418 Traditional approaches to foster care are too often based on faulty assumptions about motivation and the amount of time required for change. They also ignore the important role social context plays in human behavior. This workshop will offer a model that will help you work more effectively with foster care cases by showing you how to clarify the foster care worker's role and responsibility, utilize straight talk, spell out power differentials, look directly at choices and their consequences, and avoid the usual dissembling language of the system. We'll discuss the need to give clients all the information available, to downsize the professional's role, and to promote the responsibility of the clients, even in an agency culture that encourages the opposite.