Appreciative supervision in social work. New opportunities for changing the social work practice

The practice of social work focuses mainly on solving problems, on reducing dysfunctions, on diminishing deficiencies etc. More often then not, allocating resources for providing problem-centred social services does not solve the problems for which the services were designed. Our initiative consists in experimenting appreciative supervision and in identifting the potential differences between the two approaches, the one centred on problems and the appreciative one. The results we have obtained in the practice of social work through the application of appreciative supervision underscore the advantages of this approach, an approach which is capable to produce profound changes in the practice of social work. We chose a pair of similar cases in terms of the child's risk of abandonment and we managed each of them differently, according to opposing views on supervision; the results showed that the desired changes can be brought about more easily when using appreciative supervision.