(This item is among the 5-10 highlights posted for ISHN members each week from the ISHN Member information service. Click on the web link to join this service and to support ISHN)
An article in Volume 88 of the Children and Youth Services Review examines the multi-level implementation of the Triple P Parenting Program. "The use of so-called “multilevel” strategies to prevent child maltreatment and behavior and emotional problems in children is increasingly being promoted by experts in the early childhood education and intervention field. However, few studies have explored the processes involved in implementing these strategies. The present study contributes to addressing gaps in the implementation science literature by documenting the implementation process of a multilevel prevention program by an intersectoral partnership as perceived by staff managers and practitioners. Findings support in some ways the conceptualization of the implementation model used while also helping to refine that model by suggesting certain dynamics that might interact with the model. The Highlights include: (1) Community implementation of multilevel programs are more complex than theoretical models suggest. (2) Implementation process is characterized by key transition periods between phases. (3) Implementation trajectory is non-linear and marked by recurring cyclical dynamics. (4) Ecological approach based on systems analysis can help capture this iterative and adaptive process." Read more...
(This item is among the 5-10 highlights posted for ISHN members each week from the ISHN Member information service. Click on the web link to join this service and to support ISHN)
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(An item from the ISHN Member information service) An article in Issue #4, 2015 of Public Administration Review helps us to understand one aspect of the decision-making processes that occur in professional bureaucracies such as health, education or other ministries/systems. The article examines advice networks and the role that structures, internal competition and Individual attributes play in shaping those networks and the advice. The authors summarize their work: "Interpersonal networks are increasingly important for organizational learning and performance. However, little is known about how these networks emerge. In this article, exponential random graph models are employed to explore the underlying processes of advice network formation in 15 organizations. The author examines the influence of (1) structural effects (reciprocity, transitivity, multiplexity), (2) actor attribute effects (job function, tenure, education, self-efficacy), and (3) peer competition. Results suggest that employees rely more on reciprocity, closure, and similarity in job function than on peer expertise or status when seeking advice. In addition, employees who perceive greater levels of competition with peers are significantly less likely to both seek and provide advice. As public organizations look to private sector strategies that promote internal competition to improve efficiency and accountability, public managers need to be aware of the negative implications those strategies can have on interpersonal networks and organizational learning." In school health promotion and social development we have traditionally ignored the systems above schools, even though we know that eventually and inevitably, educators and nurses in schools will need to report back and ask for resources from these agencies, ministries and systems. Read more>>
(An item from the ISHN Member information service) Three articles in Issue #6, 2015 of Canadian Journal of Psychiatry point towards a research evidence-based approach to school-based suicide prevention. The first article is an expedited systematic review of youth suicide prevention, specifically school-based strategies and no nschool-based interventions designed to prevent repeat attempts. "None of the seven reviews eventually examined that were addressing school-based prevention reported decreased suicide death rates based on randomized controlled trials (RCTs) or controlled cohort studies (CCSs), but reduced suicide attempts, suicidal ideation, and proxy measures of suicide risk were reported." The reviewers noted the lack of high quality studies currently available but still felt that policy/program recommendations should be made. Essentially, they recommended a combination of universal and targeted programs. The second article, actually, the editorial for the issue, examined other contributions. The editorial noted that Quebec's multi-level suicide prevention strategy had cut youth suicides by 50%, so it would make sense to include the recommended school programs within a larger strategy. The third article pointed out that "school connectedness" should be considered to be a universal mental health promotion strategy and program. Read more>>
(An item from the ISHN Member information service) A special issue (Issue 2-3, 2015) of Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation examines the use of school psychologists as systems-level consultants as a strategy to deal with the complexities of the multi-level changes required to introduce and sustain comprehensive approaches to school mental health promotion. An interdisciplinary perspective is used to select the articles which cover topics such as Interdisciplinary Collaboration Supporting Social-Emotional Learning, Ecologically Based Organizational Consultations, the Competencies for Systems-Level Consultants, Multi-Tiered Systems of Support, Collaboration Between School Psychologists and Administrators and Critical Features and Lessons Learned for Implementation. Read more>> Readers may also be interested in a similar ISHN description of a systems-based approach to SMH that is based on capacity and capacity-building at this web page.
(An item from the ISHN Member information service) An article in Volume 36 of the Annual Review of Public Health describes some of the lessons we have collectively learned about complex interventions to improve health, especiually the ways that complex systems thinking is being used in clinical settings. "Complexity—resulting from interactions among many component parts—is a property of both the intervention and the context (or system) into which it is placed. Complexity increases the unpredictability of effects. Complexity invites new approaches to logic modeling, definitions of integrity and means of standardization, and evaluation. New metaphors and terminology are needed to capture the recognition that knowledge generation comes from the hands of practitioners/ implementers as much as it comes from those usually playing the role of intervention researcher. Failure to acknowledge this may blind us to the very mechanisms we seek to understand. Researchers in clinical settings are documenting health improvement gains made as a consequence of complex systems thinking. Improvement science in clinical settings has much to offer researchers in population health." This succinct summary, presented in the abstract, captures many of the lessons that need to be applied. Since ISHN sponsors a Wikipedia style web site that uses the slogan "where (research) evidence meets (professional) experience, and since many of the summaries in that web site attempt to explain these new ideas based on ecological, systems-based thinking, we highly recommend this article. Read more>>
(An item from the ISHN Member information service) An article in Issue #6, 2015 of American Journal of Public Health contends that the 200+ health awareness days, weeks and months do little to promote health or well-being. Schools are often a big part of these awareness activities, often viewing the participation in these days to be akin to addressing the problem. The authors "contend that health awareness days are not held to appropriate scrutiny given the scale at which they have been embraced and are misaligned with research on the social determinants of health and the tenets of ecological models of health promotion. We examined health awareness days from a critical public health perspective and offer empirically supported recommendations to advance the intervention strategy. If left unchecked, health awareness days may do little more than reinforce ideologies of individual responsibility and the false notion that adverse health outcomes are simply the product of misinformed behaviors. Read more>>
(An item from the ISHN Member information service) An article in Issue #1, 2015 of Asia Pacific Education Review that analyzes the mission statements in New Zealand and Japan follows nicely on two two reports from the NZ Education Review Office on student well-being. The reports, Wellbeing for Children’s Success at Primary Schools and Wellbeing for Young People's Success at Secondary Schools highlight good practice in schools but also expose the gaps and the need for a more cohesive approach to student wellbeing. Eleven per cent of NZ primary schools have an extensive focus on well-being, 18% promoted health through curriculum and responding to individual problems, 48% did a reasonable job in promoting a positive school climate, 20% over-relied on behaviour management and 3% were overwhelmed by health issues. Sixteen per cent of NZ secondary schools surveyed had extensive, coordinated approaches, 57% had variable responses to well-being, 21% were challenged in their responses. These NZ reports reflect a strong international leadership status in reporting and monitoring progress in student health. Few countries have matched this. The journal article results will add some excellent, school-level analysis to the national reports. Read more>>
(From the ISHN Member information service) An August 19, 2014 posting to the Teachers Blog from Education Week discusses the "the Unwritten Job Descriptions of Teachers in High-Needs Schools" and thereby underlines one of the challenges and dilemmas of their daily work and professional careers. The author, a woman, discusses her "worst class" and how the pre-dominantly male students in a class in a high needs, ubran school in a poor neighbourhood challenged her, her female co-teacher an dmost other authority figures in the school. She adds " A couple of the guys had terrible tempers, and managing their angry and unpredictable outbursts made me feel like I was walking on eggshells in my own classroom. When the principal and other higher-ups from the Board of Education would come in, instead of feigning interest in the class-work (as most groups of students would have, under those circumstances), they'd ask, "Why are these people here? Tell them to leave," as though we all spoke some other language that our visitors would not understand." She then describes the dramatic changes to their behaviours when a male teacher replaced her female colleague in the team teaching assignment. " In some way, we had become "mom and dad" (albeit, extremely hetero-normatively) for these guys. It was not only evident in their antics of trying to play one of us off the other; the young men in our class could sometimes be calmed down by "man-to-man" talks in the hallway with my team teacher, after which they'd come to me for hugs, band-aids, snacks, what-have-you."Years later, reflecting on that year, the female teacher realized that the students in that class had needed them as surrogate parents and that the real needs of those students were based on the need for secure social attachments with adults. She then briefly cites some of the recent research on this and criticizes the current efforts in the US to see education as a business, as a competition and as a workplace for students rather than a home away from home. Read the blog article here.
All this is not very new, any teacher can tell you about the kids in their class with the same needs. What was significant to me in reading the blog commentary was how the writer argues that " For teachers, this represents an added layer of responsibility, one for which we can't expect recognition within our formal evaluations, but which is nonetheless a vital component of doing our jobs well...particularly in high-needs schools in poor areas, where children are often coming from unsteady home lives.' While respecting and even agreeing that view as a former teacher, I am struck by the constant barrage of attacks on teachers these days. More testing, more accountability for students progress regardless of their effort or their families contribution, introduction of term-limited teacher licenses, unilateral legislative attacks on their bargaining agents, reductions in their pensions and so on. In what other profession, in what other industry, in what other corporation would the authorities really expect their employees to stay faithful to their altruistic, additional, uncompensated roles and additional unrecognized responsibilities, especially when assigned to the worst assignments?. Really. And then we have the well-meant, checklists, teacher-proof instructional programs and the fix-the-teacher "professional" development programs from the health and social program advocates constantly knocking on the school door.... This article and our additional comments here present one of the aspects of our global discussion of why the health and social sectors need to step back from their current appeals to schools and seek a new path that can lead to a systematic and teacher aware approach to the integration of these programs within the constraints, concerns and core mandates of education systems. Join us in our on-going, International Discussion Group and series of global symposiums. (From National Collaborating Centre on HP Methods and Tools) A planning tool developed in Alberta Canada for health care organizations could be adapted for use in school health and development promotion. A 2009 journal article presents the development and initial psychometric validation of the Alberta Context Tool (ACT), an eight dimension measure of organizational context for healthcare settings. Three principles guided the development of the ACT: substantive theory, brevity, and modifiability. The Promoting Action on Research Implementation in Health Services (PARiHS) framework and related literature were used to guide selection of items in the ACT. The ACT was required to be brief enough to be tolerated in busy and resource stretched work settings and to assess concepts of organizational context that were potentially modifiable. The English version of the ACT was completed by 764 nurses (752 valid responses) working in seven Canadian pediatric care hospitals as part of its initial validation. Cronbach's alpha, exploratory factor analysis, analysis of variance, and tests of association were used to assess instrument reliability and validity. The concepts that underlie the tool are very relevant to school health promotion and development. These concepts were converted to several definitions that were generally confirmed in the research study. These definitions were developed into research questions for the study and include:
(From the ISHN Member information service) Our pioneering work with simple, cheap and accessible technologies such as multiple Twitter accounts (instead of email), webinars and web meetings complementing expensive face-to-face events, a Wikipedia style web site to accumulate knowledge, Skype calls to eliminate long distance charges, blogs with high quality content and other tools has persuaded us that we are at the cusp of a dramatically different world of knowledge exchange that is no longer controlled and dominated by academic journals or governments/large organizations with the resources to purchase or maintain expensive web-based resources. While front-line workers in all sectors will continue to face the limitations of time/busy schedules and we can expect the 90-9-1 rule (90% following web resources passively, nine per cent occasionally contributing and one per cent actively participating, we also note that huge proportions of the population are now publishing personal content on family/individual Facebook pages, sharing interesting videos and photographs and looking for information on the web every day with tablets now sitting in living rooms and kitchens. We also see books, newspapers, television and radio converging into web-based combinations that are now charging small subscription fees or lower web-based prices.
It is this environment that we note the start of a new journal, The Canadian Journal for Teacher Research, which is enabling classroom teachers to articulate their views based on their practice-based expertise and professional experience. The inaugural articles in this new journal indicate some of the content and media uses in our immediate future. An April 2014 article in this new journal highlights the fact that most of us have learned that simple, easy to use technologies such as inexpensive tablets rather than expensive computers, or simple presentation and editing tools in the classroom can transform learning and communications. Other articles in this new journal are presented in video format. Rather than asking teachers or other front-line workers to write complex articles with complex academic rules designed to favour those with extensive time in front of computers, the videos can simply record presentations or interviews or even simple class events or discussions. A good example can be found with this video article on the importance of teachers as leaders of innovation, research and collaboration that featured a teacher, principal and academic in a recorded discussion. ISHN is going into its first experience with recorded Skype interviews with practitioners in the coming months. We hope that the three minute format, which will seek to present one or two key ideas/insights from the practitioners based on their "practice story' (rather than asking them to prepare a "case study" (often controlled by academic concerns) or be constricted to the positives in a "success story" (often controlled by the interests of the sponsor or government funders). We are also trying to accumulate and "roll-up" several small scale webinars, recorded inerviews, slide presentations, inforgraphucs and accompanying Wikipedia style summaries into lengthier thematic collections and, eventually, into web-based handbooks of better practices. Obviously, there will always be an important place for disciplined, research-based discourse in knowledge development and exchange. There is also a need for large organizations and governments to select and present the knowledge that they view as more important in their own reports, guides, policy documents and web sites. But we think the simple, convenient and cheap technologies will add a new set of voices to the mix, one that can come more easily from those in the front-lines of professional work and knowledge based on professional experience. |
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