Use of an ADEI Assessment Tool to Examine Social Work Curricula

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Nov 20, 2024

On October 25, 2024, during the Annual Program Meeting for the Council on Social Work Education in Kansas City, MO, my UAB colleagues (Colleen Fisher, Mary Jacque Carroll and Ron Pitner) and I presented an assessment tool developed by Melissa Freedman, MSW, to review syllabi and courses as an effort to ensure the integration of antiracism, diversity, equity, and inclusion (ADEI) within our program curricula at the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Department of Social Work.  We used this tool to assess course content in our Bachelor’s, Master’s and Field Education courses.  In this blog post, we provide access to the tool and slides from the presentation. 

Call for Submissions: 101 Things to Do with a Social Work Degree

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Aug 20, 2024

My colleague, Dr. Melanie Sage and I are excited to invite submissions for our upcoming book, tentatively called 101 Things to Do with a Social Work Degree. This book aims to showcase social workers’ diverse and impactful roles across various settings. We seek contributions in English from social workers actively practicing or utilizing their social work degrees in traditional or unique settings at the micro, mezzo, and macro levels.

Ideal Contributors:
We are looking for social workers who:

Key Components for Effective Social Work Assignments

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Jan 26, 2023

As social work educators, we create assignments to give our students opportunities to learn about the profession and develop competencies needed for social practice. Assignments also offer a way to assess if students are growing in their understanding of how to be professional social workers. Assignments can range from reading a chapter in the course textbook to a 20-page research paper and more. I have shared many assignments on this blog that I have used in various classes. What I have learned over the years is that it takes effort and structure to create a quality assignment that will help students connect what they are learning in the classroom to their field experience and beyond. In this blog post, I share my thoughts on how to structure an assignment that is clear and contextualized for the social work profession, using three simple questions – Why?, What?, and How?

Tips for the new Social Work Adjunct Instructor

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Aug 25, 2022

In my role as the Director of our undergraduate social work program this summer, I have been onboarding several new adjunct instructors to our Department. It is a fun process as new adjuncts bring new ideas and energy to the role, and I have been reminded of my early days in social work education as an adjunct instructor. I taught statistics to social work students for four years while working on my Ph.D. I often think back to that experience as my boot camp for my career as an academic in social work education. One of my teaching mantras is “if I can teach stats, I can teach anything.” If you are unsure that you want to be an adjunct instructor, please read this post by my colleague, Dr.  Trish Desrosier, at Western Kentucky University, who will explain why you might want to teach a class for your local social work program. If you already have a new adjunct teaching position, congratulations and welcome! In this post, I write about a list of tips I share with our new social work adjuncts based on my experiences and their questions.

Collect the key course materials as soon as you can. Start by getting a copy of the course syllabus as soon as possible, along with the textbook and other materials such as PowerPoint slides, lecture notes, and handouts. This includes digital content from the institution’s learning management system. The syllabus is your road map for the course, and the other content will make the ride through the semester smooth. 

Technology Disruption Readiness Plan: A Best Practice for the Social Work Classroom

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on May 20, 2022

In social work education, one lesson we can take away from the COVID pandemic has brought many lessons to social work education is to be ready when a crisis or disruption requires an instructor and students to quickly shift an entire course, a class session, or even an assignment. In today’s world, this typically means understanding when and how to adapt our learning environments to incorporate or adjust for digital technologies, both hardware (i.e., portable devices, laptops, WiFi access) and software (i.e., learning management systems). A social work educator can prepare for future disruption in their classroom by developing a course-level Technology Disruption Readiness Plan. Such a plan aims to thoughtfully and systematically think through how one will manage disruptions due to technology to the educational process and then share this information with students. This approach is recommended in the NASW Standards for Technology in Social Work Practice under Standard 4.06 Technological Disruptions, which focuses on what to do when technology fails with online teaching, such as a power outage or a laptop failure. It is easy to transfer this idea to other forms of educational disruption, including situations unique to an individual  (i.e., serious illness and military deployment) or community-level crises such as natural disasters. Further, the disruptions occur with instructors as well, and having a plan to hand off one’s class to another instructor can make the transition less traumatic for you and your students.