Promoting Best Practice Through Supervision, Support and Communities of Practice

Critical Best Practice (CBP) involves working with uncertainty and risk while maintaining open approaches to practice (Ferguson, 2003). For this difficult and demanding activity to be achieved effectively, a continuous, critically reflective examination of one’s own and others’ values, feelings and perspectives is needed. This chapter will explore a range of approaches to supervision as well as a number of other sites of support. Our aim is to illuminate some of the supervisory and/ or supportive practices which facilitate best practice through the development of engaged, self-aware and critically reflective social workers.