Five Steps to Planning your Social Work Program’s Self-Study: CSWE Accreditation
Editor’s note: Melissa Freedman, MSW, is a social work educator and consultant specializing in leadership, supervision, administration, and quality management and assurance. In this blog post, she shares guidance for social work educators about how to start planning for the important task of reaffirmation and the initial process of accreditation with the Council on Social Work Education. I can also envision social work faculty and staff applying these guidelines to the adoption of new accreditation standards and policies and sharing them with institutional leadership when asking for support and resources. She can be reached via email at freedman121@comcast.net.
The time has come to begin writing your accreditation self-study with the Council of Social Work Education (CSWE). As with any major project, preparation and planning are key. Simple, right? And then it’s time to put the metaphorical pen to paper, and the landslide of anxiety and overwhelming doubt begins. To help alleviate some of the agony, this blog serves to provide introductory guidance to identify your accreditation team and the initial tasks necessary to develop the most appropriate plan of action for your program(s). This guidance stems from my years of a career spent in leadership, training, and quality management and assurance. I will start with this…it truly takes a village, and writing a self-study should never be a siloed process.
The first step is to determine the members of your accreditation team. The composition of your team depends on which social work program(s) you offer and how your academic unit is structured. For example, you offer both baccalaureate and master’s degree programs. The accreditation team members would include the baccalaureate program director, the master’s program director, the director of field education, an assessment coordinator, and the lead administrators of the academic unit, be it a College, School, or Department – Dean, Associate Dean, Director, or Chair. Due to the nature of their defined roles, these individuals are assigned primary responsibilities for making decisions concerning social work education. Aside from these members, you should look for additional faculty and staff to join your team. In doing this, I encourage you to consider who else may have the skills and/or experience to effectively provide support. Your options likely depend on how your academic unit is organized in the overall institutional structure. For example, how might IT support be integrated into the process? How could an institutional research and analysis office be utilized? Who might help you maintain a centralized file or platform that will serve as the primary repository for all materials and documentation? Do you know someone who can assist with copy editing? This is especially important when multiple authors are involved in the writing process. And lastly, do you need an external consultant to aid your team in fully writing to the minimum threshold requirements of the accreditation standards?
The next step is to identify who will be the primary authors of the self-study, and who will be responsible for authoring responses to which specific accreditation standards. If you have co-located programs, who will ensure relevant information (i.e., policies, procedures, criteria) is consistent between the programs? Which standards will the program director(s) write, and which standards will be written by administrative leadership? It is often assumed that the program directors will draft responses related to the program’s mission and consistency with the profession’s purpose and values, the rationale for the program’s curriculum design, and how the professional practice community informs the program’s curriculum. Moving beyond the core curriculum and program standards, who will write responses for faculty standards, including principal assignments to the program(s), faculty credentials, faculty-to-student ratios, and the recruiting and hiring of faculty? It is imperative to identify these writing responsibilities as early as possible, not only to divide the workloads but also to be transparent about the commitment required of each person and the incentives to support faculty and staff efforts. After your team is assembled, I further encourage you to consider back-ups should any member of your team be unable to fulfill their role as initially planned. Life happens.
The third step is to critically examine your team members’ knowledge and understanding of CSWE’s Educational Policies and Accreditation Standards (EPAS). Are team members new to social work education? Are members new to CSWE accreditation? New to the reaffirmation process and requirements? Have they previously authored a self-study, be it portions or an entire self-study? Have any members served as site visitors? From this, you can identify the team’s strengths and needed areas of training, both internal and external. CSWE offers an array of support – see their Accreditation Scope & Services webpage – and encourages programs to utilize their accreditation services and resources. As part of its services, CSWE offers 30-minute consultation appointments with a program’s CSWE accreditation specialist. The note of caution here is that accreditation staff do not determine compliance; only CSWE’s Board of Accreditation can render this decision. This happens after you submit the self-study. In short, be prepared that the yes or no response you seek may not be available. Having a network of social work educators with accreditation experience should not be overlooked in your preparation. While using self-study examples from other programs is not encouraged by CSWE, they may help to inspire resourcefulness in your writing and organizing content. Having others to connect with who have lived experiences helps to normalize what your team may be experiencing.
The fourth step is to assess your comfort with ambiguity and uncertainty. Risks are always inherent in an accreditation process, and radically accepting the potential of risks from the start establishes a realistic pathway forward. For example, CSWE identifies frequently cited standards on an annual basis and shares this information on its website and at conferences. If you were to submit a self-study tomorrow, what area(s) might result in findings that have to be addressed during the site visit? What resources do you have to remediate known risks? Are there areas that, no matter how much time and effort you devote to, will still result in compliance below the minimum threshold? While perfection is something we can agree to, it may not be practical, or necessary. Be at peace with your best. Knowing when to call the question is necessary. Some programs are always going to do it better and faster than you. While the standards are designed to be universally applied, the reality is that programs located in institutions with stable and abundant budgets, more resources, and greater autonomy have an advantage over smaller programs. The purpose of the self-study is to tell your story – there are no right or wrong ways for a social work program to exist. But, there are right and wrong ways to answer compliance statements to demonstrate a minimal level of compliance. More on this later.
And lastly, for the administrative leadership, typically serving as the program’s primary contact with CSWE, what is your vision for the accreditation/reaffirmation process? How involved will you be, or do you wish to be in the process? How will your leadership style be exacted – Are you a micromanager? Are you a servant leader? Thinking about the future, what do you hope to gain or accomplish as a result of the self-study?
Do you have any other tips for planning out the self-study process? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.
How to cite:
Freedman, M. (2023, June 30). Five Steps to Planning your Social Work Program’s Self-Study: CSWE Accreditation. Teaching and Learning in Social Work Blog. https://laureliversonhitchcock.org/2023/06/30/five-steps-to-planning-your-social-work-programs-self-study-cswe-accreditation/
