Improving reasoning skills

This film is part of the Working with uncertainty and risk in children's social care: Video learning resources.

What are the factors that feed into the development of improved reasoning skills? Professor Eileen Munro discusses the organisational factors that affect these skills and the multi-faceted expertise that social workers bring to the table.

Talking Points

This video looks at:  

• Why emotional wisdom and relationship skills are vital for being able to understand and discuss challenging subjects with the families you work with.
• The importance of being able to interpret what people are feeling from the way they are speaking, and the varied ways in which people show emotions in a multi-cultural society.
• The importance of reflection and working with others to understand complex cases in both a logical and intuitive way.
• The effect of the organisational culture on reasoning and decision making.
• The importance of support and challenge from your team, as well as having time and a manageable workload that allows time for reflective supervision.
• How online work can affect team working and the quality of reasoning, and the importance of recreating the support of the team when hybrid working.
• Acknowledging the uncertainty in what might happen in the future to inform your decisions.
• The power of hindsight bias and using hindsight to review your practice and learn for the future.
• The importance of looking at why things went well and learning from this.

Reflective questions    

1. How confident do you feel discussing challenging subjects with the families you work with? What would help you with this?
2. Do you tailor your approach when working with families from different cultures? How can you develop this further?
3. How do you and members of your team support and challenge each other in a safe and secure way?
4. What has been helpful in recreating team support and challenge online? Are there any things you might do as a team to improve this?
5. How do you learn from and share with others examples of your successes?
6. How can your organisation better harness the strength of a diverse workforce to improve practice?

Related resources 

• Choosing Digital.
• Relationship based family support and child protection. 
• An introduction to cultural competence in social care.
• Working with trauma-experienced parents in children’s social care.