The Faculty Field Liaison: An Essential Role for Advancing Graduate and Undergraduate Group Work Education

The faculty field liaison is responsible for representing a school’s social work program in monitoring agency internship sites and agency field instructors for an assigned cohort of the program’s BSW or MSW internship students. This article focuses on the faculty field liaison’s role in effectively monitoring the internship site and field instruction to ensure the internship experience is successfully providing the group work skills and knowledge the BSW or MSW student intern needs to be an effective group work practitioner. The field instructor role has been given a lot of attention in the social work literature, but the role of the faculty field liaison has been given little to no attention. This is despite the faculty field liaison’s significant responsibility of representing the BSW and MSW program by bridging the relationships between the program, the field instructor, and the internship student. This article identifies the importance of the faculty field liaison responding to concerns in group work education in the classroom and field setting. Practice vignettes illustrating the work of the faculty field liaison in monitoring group work assignments and field instruction supervision for graduate and undergraduate social work interns are provided.     

The Use of Field Trips in Teaching Social Group Work

The field trip, as organized by the students and faculty of an undergraduate social work program, is suggested as a vehicle for teaching group work skills. Other learning opportunities offered by field trips are also discussed. In addition, recommendations are made as to how these experiences can be organized in order to enhance the learning of social group work in the academic setting.     

Teaching Group Work in the BSW Generalist Social Work Curriculum: Core Content

In this article, nine considerations associated with social work practice with groups are identified and discussed. These range from the importance of mutual aid and the role of the group leader to multicultural competence and practice skills needed in the beginning, middle, and ending phases of group work. Group work is only one of four modalities that must be taught in the undergraduate practice sequence. Therefore, the nine considerations represent the essential content on group work for the generalist practice curriculum. The author assumes that this content can be presented in a 7-week time frame. In a companion article, the author presents teaching strategies and techniques that assist the instructor in conveying the principles for practice discussed in the present article.     

“Her Anger Frightens Me!” Using Group-Work Practice Principles and Feature Films in Teaching Clinical Practice in Mental Health

ABSTRACT

Combining group-work practice principles and the arts (feature films) can contribute to more effective teaching and enhance student clinical practice competency. By treating teaching as a form of group work and introducing a feature film into the classroom group, an instructor can reduce student-learning anxieties, teach core clinical concepts and skills, and enhance the classroom’s socioemotional climate. Vignettes demonstrate how this approach to teaching enriched students’ learning in an introductory clinical social work class on adult mental health.     

The Right Kind of Telling? Locating the Teaching of Interviewing Skills within a Systems Framework

to Juliet Koprowska, Department of Social Policy and Social Work, University of York, Heslington, York, YO10 5DD, UK. E-mail: jk11{at}york.ac.uk Summary There is a gradually expanding literature addressing the teachingand learning of interviewing skills in social work education.The process of professional learning in the wider field is notfully understood; empirical studies are rare and methodologicaldifferences make comparison difficult. Few papers offer a theoreticalbasis for methods of teaching. The article starts with a shortaccount of the literature, with more explication of papers whosethemes are closely related to those of this article; a considerationof skills training on social work qualifying programmes follows.Next, Agazarian's (1997) theoretical framework is presentedand then the theory and methods of practice are employed tomake sense of obstacles to learning and to demonstrate how toovercome them. Finally, potential areas for further researchare suggested.     

Group Work Education: A Call for Renewed Commitment

Studies demonstrate steady decline in group work courses and concentration in graduate social work programs. This is attributed to the Council on Social Work Education’s recommendation, in 1969, for a generalist practice model; the growing interest of professional social workers in developing casework skills, including psychiatric casework; and the influence of perspectives from nonsocial work disciplines. This article proposes renewed efforts to strengthen social group work education and concerted collaboration between classroom and field. It focuses on essential course content, emphasizes social group work perspectives, and identifies core social group work concepts and tools for inclusion in curriculum and field education.     

Optimizing Geriatric Social Work Education: Program and Individual Characteristics That Promote Competencies

Since 1998, the Hartford Partnership Program in Aging Education (HPPAE) has been implemented in over 70 graduate social work programs. This study examined whether program and individual student characteristics are associated with students' knowledge, skills, and values in aging. We conducted a secondary analysis of national program evaluation data. Results from hierarchical linear models indicated greater gains in knowledge of aging among full-time students, as well as students in programs that had defined field rotation models and/or that made greater use of geriatric social work competencies. Implications for efforts to enhance graduate social work education in aging are discussed.     

Virtual Communities of Practice in Social Group Work Education

Virtual communities of practice are an international phenomenon in social work around the world. However, they are rare in social work in the United States. This article describes an online community, the Social Group Work Commons, designed to complement courses in social group work. Using Web 2.0 Internet tools, such as blogs, discussion boards, and chats, the developers employed group work skills to help students establish a vehicle for mutual support as students struggled to integrate course content in their field placements. Examples from course blogs indicate students became increasingly intimate in their online exchanges over time and readily provided each other support in applying course content in their practice.     

Participatory Action Research: Psychology and Social Change

Participatory Action Research provides psychologists with a way of putting their skills and training to work in support of positive social change while still contributing to the important work of knowledge generation within the field. This article summarizes the development of Participatory Action Research and reviews the theoretical justification for this practice as a valid form of social research. The basic tenets and practices of this approach are discussed and the potential role of Participatory Action Research in psychology is considered.     

Competency‐based Education: Evidence from Social Work Postgraduates from Five Universities in China

Social work education in China has undergone rapid development during last two decades. However, methods to define, measure, and evaluate social work students' competency remain largely unexplored. In this study, we evaluated competency in graduate social work students in China and examined factors that impacted competency, based on learning theory. Findings indicated that knowledge and skills learned in class, field placement, and social context all have effects on competency. How students think about individual development and the social work profession has the most significant effect. These findings carry implications for social work education in the Chinese context. The rapid development of social work education in China requires the effective measurement and evaluation of students' core competencies.     

Lifelong Resiliency Learning: A Strength-Based Synergy for Gerontological Social Work

The significance of the synergy between promoting resiliency and the strengths-based perspective is well established in gerontological social work. This article reports on qualitative research that suggests another potentially productive synergy, one that can result from the interaction between the capacities for resiliency and lifelong learning. These findings emerged from a qualitative study involving 12 older women (ages 64–72) participating in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Southern Maine. Lifelong learning is defined as a cognitive process by which individuals continue to develop their knowledge, skills and attitudes over their lifetime. The implications of the data are considered from a multidisciplinary perspective that includes gerontological social work, educational gerontology, and adult learning. Specific social work research and practice initiatives that could confirm and operationalize this synergy are suggested.     

Cultivating Interest and Competency in Gerontological Social Work: Opportunities for Undergraduate Education

Undergraduate social work programs are well-positioned to recruit students to gerontology, but little is known about how well curricular activities help foster students' commitment to the field. This study considers whether a small group of undergraduate students' interactions with older adults positively impacts students' plans to work with older adults; perceptions of skills; and feelings of comfort and competency in working with older adults. Experiences from this study suggest that experiential learning can positively impact students' perceptions of work with older adults, but may not be enough to draw students to the field. Implications for undergraduate education are discussed.     

Matching Practice Skills with Client Problems

Abstract

Despite the increasing pressure to measure social work practice skills and relate those activities to client outcomes and treatment costs, relatively little social work research has been devoted to the development of social work process instruments. The recent development of the Practice Skills Inventory has provided practitioners with a useful tool for measuring the frequency with which practitioners employ specific categories of common social work intervention skills. However, it is important to demonstrate that social workers employ these practice skills differentially depending on clients' presenting problems. The current study of 281 experienced MSW practitioners demonstrates that they, indeed, emphasize supportive, therapeutic, case management and insight facilitation skills differentially depending on the problems experienced by their clients. Implications for practice and evaluation research are addressed.     

智障者社交技能学习研究——以香港培泽弱智协进会元朗马田一舍为例

随着和谐社会建设的推进,特殊人群的需求备受关注,尤其是智障者的关注。为了解智障者如何学习社交技能,笔者实地观察、直接参与智障者的日常生活,对其学习状况进行具体描述,并分析总结其中存在的问题,最后提出应对的策略。笔者希望通过本文,从社会工作专业视角出发,运用社会工作专业的技能与方法引导和协助智障者学习社交技能。     

The BSW Social Work Curriculum: Teaching Strategies,Case Material,and Assignments for Teaching Group Work

This article is a companion piece to another article appearing in this special edition of Social Work with Groups on group work content for the generalist practice curriculum. In this article, techniques that assist the instructor in presenting the material on group work in the classroom are identified. These techniques, which include case material and classroom exercises, also help students connect their field and classroom learning about group work. The activities discussed in this article derive from the core group work content discussed in the previous article.     

Mindfulness,meditation, and breathing exercises: reduced anxiety for clients and self-care for social work interns

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to identify and describe a teaching tool that supports social work student success in the classroom and in field placement. The project introduced mindfulness, meditation, and breathing techniques to 2nd-year master of social work (MSW) students in a group classroom setting and engaged students as they applied those techniques in their internship settings with clients. Students were introduced to mindfulness, meditation, and breathing techniques through lecture, experimental exercises, video clips, and case studies and used the group setting to learn to use those tools to add trauma-informed mindfulness interventions to the clinical techniques they concurrently practiced in field placement. Students learned methods to incorporate those interventions into their psychotherapy/counseling sessions with clients and discovered that mindfulness-specific interventions also helped regulate their own autonomic nervous systems, contributing to decreased anxiety. Thus, mindfulness skills taught in social work programs have significant multidimensional benefits; engaging a group classroom setting to learn to utilize mindfulness, meditation and breathing techniques can reduce stress and anxiety for clients and promote adaptive self-care skills for MSW students.     

Patterns of practice: An exploratory factor analysis of child and family social worker skills

There is relatively little research on the communication skills that social workers use in direct practice with families. This study explores patterns of practice skill found in child and family social work home visits. The study analysed 127 practice interactions in family homes, coding for seven dimensions of worker skill using a coding framework drawn from motivational interviewing. Exploratory factor analysis was employed to establish patterns of skill within the data and to group key dimensions of skill. The findings make two contributions. First, three fundamental dimensions of good practice emerged, which we characterize as care and engagement, good authority, and support for behaviour change. Second, in exploring the relationship between “care” and “control” elements of social work, skilled social workers were able to combine good authority and empathic engagement, whereas those who were less skilled in use of authority were also less good at engagement. This contributes to debates about care and control in social work. The usefulness of these dimensions for conceptualizing practice in child and family social work is discussed and directions for further research are suggested.     

Can We Afford not to Develop Social Work Practice?

Summary This paper outlines the main arguments for resources to be directedtowards developing practice methodology and skills. A reviewof recent research literature indicates that there are a groupof cases which take up much social work time and resources butthat this work lacks professional expertise and effectiveness.Outcome research in related fields is also reviewed. A synthesisof these studies' conclusions suggests that social workers couldbe effective though the essential skills are rare. The implicationsof these findings for the focus and nature of social work trainingare discussed.     

Graduate Social Work Education

This paper reviews the current state of empirical research on graduate social work education, focusing upon the major curriculum content areas of research, practice skills, HBSE, policy, values, and field instruction. The authors address what has been accomplished to date, and which areas are especially in necd of quality research investigations.     

Social worker decision-making in court

The current study aimed to explore the factors that influence how social workers make decisions and develop their decision-making skills in care proceedings, and to identify effective support and intervention to develop social worker decision-making skills. The study employed a mixed thematic approach across two phases of study: an initial inductive thematic analysis of responses to an online qualitative questionnaire and then a mixed thematic analysis of follow-up focus groups and interviews with social workers working in various social work roles within England and Northern Ireland. The findings identified a number of themes that help to understand the decision-making skills of social workers; thorough assessment skills, relationship-based anti-oppressive practice, being mindful of the lived experience of the child and using critical reflection to make complex decisions. Wider structural factors that support or hinder decision-making, particularly in respect of organizational support and management supervision were also identified. Social workers can be supported to develop decision-making skills through additional training, reflective learning and management support to develop their practice wisdom within this field.