Learning Teams and Virtual Communities of Practice: Managing Evidence and Expertise Beyond the Stable State

Abstract

In the past decade, the Israeli Ministry of Social Affairs has been engaged in an ongoing effort to change the capacity of social service organizations and social workers across the country to use and create knowledge in order to achieve the best outcomes for the people they serve. Although there is an ever-growing mandate in Israel to demonstrate outcomes and use effective strategies, social workers have historically experienced unique challenges in accessing and assessing available evidence-based practice when they are available. The first step to addressing these challenges, the intra-organizational phase, was to design, implement, and test a model of organizational learning designed to teach social workers how to use learning to change practice. The second step, the inter-organizational phase, was the introduction of virtual communities of practice as a tool to support workers in the acquisition and dissemination of new knowledge. This paper presents a case study of this effort including a description of the development and implementation of the two phases and an agenda for future research.