Team Members and Their Social Skills

Social Work Practice With Families and Groups

In drafting the schedule of events and the content, there was first an extensive and inclusive discussion session that saw the members of the program and the specialists in the field of psychology and guidance and counselling getting together for in-depth consultation. During the brainstorming session, there were several topics and content that were proposed, prioritized, discussed and then agreed upon for covered age during the 10 weeks session to help the children suffering from emotional problems after the death by suicide of their parents. Once the content and the sequence of the topics to be covered during the session were agreed upon, each member of the team that was to make a presentation and training in any of the ten weeks sessions was duly briefed and charged with doing extensive research on their areas as assigned. There was then a debriefing session for each member of the training team to present to the other trainers the content they further researched and came up with. The members of the training team would then make contributions on each individual's content and the final material agreed upon for more professionalism and uniformity and also forms a common knowledge among the trainers for ease of support to each other during the sessions (Linkner J., 2010).

The group needs the social worker running the group to have special skills as a counsellor or a psychologist. This is necessary since the variations of children that the group will be handling have several and varied backgrounds as well as challenges. They will display different emotional problems ranging from obsessive compulsive disorders, schizophrenia, personality disorders, earing disorder, suicide problems and such related issues. These issues, in as much as may be handled by social workers with general knowledge, will need a specialist in counselling or psychology in order to act as a backup incase there are extensive challenges experienced.

The group is deemed suitable for people of varied social-cultural backgrounds which is what comprises if the military families. The formatting of the group is such that the trainers and facilitators are from various races and social backgrounds, including some of the group members who are survivors of suicide from military families. The group is intentionally made to have this consistency due to the recognition of the fact that the military suicides ae experienced in all races and all social and cultural backgrounds, hence, in order to cater for this diverse composition of children, the team had to be culturally diverse. The cultural diversity in the team has enabled the team to have a multiple talent base that enables it to handle the clients effectively, it has also allowed the clients to trust the team and have a positive view of the team and hence enrolling with an open mind with positive attitude towards getting the needed help once they are through the sessions (Cathryn L.C., 2008: Pp6-8).

Section Four

Once the team has gone through the entire program as envisioned, there will be need for a hindsight to the ten weeks of work and implementation of the project to ensure the team understands the issues they have tackled and the level of effect or success that the project has had. Being that it is a social science-based project, there will be need to measure the success of the program from the outcome that it has on the people who are targeted. The team will widely adopt the management by objectives approach which mainly focuses on the objectives that the team has in mind at the start and how far they shall have been achieved at the end of the exercise as opposed to the roles that an individual team member is given. This approach will give the team members a cohesive and collective approach towards the set objectives hence easier to measure and higher likelihood of achieving the goals.

The methods that will be used are the pre and post test analysis that will enable the team to evaluate whether they had some level of success or not. Before the children start the session, they will be asked to write down their expectations as they enroll for the program. Then after the sessions and the entire program, the narrative essay will be used as a tool to know the perspectives of the individuals who underwent the program. These narratives will allow the social worker heading the program to know how far the team achieved the intended goals and also possibly pick from the narratives the strongest points that are common among the students. In the process of the presentations and trainings, there will be independent individuals who are specialists in fields related to the guidance and counselling of the children wo will help develop the graphic rating scale which, though considered subjective, will give an indication of the performance of each presenter and when aggregated, there is a possibility of getting the level of performance that the team achieved as a whole (Nordmeyer B., 2015). This tool is valid since the performance outcome of any team is simply a synergistic product/manifestation of the multiple inputs that each team member puts into the entire process. Our team program accurately falls into this standard of measure since the training will be conducted over a ten weeks period and the sessions will be carried out by different team members, all with a single vision and aim at the end of the training; to help the suicide survivors to get out of the depression that they may be in and live a normal and social life as they used to before. The graphic scale is also important is this evaluation since it will give the team leader a role specific feedback that will enable the correction of the roles and place the team member is the correct team role the next time hence improving the performance of the team as a whole (Rosen M.A., et.al, 2010).