Comments on: Child & Family Outcomes…How Do You Know??

By: Dana Childress, M.Ed.

Dana Childress, M.Ed. — Mon, 14 Dec 2015 18:26:42 +0000

You’re welcome, David! I really love how you write about “measuring success in the eyes of the families” – I wish I’d said that! At its deepest level, it IS their perspective that really matters in terms of outcomes. I also completely agree that really getting a measure of successful outcomes means that leadership must often step outside of traditional “easy” measures and even beyond the surface-level monitoring that often occurs (e.g., monitoring how many IFSP services occurred per child). I recently co-facilitated a workshop with leaders where I asked the “how do you know?” question. Eye contact shifted and folks seemed uncomfortable with the elephant in the room. However, by digging deeper, I learned that these leaders already had fantastic ideas about how to find out about outcomes. I think that maybe they just hadn’t thought about their work from this perspective before. I included some of their great ideas in this post. 🙂

By: David Munson

David Munson — Mon, 14 Dec 2015 18:16:58 +0000

Dana, you often tackling difficult subjects such as this “elephant in the room” about the true long-term impact we have on children and families. Due to the hard work and extraordinary efforts of professionals in our field we tend to measure success by that standard (hard work and efforts). We also gravitate toward using the usual, often revised, required measures of success. With those results we are often satisfied this tells the whole story. But I have witnessed courageous leaders who understand the value of confronting the status quo. The leaders I am thinking about have taken personally the noble task of shepherding agreement from key stakeholders, gaining strong public-stated support for measures of success, and stopping at nothing to support the frontline professionals as they help meet the agreed-upon outcomes. These outcomes are those that measure success in the eyes of the families vs. our traditional measures. Thank you, Dana, for prompting some deep thinking on this critical topic!