Buzzwords: Moving to Behavioral Descriptors doodle video is a short, animated video that follows a child involved in a child welfare investigation. The video describes what buzzwords are and illustrates the impact they can have on children and families. It also demonstrates how to recognize buzzwords and offers strategies for transforming buzzwords into objective, behavior-based descriptors.

This publication looks at buzzwords in the context of words or phrases commonly used in child welfare reporting and documentation that can be subjective or carry negative connotations, and offers strategies to minimize their negative impact.

Explore considerations for monitoring and evaluating new interventions and applying findings to make adjustments aligned with equity and inclusion. 

Learn how to collect, analyze, and use data about the implementation and outcomes of a program or other intervention.

Understand the role of coaching in supporting workers, including coaching functions, effectiveness, models, and strategies.

Learn effective strategies to collect, analyze, and use data related to caseworker visits.

Learn about quality contacts, why they are important, and how an agency can successfully implement them.

This tool is a role-playing activity, designed to help child welfare workers and supervisors become more familiar with the process of recognizing and translating buzzwords into descriptive language.

Explores the tasks of determining the “big picture” objectives and scope of evaluation efforts and assessing the agency’s capacity to conduct rigorous fidelity assessments, formative evaluations, or summative evaluations.

Support skill development for individuals and teams and facilitate team discussion and targeted action planning.

Describes the task of analyzing costs to satisfy funding requirements; support decision-making around intervention selection, testing, and piloting; and plan for scaling up and sustainability.

Presents how teams can develop a visual logic model that shows inputs, activities, outputs, and outcomes needed for the evaluation plan in a structured format to guide the work.

Examines the tasks of sharing findings and recommendations to inform stakeholders of the implementation progress, guide decision-making about the future of the intervention, support advocating for resources, and expand the knowledge base.

Examines how teams can identify questions to help guide monitoring and evaluation, shape the data that are collected and analyzed, and support evaluation partners in developing research questions.

Explores the task of identifying, as a team, if an intervention is effective enough to spread, needs adjustment to improve, or should be discontinued if appropriate.