The Role of the Interpretation Guide in the Self-Study: CSWE Accreditation

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Oct 24, 2023

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 an overview of the interpretation guide to write a self-study for social work accreditation by the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE). I found using CSWE’s interpretation guide both useful and overwhelming at the same time, and the tips that Melissa shares in this post helped break down the guide for me. She can be reached via email at freedman121@comcast.net.

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As a social work program navigating the accreditation process, this blog post assumes you have created a work plan, identified your core accreditation team members and their roles, assigned writing responsibilities to these team members and/or other key individuals, and started to develop an internal timeline for task completion. If you are still contemplating how to start the self-study process or have not yet addressed all key planning steps, you may read the Five Steps to Planning your Social Work Program’s Self-Study: CSWE Accreditation the first blog post in this series on CSWE Accreditation.

Before social work programs begin writing their self-study(ies), I vehemently encourage them to follow a few recommendations. First, to actively use the interpretation guide. Second, TO ACTIVELY USE THE INTERPRETATION GUIDE!

What is the interpretation guide? CSWE identifies it as the “official companion document” to Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS). Currently, there are two versions of the guide available: one for social work programs seeking accreditation under the 2015 EPAS and another for programs seeking accreditation under the 2022 EPAS. Here are the links to the most recent version of each guide: