Reflection in Home Visiting: The What, Why, and a Beginning Step Toward How

Abstract

The work of home visitors in early childhood fields may include addressing many challenges to achieving curricular outcomes, including issues such as maintaining boundaries and managing one’s own reactions to children, parents, and overall family situations. Increasingly, reflective supervision and consultation are recognized as a way for workers in home visiting early intervention and early care fields to address these personal and professional challenges and build competence (Watson, Gatti, Cox, Harrison, & Hennes, 2014). The features of home visiting that make reflective supervision/consultation essential are discussed. Next, results of a pilot project in which a sample of Part C early intervention providers respond to a vignette portraying a challenging parent-child interaction are briefly presented and discussed. Despite often stating the importance of relationships, participants did not identify concrete methods of supporting relationship or demonstrate recognition of parallel process. In addition, providers seldom endorsed the use of reflective skills, such as observing, listening, wondering, or reflecting (Weatherston, 2013) and no providers discussed a need for reflective supervision/consultation. We suggest that these findings illustrate some of the areas in which early intervention home visitors could benefit from participation in reflective supervision/consultation to move from identifying reflective skills as important to actually being able to use such skills in their work with families.