these activities have been provided by John Kennedy Jr.’s “Reach Up” Foundation and the President’s Committee on Mental Retardation (PCMR). PCMR hosted a national meeting in October with Certification as a major theme area, the Reach Up Foundation hosted a follow-up meeting for the task force in December in New York City. The University of Minnesota’s Direct Service Training Initiative funded direct service worker participation on the committee.
The PCMR is organizing a publication on this issue with significant support from the “Reach Up Foundation”. The publication will include contributions from Task Force members, including direct service workers and from self advocates and family advocates.
Task Force members are eager to establish a formal alliance that will work on a variety of strategies to improve human services delivery through the advancement of the direct services worker including promoting national certification.
COMMUNITY SUPPORT SKILL STANDARDS PROJECT UPDATE
JULY 1, 1995
Community Support Skills Standards:
Writing the Standards
In a two day workshop held on January 26th and 27th, representatives from stakeholder groups around the country gathered in Newton, MA to continue the work begun by the group in November. During the November session, team members used the results of our national job analysis to design standards and associated work activities (work segments which further define a broad standard) in twelve domains of competence. The writers were inspired by the relevance of the competency themes which surfaced in the Job Analysis process, which include Participant Empowerment, Communication, Assessment, Community & Service Networking, Facilitation of Services, Counseling Skills, Life Skills Development, Education, Training & Self-Development, Advocacy, Career and Educational Support, Crisis Intervention, Program and Employee Development, and Documentation.
The goals of the January workshop were to further refine our conceptualization of the standard format and to complete writing the components agreed upon by the group. Another critical goal for the workshop was to develop a prefacing document which would capture the overarching values and themes at the heart of direct service work. At the end of our November workshop we realized that these ideas were embedded in our job analysis and ran throughout the resulting standards but needed to be made more explicit in a unifying document. This document was generated and came to be known as “The Soul of Our Work”.
Validating the Standards:
The writers of the standards were given the requirement that their work must be firmly grounded in the results of the nationally validated job analysis and this is certainly the case. In addition to the validated job analysis, project staff felt strongly that the standards should be validated nationally to both improve them and to further affirm the relevance of the skill set to a wide variety or workers and other stakeholder groups.
Due to the challenge of validating a complex and lengthy document, project staff opted for a workshop design to bring together key stakeholder groups to comment on the draft. Through the months of March and April workshops were convened in four cities: New York, Chicago, Austin and Tacoma where we brought together service participants, workers, educators, trainers and employers. Throughout this process there was very strong endorsement of the standards and workshop groups provided very helpful feedback to improve the standards.
The feedback from all the workshops was integrated by project staff and summary recommendations for changes were provided for the endorsement of our Technical Committee in a workshop held in Washington, D.C. on May 22nd and May 23rd. This final version will be produced in an attractive and accessible format in August.
Partnership Activities:
The project's Technical Committee convened in February to provide an initial review of the standards prior to their validation and to assist us in the design of the workshop validation process.
The Technical Committee continues to operate in a highly cooperative fashion and to strongly affirm the spirit and specifics of the content of the standards we are evolving.
Members have been invaluable in getting the word out to the groups they represent and involving us in key roles in their conferences and meetings.
The coalition was expanded by one group in this quarter. The Child Welfare League of America has joined with us to provide an essential voice for the segment of human service workers serving children in need of support.
Dissemination:
Project staff have had the opportunity to make presentations at several major conferences during this period including the annual conference of the Association of Public Developmental Disabilities Administrators, the annual conference of the American Network of Community Options and Resources (ANCOR), the annual conference of the International Association of Psycho-Social Rehabilitation Services, the President’s Committee on Mental Retardation, the Eastern Psychological Association annual conference, the New England Organization of Human Services Educators annual conference, and the Northwest Tech-Prep Conference.
Technical Committee members have written articles for their respective membership newsletters and project staff have written a chapter on the relationship of Skill Standards to quality in the delivery of human services to be included in a book on quality enhancement issues in human services.