Week 11: Challenges for Professionals and Looking to the Future

As you begin the last week of the course, take the time to examine how you have approached the creativity process, your own creativity, and the role you can play in fostering creativity and driving innovation within your organization. Consider the new habits you can cultivate to challenge the comfortable and the familiar; the new routines you can adopt that can lead to innovations in processes, products, and services. How will you continue developing your own creativity and applying it to challenges you encounter personally and professionally? How will you harness the creative talents of your team to improve the outcomes of your team and organization? This week, you will draft a plan for how to bring together a creative team.

This will allow you to draw on your experiences and your learning throughout the course. You will also create a new goal for the Blueprint for Professional and Personal Growth based on the learning and insight gained from the course resources and assignments.

Austin, M. J., & Claassen, J. (2008). Implementing evidence-based practice in human service organizations: Preliminary lessons from the frontlines. Journal of Evidence-Based Social Work, 5(1/2), 271–293.

Beil, G. (2012). Technology speaks: Health and human service agencies must embrace the mobile revolution. Policy & Practice, 70(4), 30–31.

Note: Retrieved from Walden Library databases.

Green, L. W. (2006). Public health asks of systems science: To advance our evidence-based practice, can you help us get more practice-based evidence? American Journal of Public Health, 96(3), 406–409.

Discussion 1: Keeping Up With Technology in Human Services

Human services professionals use technology for everything from finding resources to keeping in contact with clients and staying current by monitoring the human services environment. With the variety of technologies available, and with new ones constantly emerging, keeping up with the latest innovations can be challenging. Professionals are tasked with finding—and, in some cases—learning to use the technologies that are most beneficial to their area of practice.

With these thoughts in mind:

By Day 3

Post a brief description of a technology (e.g., cell phone, Internet site, app) that might be valuable to a human services professional in your area of interest or practice. Using specific examples, explain how professionals might use the technology and how it may benefit their particular practice.