Developmental Audit®: Strategies for Strength-Based Assessment
Developmental Audit® was cited as ‘a comprehensive tool for identifying a youth’s problems, significant life events, supports and strengths, private logic and coping strategies, and goals for growth in the areas of belonging, mastery, independence, and generosity’ in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry by Drs. Joe L. Martindale and Guy K. Palmes.
Development Audit has successful met the Daubert Challenge(12/21/10, South Dakota).
Positive alternatives for dealing with challenging children and youth
The Audit goes beyond deficit-based assessment to address these two crucial questions:
1. How did this young person come to this point in his or her life?
2. Where should we go from here to foster positive learning and growth?
The young person becomes a primary data source and full participant in this reflective and restorative process. The Audit is particularly relevant for young persons whose chronic or serious problems put them at risk for placement in restrictive settings. It engages young persons in conflict into the process of solving problems and finding solutions.
The Developmental Audit offers schools a fresh alternative to traditional deficit-based assessment, encouraging instead a format for functional assessment and positive behavior intervention plans. Courts and treatment programs also use the Audit to develop restorative interventions.
The Audit is grounded in resilience science, neuroscience, and ecological research on positive youth development. It triangulates real-world information from multiple data sources to provide the best understanding of a particular child in a particular setting at a particular stage of development. The completed Audit provides evidence-based hypotheses about the meaning of behavior and a roadmap to restorative goals and positive growth.
- Participants in this workshop will learn the following strategies:
- Connect with guarded youth and enlist them as partners in planning.
- Conduct an ecological scan of family, school, peer group, and community bonds.
- Identify how the youth copes with challenge in resilient and self-defeating ways.
- Address problems by developing positive external supports and inner strengths.
- Meet Circle of Courage needs of Belonging, Mastery, Independence, and Generosity.
The Audit is particularly relevant to professionals from the following sectors:
- Education, special education, alternative settings
- Child welfare, foster care, residential treatment
- Juvenile justice, corrections, law enforcement
- Psychology, social work, counseling, therapy
- Wrap around, youth development, family advocacy
- Research, universities, professional staff development
Developmental Audit is the product of collaboration between the Circle of Courage and Reclaiming Youth International with grant support from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation
This training is now also available as an on-site training at your facility. Please contact seminars@reclaiming.com or call 1-888-647-2532 for more information.
