Upcoming changes and trainings

While the blog has been quiet this summer, there are some important changes coming to our site to make it more accessible to visitors.  We have learned through discussions and surveys with county staff that many IT departments and computer systems make it impossible for workers to access this site from work computers. With that inconvenience in mind, we are currently planning to move all the existing content to our main website, which has been approved on county and CWS/CMS machines.

That change will happen in the coming months as we get closer to scheduling the trainings for the second half of the year.  Please keep checking our course availability page for the latest SOP trainings and workshops and please, please remember to register in advance through your training coordinator or other online contact.  Call or email us directly if you do not have a training coordinator who can sign you up for classes.

As a reminder, participants who are enrolled in trainings will receive an email from Grace Barajas containing confirmation details about our trainings.  A confirmation email or other document provided by your supervisor or other county staff is not a confirmation that you have been registered with UC Davis.  Although we attempt to accommodate anyone who is interested in attending, we have had some challenges lately in handling unexpectedly large class sizes beyond the capacity of the course, and in some cases, the classroom.

Facilitative Supervision Training on August 14 in Davis

We have low enrollments for The Facilitative Supervisor, a special training opportunity with Heather Meitner in Davis on August 14.  Please contact Grace or your training coordinator to register for this class if you are interested.  If you have a schedule conflict but would like to participate later in the year, please let us know that as well so we can schedule another opportunity.

Course description:

The Facilitative Supervisor model promotes improved supervision through a focus on six key practice areas: thinking critically, structuring supervision, coaching learning, managing relationships, adapting approaches and promoting accountability. These practices are not new as supervisors are engaging in all of these practices, but perhaps not with the same level of effort and not all at the same time. The Facilitative Supervisor approach adds a new dimension-that is the direction for why supervisors engage these practices. Through supervision, supervisors facilitate casework practice and the achievement of outcomes for children and families. So, this approach is not just about the "what," but the "why" and "how" of supervision.

Learn about the model, the behavioral anchors that ground the practices, and the professional development approach that focuses on learning circles as the main vehicle for developing supervisor knowledge and skills. We will introduce the dialog structure to guide supervision conversations as well as the multicultural guidelines to enhance communication across difference.

The workshop will offer participants an experience to explore their strengths and needs supervising safety-organized practice in their unit. Come experience learning circle technology as a peer-to-peer, self-directed learning method to carry forward over the next year.

Question: what exactly is Safety-Organized Practice?

Safety-Organized Practice is a holistic approach to collaborative teamwork in child welfare that seeks to build and strengthen partnerships within a family, their informal support network of friends and family, and the agency. SOP utilizes strategies and techniques in line with the belief that a child and his or her family are the central focus and that the partnership exists to find solutions ensuring safety, permanency, and well-being for children.

Safety-Organized Practice is informed by:

• Solution-Focused Therapy, based on the work of Insoo Kim Berg, Steve de Shazer, and the Brief Family Therapy Center (now the Solution-Focused Brief Family Therapy Association);
• Signs of Safety, the Three Houses, and the Safety House, based on work by Steve Edwards, Andrew Turnell, Nicki Weld, Sue Lohrbach, Sonja Parker, and many other child welfare professionals;
• Structured Decision Making by the NCCD Children’s Research Center;
• Group Supervision and Interactional Supervision, based on work by Sue Lohrbach and Lawrence Shulman;
• Appreciative Inquiry, based on work by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva;
• Motivational Interviewing, based on the work of William Miller; and
• most importantly, the evolving work of hundreds of practitioners around the world to adapt and integrate evidence-based tools and approaches with best practices in the field of child welfare.

SOP Coaching Webinar #3 update

Webinar #3, Coaching to Safety Mapping, will take place August 29, 2012 at 10:00 am.  It is scheduled for two hours, but will continue as long as the presenters are available and participants remain online.

Webinar series for SOP Coaching

Many counties and jurisdictions in California are implementing Safety-Organized Practice (SOP)/Signs of Safety (SofS). One key element for successful implementation is coaching!  We will be hosting a series of monthly webinars as an opportunity for learning about coaching to the practice of Safety-Organized Practice.  We will be examining skills of coaching, enhancing our understanding of the practice, and focusing on dilemmas, challenges and successes of both the practice of SOP and coaching.

Coaching: a process by which the coach creates structured, focused interaction and uses appropriate strategies, tools and techniques to promote desirable and sustainable change for the benefit of the learner, in turn making a positive impact on the organization
~ Adapted from Mink, Owen and Mink,  (1993) and Cox Bachkirova and Clutterbuck (2010)

Two important online resources for coaches:

• Safety-Organized Practice site (you're here!)
• Coaching In Child Welfare site

Accessing the webinars

Please visit http://uc-d.adobeconnect.com/sopcoaching to join the webinars. Enter as a guest and type in your name to be granted access.

Scheduled dates:

• Webinar #1: Overview of Coaching Skills

Nancy Hafer and Rose Wentz, Northern California Training Academy, UC Davis

Author of the Coaching Toolkit

June 21, 2012

10:00 am - 11:45 am

• Webinar #2: Safety-Organized Practice: Key Skills to Develop

Sue Lohrbach: formerly from Olmsted County, Minn. national leader in Safety- Organized Practice and Group Supervision

July 25, 2012

10:00 am - 12:00 pm

• Webinar #3: Coaching to Safety Mapping

Connected Families, Minnesota

August 29, 2012
10:00 am - 12:00 pm

• Webinar #4: SDM and Safety-Organized Practice: Coaching for Integrating Both Approaches

Heather Meitner, Children’s Research Center

September 10, 2012

10:00 am -12:00 pm

• Webinar #5: Tools for Coaching: the Use of Practice Profiles, Case Readings, Coaching Skill Assessments, Goal Attainment Scales and others

Holly Hatton, PhD; Cindy Perry, PhD; Melanie Schindell, UC Davis

October 29, 2012

10:00 am - 12:00 pm

For more information or to enroll:

Contact Grace Barajas to enroll at (530) 757-8725 or grbarajas@ucdavis.edu; for other questions, email Jennifer Lowery at jndavis@ucdavis.edu.

ABA Training Video on Interviewing Children

The American Bar Association Section of Litigation Children's Rights Litigation Committee has produced this 38 minute award-winning training video which provides practical guidance and demonstrations of techniques that can help lawyers work effectively with their child clients. Supplemental training materials to be used with the video are available here.

The ABA Section of Litigation Children's Rights Litigation Committee has collaborated with the Barton Child Law and Policy Center of Emory Law School to make this video available through the Internet. Please share this video and the training materials with colleagues who represent children so that we can all try to provide the highest quality of representation for children.

For more information about representing children or the Children's Rights Litigation Committee, contact Cathy Krebs.

Thanks to everyone who helped make the Circles of Sharing a success!

We had great turnout in both Fresno and Eureka and enjoyed the unique opportunity to come together with shared excitement about the future direction of practice!

April Reunion Space Available!

We still have several seats available for the Safety-Organized Practice Reunion taking place April 17-18, 2012.  If you are interested and available, please have your training coordinator register you or contact us for more information.  This is the LAST Signs of Safety/Safety-Organized Practice course currently scheduled until the fall.  Lunch will be provided if that helps sway your decision!

After the reunion, we will proceed with some county visits for custom training and other special events, like the tribal sharing circles later in April, but there will be no more full-scale classes open to all of Northern California.  In the gap between this year and next year's classes starting after July, we encourage you to join and start conversations about the practice on our discussion group.

It has been a busy year and we know how difficult it can be to take so many training days out of challenging work schedules, and the Academy just wants to extend a big thank you to all of our training participants (over a thousand!), instructors, practice leaders and coaches, and county agency staff who helped it all happen.

April Training Updates

The April 17-18 Safety-Organized Practice Reunion taking place here in Davis will be facilitated by Phil Decter and Heather Meitner of the Children's Research Center. Heather Meitner is familiar to many of you from a long series of trainings in individual counties and through Academy courses, including Family Meeting Facilitation and Safety Planning.  Heather is a senior program specialist at the NCCD Children's Research Center. She works nationally with child welfare organizations as a trainer and consultant on their implementation of strength and safety-organized practice skills and their integration of those skills with Structured Decision Making. Meitner is a licensed social worker residing in Boston. She has worked in the human services and child welfare fields for 17 years in multiple capacities including direct service, management, training and consultation.


Additionally, the Family Meeting Facilitation course taking place Monday and Tuesday, April 9 and 10 at Putah Creek Lodge will again be co-instructed with Heather by Maryanne Rehberg and Veronica Piper-Jefferson.


If you are interested in registering for either of these trainings (space is still available!), please contact us or have your training coordinator enroll online.

Additional Safety Planning Location: Red Bluff

In addition to the new Safety Planning course taking place in Davis on March 16, we are adding a second location: Red Bluff!  The class will take place at the Red Bluff Community and Senior Center on March 14, 2012.  Contact your training coordinator to enroll.  The project code for this course is 113SSA434A if you have access to our online registration site.

Course description:

This hands-on workshop will engage participants in a dialogue and practice activities about safety planning with children and families to create rigorous, on the ground, sustainable safety plans with child welfare-involved families and their support networks. Safety planning is a process social workers must repeat with families at different points during a case. Effective safety plans create clear and observable guidelines about contact between the children and the potential danger within the context of the family’s culture.

Based on the Signs of Safety, Safety Planning process, the group will expand their knowledge of safety organized practice into co-creating concrete detailed plans of action made in response to specificallyidentified dangers (behavioral and action driven) that go beyond our current case plans with families. This course is geared towards child welfare direct service staff, supervisors, and family meeting facilitators.

New discussion group feature and upcoming trainings

As part of our continual updates to this site to make it more useful for practitioners, we have added a new feature: a discussion group mailing list!  Invitations to join were generated this morning from our training attendance records, but if you missed out, you can join by visiting the group page here.

As a member, you will receive automatic updates when this blog is updated, as well as have access to the entire community of child welfare professionals enthusiastic about using safety-organized practices in their work.  Members can send out questions, tips, and valuable resources to each other as a group by emailing the group.

All messages from this list will include [SOP] in the subject line, which you can use as a filter keyword to keep the messages out of your inbox and in a folder by themselves, for you to catch up on when you have time (if you would like assistance in setting up a filter, please leave a comment or contact Matt Austin for help).

More Upcoming Classes

In other news, the Academy has scheduled more training coming up soon.  The trainings are:

Family Meeting Facilitation Part II

March 15, 2012, in Davis at the Buehler Alumni Center

This is the one-day follow up training for participants in any of Heather Meitner's previous two-day family meeting trainings held in Davis or Redding in October 2011 and January 2012.

Safety Planning (New course!)

March 14, 2012, in Red Bluff at the Red Bluff Community and Senior Center
March 16, 2012, in Davis at Putah Creek Lodge

This hands-on workshop will engage participants in a dialogue and practice activities about safety planning with children and families to create rigorous, on the ground, sustainable safety plans with child welfare-involved families and their support networks. Safety planning is a process social workers must repeat with families at different points during a case. Effective safety plans create clear and observable guidelines about contact between the children and the potential danger within the context of the family’s culture.

Based on the Signs of Safety, Safety Planning process, the group will expand their knowledge of safety organized practice into co-creating concrete detailed plans of action made in response to specifically identified dangers (behavioral and action driven) that go beyond our current case plans with families. This course is geared towards child welfare direct service staff, supervisors, and family meeting facilitators.

Family Meeting Facilitation (Facilitation Skills for Family Team Meetings)

April 9-10, 2012, in Davis at Putah Creek Lodge

Based on popular demand, Heather Meitner's two-day FTM training is back! This course has been filled to capacity in October and January.  Enrollment is capped at 30, so act fast if you've been missing out!

This is an experiential training for facilitators of Safety Organized Family Team Meetings (FTM) in child welfare agencies. This curriculum is designed to be used in conjunction with pre-training reading and exposure to Signs of Safety concepts and safety mapping conducted with a family. The purpose of Family Team Meetings (FTM) of any type is to build agreements between the Department, families, providers and other essential team members.  It is largely the responsibility of meeting facilitators to bring a very disparate group of people into FTMs and build critical agreements and decisions.  

In this two day facilitation training, you will learn the strategies and skills for helping groups solve problems and build agreement to enhance the safety of children and families. This workshop will provide you with a solid foundation of theory and facilitation practice skills for immediate use.

Reunion of Sharing and Learning: Deepening Safety-Organized Practice including Signs of Safety and Structured Decision Making

April 17-18, 2012, in Davis at the Center for Human Services Da Vinci Building

This reunion is offered to all Northern counties that participated in previous three-day training with Phil Decter and Raelene Freitag for the implementation of Signs of Safety and Structured Decision Making. This two-day reunion will include learning circles, and participants should be prepared to bring examples of your work, successes and challenges to share with your peers. The training will build on prior foundation learned while deepening practitioners' knowledge and skill in Safety-Organized Practice. We encourage sending a team of practitioners to share and deepen their child welfare practice. The first two days of the reunion are open to all staff in counties implementing SofS.  There is also a special one-day session for managers and directors on April 19 with separate registration (see below).

Reunion of Sharing and Learning: Deepening SOP Leadership Day

April 19, 2012, in Davis at the Center for Human Services Da Vinci Building

On the third day of the reunion, we will host a discussion exclusively for child welfare leaders and county directors. This leadership day will focus on the implementation of Safety-Organized Practice. We will review the evaluation outcomes to date, strategies for supporting training, coaching and practice integration. Topics include maintaining and deepening the practice; spreading the practice to the community, courts and others; examining the data; and more. 

Please note: enrollment in the Leadership Day is separate from enrollment in the reunion; managers and directors planning to attend all three days must register for both the reunion and the leadership day.

To enroll in any of these courses:

Contact your supervisor or training coordinator to enroll in any of these courses.

County training coordinators can enroll staff online.

New Courses Coming Soon

Additional trainings in Safety-organized practice are being scheduled for March, April, and May, covering such topics as safety planning, family meeting facilitation (another opportunity for this continually waitlisted class!), and cultural sensitivity. Please subscribe or check this page for further details as they are available.

January 25 Course in Redding CANCELED

Due to low enrollments and logistical issues, the Redding follow up training on January 25 has been canceled. We are coordinating schedules to try to find time to reschedule this training later in the spring.

For those of you who were signed up to attend, you are welcome to attend the January 26 session in Davis if you are able to make it.  That will take place at the Putah Creek Lodge from 9:00am to 4:00pm.

Videos are up!

Recorded trainings and interviews with Heather Meitner and Sonja Parker are now available on our videos page (link above), YouTube, and for free, permanent download from iTunes.

Thanks for your patience--future videos should move much more quickly through the process now that we're all set up!