Boundary crossing 2

As career professionals we may be exposed to hearing more information at times from our clients than we are comfortable with. Interestingly, this seems slightly more likely when we are working with young people.

A boundary gets crossed, and information about issues such as personal safety or mental health are shared with us. Sometimes a 'safe' pair of hands and trust means our clients may unburden themselves to us in ways that are outside our areas of expertise. Sometimes disclosed issues may fall well outside our professional practice capacity. The CDANZ Code of Ethics provides clear advice to us in these circumstances - that we must "only undertake those practices for which [we] are qualified and in circumstances where [we] have appropriate experience" (2016).

What to do in this type of situation can be incredibly complex, but the career session clock stops ticking at the moment these other issues appear. Not only will immediate safety issues will limit anyone's ability to think constructively about their future work, but our expertise runs out, and we need to refer our client to an appropriate professional.

I personally like to think of this as 'hosting' the client: I can find someone who has the expertise to help my client, and I can consider how can I meaningfully and sensitively host the client into an introduction so that their underlying needs are met as well (at least as I can have them met). For myself in private practice, this means relying on my expert networks. In an educational institution, or in a large organisation, there are usually structures already in place.

So how do we prevent boundaries from being crossed? One easy way to prevent boundary crossing is to begin any session by briefly discussing what we are getting together to talk about. We set an - informal - agenda. This scoping of our work helps us to stay within our expertise, and to focus on the mahi we have met to undertake. And if we have talked about the scope of service we will deliver before we start a session, there is less risk of us facing situations which we are unprepared for.

I have been lucky in my career that I have not - knowingly - had clients with suicidal thoughts. I have seen clients who were mentally ill, though. Luckily none of those clients were immediately in danger, so I was able to take more time and direct them kindly to expert and appropriate services.

Or perhaps it is less luck, and more planning.

Sam

References:

• CDANZ (2016). Code of Ethics. http://www.cdanz.org.nz/uploads/CDANZ_CoE_Word%20English%20Final.pdf
• Popadiuk, N. (2013) Career counsellors and suicide risk assessment. British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, 41(4), 363-374. https://doi.org/10.1080/03069885.2012.726964

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Managing research risk with HACCP

Part of undertaking research is to acknowledge our limiters (our potential biases) and our delimiters (our scoping to make our question answerable).

Whenever we identify a limiter or a delimiter, we then need to DO something about it. We need to manage the risk we have identified. Like risk management, we identify our problem, then either eliminate, substitute, minimise, or isolate the risk.

Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) is one of the best known risk management processes on the planet. Designed to manage food safety risk, I think most of the steps are equally applicable to research risk management.

Below are six of the seven the HACCP principles, as I have adapted them for research projects:

1. Conduct a careful risk analysis. Read about potential biases. Understand how each could affect our research project.
2. Determine the key biases. Discount the least likely biases. Decide which biases are most likely to be factors in our research project.
3. Establish criteria to spot those biases as they occur.
4. Create alternative actions to limit, eliminate, substitute or isolate those biases.
5. Set verification actions to be sure that each bias is not present, such as cross-questioning, control groups, split data set and cross-tabbing.
6. Write up all biases and corrective actions in our methodology.

A limiter is simply a risk. We just need to manage it like a risk.


Sam

• Reference: MPI (n.d.). Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point. Retrieved from https://www.mpi.govt.nz/food-safety/food-safety-codes-and-standards/hazard-analysis-and-critical-control-point/

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What does an ideal teaching moment look like?

I read an article by James Derounian in the Guardian on what his "idea of a (utopian) university" looked like recently.

In reading that article, I started thinking about what my ideal teaching moment looked like (of course, then I started thinking about what my ideal learning moment looked like, but I will postpone that thinking for a future post). For this time, I will think about what I need to see in my learners to know that my teaching has done what it should. That fabulous "Aha!" moment.

I want to see that learners have taken the course materials and explored beyond them. I want to see curiousity, exploration, risk, testing of new ideas, uncertainty, experimentation, over-turning of old ideas that don't make the grade and seeding of new ideas that will work for now. I want to see theories applied to known situations and used to test potential situations. I want to see independence of thought. I want learners to give me a map back to where they have got their new ideas from and honour those whose ideas are worthy of repitition. I want them to be passionate in their thirst for new learning. I want them to make learning a fire that burns within them, a Tonto that will ride shotgun with them on their knowledge quest for the rest of their lives.

I want their eyes to light up when they are challenged with something new, and understand that they can work through this new thing. To have the confidence and the grounding to know that, like Creighton Abrams said, this is just like eating an elephant... a bite at a time.

I want their learning behaviours to be really active, where, if I asked them what they were doing and how engaged they were with their material, they would say that they wrote their own study questions and answers; that they compared and contrasted; that they closed their notes and tested how much they remembered; that they asked themselves “How does this impact my life?”

Quite a big ask really, now I come to think of it!

• Reference: Derounian, James (20 September 2013). The idea of a (utopian) university. Retrieved 26 September 2013 from http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2013/sep/20/new-academic-year-university-utopia?j=50280&e=sam@samyoung.co.nz&l=351_HTML&u=2716443&mid=1059027&jb=9&CMP=&et_cid=50280&et_rid=4915806&Linkid=The+idea+of+a+%28utopian%29+university

Sam

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