Evaluation

            This past week I continued my usual tasks of working my crisis line shifts, planning and leading children’s group, and attending my usual meetings.  This week was rewarding because children’s group went smooth and we didn’t face many challenges (two weeks in a row!).  I also was able to bring two of my three research projects to my supervisor and show all of the work I have done so far this spring.  It felt great to have finished up two projects and to know that they will be incorporated into future 40 hour training sessions.  The one major difficulty that I faced this week was having a client show up 45 minutes late to an intake.  Intakes are generally scheduled for an hour time slot, so it was difficult trying to give the client the space and opportunity to talk while also filling out paperwork.  It turned out that she just wanted to talk and decided it would be best to come back another time, but it was still pretty stressful on my end.

Evaluation

            It seems that everyone meets regularly with their supervisors to discuss any challenges they face.  In terms of clients and services, we administer service evaluations every few months in all of our groups.  In my group, service evaluations have been going on almost every week for the past month or so because it’s an open group, so sometimes kids will come and other times they won’t.  For individual services, I believe service evaluations are administered every six months to see if we are doing an effective job as well as if our clients are meeting their goals.  The children’s group service evaluation goes over what the children have learned from being in the group.  The questions are: what topics have you learned about?  Where is a safe place to go if your parents are fighting?  Who is a safe person to contact if your parents are fighting?  If your parents are fighting, what should you do?  Most of these questions are multiple choice, and we stress that there aren’t any wrong answers.  These answers determine whether we are educating the children on appropriate topics or if we need to cover certain topics in more depth.