Accountability through ongoing learning
Throughout my career I have met hundreds if not thousands of youth workers with varying levels of expertise, varying knowledge bases and within differing organisations. Whether they are eighteen or eighty (yes I have met an eighty year old youth worker) they all brought their understanding and experiences to their practice. The ones who I […]
Why youth worker’s need to embrace technology for professional development
Are we falling behind??? Are we becoming as obsolete as the home phone, the floppy disk or the hand held calculator??? Are we able to keep up with the rapid expansion of technology? It used to be that if you needed your home stereo hooked up, your website developed or an email list for […]
Setting boundaries in youth work:How much do I share about me?
Over the past two weeks I have spoken to a number of youth workers and all of these conversations have turned at one stage or another to the topic of how much they should share about themselves with their young people. Some of the comments that I have heard were, “if I was asked I would tell them that it […]
youth work peer consultation: reflective practice revisited
Reflective practice with your peers We have all had those moments in our youth work career. We are stuck and we don’t want to go to the boss because we don’t want to seem incompetent. So we lean across the aisle/cube/partition and ask a colleague what they would do. Sometimes our reflective practice is not so […]
Behavioural observation is the key to best practice youth work.
A few weeks ago we stated that we would look at how to develop a behavioural lensto inform how you work with young people and colleagues. A lens that will help you understand peoples strengths and weaknesses, how to speak to them in a way that will help you develop your relationship with them and […]
Self care 101: There is no work life balance
Work life balance I have just finished reading an article in the latest Journal of the Australian Association of Social Work. The article addresses that enigma that we all struggle to solve eventually in life, ‘how do I find a work life balance’? The article shows the results of a survey of 439 qualified social workers […]
Accountability
As I said a few weeks back the team at Ultimate Youth Worker are currently developing our “Model of Effective Youth Work Practice“, which will guide how we work as youth workers and how we teach youth work to those in the industry. We are creating this guide for the development of practice excellence for youth […]