Reflection in Home Visiting: The What, Why, and a Beginning Step Toward How

Abstract

The work of home visitors in early childhood fields may include addressing many challenges to achieving curricular outcomes, including issues such as maintaining boundaries and managing one's own reactions to children, parents, and overall family situations. Increasingly, reflective supervision and consultation are recognized as a way for workers in home visiting early intervention and early care fields to address these personal and professional challenges and build competence (Watson, Gatti, Cox, Harrison, & Hennes, 2014). The features of home visiting that make reflective supervision/consultation essential are discussed.Next, results of a pilot project in which a sample of Part C early intervention providers respond to a vignette portraying a challenging parent-child interaction are briefly presented and discussed. Despite often stating the importance of relationships, participants did not identify concrete methods of supporting relationship or demonstrate recognition of parallel process. In addition, providers seldom endorsed the use of reflective skills, such as observing, listening, wondering, or reflecting (Weatherston, 2013) and no providers discussed a need for reflective supervision/consultation. We suggest that these findings illustrate some of the areas in which early intervention home visitors could benefit from participation in reflective supervision/consultation to move from identifying reflective skills as important to actually being able to use such skills in their work with families.

Measuring Reflective Supervision Within Home Visiting: Changes in Supervisors’ Self‐perception Over Time

“…When considering how best to promote positive outcomes for the vulnerable children and families enrolled in home visiting, it is important to identify the supports needed for the professionals who deliver these services. To be effective at their jobs and develop strong relationships with families, home visitors need supportive supervisory relationships in which to explore and address the range of challenging and complex issues that arise during their work (Tomlin, Hines, & Sturm, ). This relationship provides a mentoring and professional development function as well as serves to support self‐care and self‐awareness in an effort to combat the impact of compassion fatigue and, ultimately, to reduce professional burnout.…”

Development and implementation of a screen-and-refer approach to addressing maternal depression, substance use, and intimate partner violence in home visiting clients

“…Future versions of HELP should include provisions for systematically addressing multiple contextual levels, including regular coaching and reinforcing of specific MI and CM techniques, and structured supervision guidelines for supporting home visitors in HELP implementation (Damschroder et al, 2009; Powell et al, 2012). The importance of reflective supervision for early childhood professionals such as home visitors is being increasingly promoted for increasing competence and developing new skills, and is especially critical for supporting home visitor work with the highest-risk families, such as those targeted by HELP (Tomlin, Hines, & Sturm, 2016). Specific guidelines for reflective supervision to address SU, MH, and IPV may promote more successful implementation of HELP and should be integrated into its next iteration.…”

Estratégias de avaliação da visita domiciliar: uma revisão de escopo

“…Tomlin A, Hines E, Sturm I (2016) (30) To assess home visit through the interaction of visitor with participant.…”

“…Pro-Kind (27) Parent Support Program (25) CAPEDP Project (13) Interview Every Child Succeeds (21,22) Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (20) Indiana First Steps (30) Tools Cuna Más in Peru (16) Creciendo con Nuestros Hijos (16) Programa de Acompañamiento a la Política de Primera Infancia (16) Programa Primeira Infância Melhor (16) Home Visits Program in Kingston and Saint Andrews (16) Atención Integral de la Niñez con Participación Comunitaria (16) Consejo de Salud Rural Andino (CSRA) (16) Partnering with Families for Early Learning (19) Nurse-Family Partnership (10) Family Nurse Partnership (24) Early Head Start (9,11,28) Early Childhood Block Grant (26) Parent as teacher (30) Visiting notebooks analysis This thematic category was the least prevalent in terms of frequency, with three occurrences. The notes made by the visitor during home visit were used as a source of information referring mainly to Another way to analyze notebooks is to estimate the time spent in each domain to be addressed during the visit.…”