Learning Teams and Virtual Communities of Practice: Managing Evidence and Expertise Beyond the Stable State

Abstract

In the past decade, the Israeli Ministry of Social Affairs has been engaged in an ongoing effort to change the capacity of social service organizations and social workers across the country to use and create knowledge in order to achieve the best outcomes for the people they serve. Although there is an ever-growing mandate in Israel to demonstrate outcomes and use effective strategies, social workers have historically experienced unique challenges in accessing and assessing available evidence-based practice when they are available. The first step to addressing these challenges, the intra-organizational phase, was to design, implement, and test a model of organizational learning designed to teach social workers how to use learning to change practice. The second step, the inter-organizational phase, was the introduction of virtual communities of practice as a tool to support workers in the acquisition and dissemination of new knowledge. This paper presents a case study of this effort including a description of the development and implementation of the two phases and an agenda for future research.

Thinking together: What makes Communities of Practice work?

“…The attempts to purposefully design CoPs face a critique for losing sight of the original emphasis placed on learning entailing an investment of identity in the social context, as well as losing sight of the spontaneous nature of CoPs ( Amin and Roberts, 2008 ; Gherardi et al, 1998 ; Lave, 2008 ). As observed by Waring et al (2013) , some attempted to ‘set up’ CoPs in order to obtain knowledge as an output, which is reflected in the interventions where ‘CoPs-to-be’ were expected to implement certain pre-specified strategies based on ‘evidence’ ( Anderson-Carpenter et al, 2014 ; Evans et al, 2014 ; Sabah and Cook-Craig, 2010 ; Tolson et al, 2008 ).…”

Multimodal Composition and Social Justice: Videos as a Tool of Advocacy in Social Work Pedagogy

“…This suggests that educators could draw their personal experiences to cultivate digital media literacy for professional practice. Further, collaborating with colleagues in other disciplines such as mass communication, journalism, or library science offers social work instructors an opportunity to learn technical skills, and receive feedback and support on video-based projects (Sabah & Cook-Craig, 2010;Silfen and Zgoda, 2008;West, 2008). We would also encourage instructors contemplating a videobased assignment in their course to participate in the assignment along with the students during the semester or to produce their own video as an example prior to the course.…”

The Organizational Context of Research-Minded Practitioners

“…Organizational settings for research-minded practice may also differ depending on whether the host agency is aligned with a learning organization framework (Austin, 2008;McBeath et al, 2009). As applied to research-minded practice, learning organizational frameworks derived from Senge (1990) may provide hospitable settings for knowledge sharing and development, particularly if managerial commitments to exploration, counterfactual thinking, and critical inquiry are allied with a development and testing framework for service delivery innovation (Maynard, 2010;Sabah & Cook-Craig, 2010). In these settings, practice research initiatives may benefit from and contribute to organizational engagement in research and experimentation.…”

“…As with the development of interorganizational networks, human service organizations may provide intraorganizational support for practice research by organizing staff into learning communities (Julkunen, 2011). If given action-oriented mandates and sufficient resources, communities of practice may serve essential functions by providing ''mutual engagement, joint enterprise, and shared repertoire'' (Sabah & Cook-Craig, 2010, p. 1001. These teams may be organized around specific practice initiatives, fields of practice, and/or research interests.…”