What the Heck is a ‘Practice Model’ and Why Should I Care?
If you are a probation or parole officer working in community corrections, you already have a ‘practice model’. Your model consists of all the practices you use on a daily basis with the knowledge, belief, or hope that they will help foster rehabilitation for your clients, keep you safely employed, develop your agency, keep the judges and other stakeholders you interact with relatively happy, and prevent more crime and harm from happening in the community. Your practice model covers the habitual ways you interact with fellow staff, get your paperwork done, manage your caseload, keep yourself motivated, establish working relationships with clients, assess clients, encourage clients, challenge clients, sanction clients, help clients stay motivated in the face of the many challenges they face, develop new skills in clients, and link clients to resources in your community etc.
Even though you have a practice model, you probably cannot easily articulate all the bits and pieces of your model or explain how you sequence the different practices you use to someone who asks you how you do your job. It is like riding a bike – you know how to do it, but you can’t precisely explain when you start to break going around a particular corner if you use just the front or the back break or both at the same time or the precise angle at which you turn your bike into the corner. Riding a bike is a complicated skill, but working with people is far more complex and much more difficult to explain, because there are multiple causes for what happens. Furthermore, your practice model is not static, it constantly evolves and changes depending on which colleagues you talk with, how you are feeling, the size and type of your caseload, which trainings your attend, what you learn from your supervisor, the failures and successes with your clients, and the constant flow of your many experiences. Not only do you have a practice model that is unique to you, but every one of your fellow officers has one that is unique to them, and your particular agency also has an agency practice model that is unique to it and your agency context. What you probably do not have is a clearly articulated practice model that is shared, understood, agreed to, and practiced by all the officers and supervisors in your agency.
Since 2012, Brad Bogue and Tom O’Connor2 have been testing a method of helping agencies to more clearly develop and articulate a shared “home grown” practice model that combines the agency’s practice-based evidence with the evidence-based practices of research. This enables an agency to develop a clear and shared practice model that is suited to its local context, needs, and demands and is owned by the agency staff who co-create the model with the support and challenge of Brad and Tom. In this method, Brad and Tom act less as the experts and more as coaches to the agency team members who are the real experts in their own field and context. It turns out that when an agency takes this kind of “top supported, bottom up” rather than a “top down” approach good things happen. When officers are given autonomy they are able to develop a clear and shared model that combines practice-based evidence and evidence-based practice in a way that fits their context and their clients.
Rather than leaving each agency to its own devices to develop its Practice Model, Brad and Tom have distilled a set of core elements from the practice and research in our field into a flexible framework or a skeleton that an agency can use and modify as it fleshes out the particular look or body that will be its Practice Model. This framework is called COVE© which stands for Coaching Options That are Versatile and Effective, and it incorporates key practices that have been tested and proven to be effective in helping people lift themselves out of crime. COVE does not dictate the set of practices to an agency, but it does orient an agency’s staff and saves it precious time as it creates its own Practice Model using its practice-based evidence. COVE incorporates the following set of core practices in a sequenced fashion: role clarification, motivational interviewing, cognitive-behavioral skill rehearsal, developmental coaching, and adult learning. Brad and Tom also guide each agency in a process called the “Building Blocks Model®” that allows its officers to test the elements of the Practice Model as they build it and make sure those elements work in their context (Vogelvang and Bogue, 2012).
We are currently working with community corrections agencies in Oregon, Colorado, and Minnesota and are exploring this work with the Irish Probation Service.
To receive a free consultation to learn more about co-creating and road testing a Practice Model for your agency or about COVE, click on this link and schedule at time that will work for you: Schedule a time with Tom O’Connor
Footnotes:
1 “A practice model is an integrated set of evidence-based practices and principles (EBP) that an agency believes will result in desirable public safety outcomes if they are supported by the agency and followed with fidelity by its officers. A practice model describes in detail the practices that line staff need to follow to prevent more crime and promote the social and human capital (rehabilitation) of people under supervision.” (Bogue and O ‘Connor 2013)
2 Brad’s company is called Justice System Assessment and Training. Tom’s company is called Transforming Corrections. The two companies combine resources and work as a team on many projects.
References:
Bogue, Brad, Jennifer Diebel, and Tom O’Connor. 2008. “A Framework for Combining Skills for Practioners to Assist in Reducing Recidivism in Offender Populations.” Perspectives, American Proabation and Parole Association 32:31-45.
Bogue, Brad, and Tom O’Connor. 2013. A New Practice Model for Probation and Parole. Boulder, Colorado: Justice Systems Assessment and Training.
Bonta, James, Guy Bourgon, Tanya Rugge, Terri-Lynne Scotte, Annie Yessine, STICS Development Team, and Public Safety Canada. 2011. STICS (Strategic Training Initiative in Community Supervision): Participant Training Guide. Ottawa, CANADA: Public Safety Canada. Training Guide.
Cincinnati, University of. The EPICS Model: Effective Practices in Supervision. Cincinnati: University of Cincinnati Corrections Institute at http://cech.uc.edu/centers/ucci/services/trainings/effective_practices_in_community_supervision.html
Vogelvang, Bas, and Brad Bogue, 2012. The Building Blocks Model®: Implementing EBP in Your Organization, International Community Corrections Association Annual Conference Orlando, FL., September 11 retrieved at https://www.slideshare.net/basov1/icca-2012-15140238