Using Rubrics to provide Strength-based Feedback for Social Work Assignments

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Feb 4, 2019

Editor’s Note: I am excited to welcome back Kristen Samuels, MSW, MS, MEd, the Field Director for University of Phoenix’s Department of Social Work, for this month’s guest educator blog post. Back in December 2018, I sent a tweet asking for advice on how to improve my grading practices, and turned the responses from colleagues into a blog post. Kristen was one of those colleagues and I asked her to turn her own tweets about strength-based feedback and rubrics into this blog post. Kristen can be reached at Kristen.samuels@gmail.com, or @KristenMSamuels on Twitter.

I recently returned to the classroom as a student in an EdD program. Although I certainly struggle with the workload, committing to life-long learning and taking the role of the student has made me a better instructor. As I am reminded of the anxiety that comes with unclear expectations or inconsistent grading practices, I become more aware of my own approaches for delivering feedback in my online classrooms. In discussions with my peers about the rigor and intensity of the doctoral writing process, we reflected on our individual fears in presenting written assignments to any of our former professors. Writing is an incredibly complex and emotive process. Students are asked to read, comprehend, apply, analyze, summarize, etc., and then present content in an integrated, accurate, and convincing way. It would be easy to miss a step and lose confidence in our position, and in that way, students are vulnerable when turning in written assignments. After putting forward long thought-out interpretations and opinions of the material, it is difficult to not view feedback as a personal attack on our intelligence. We wind ourselves up in self-doubt, and add undue stress when we throw in the impossible task of deciphering tone from an instructor’s feedback.

Strength-based feedback for Social Work Assignments

For this reason, and particularly for us as Social Work educators, we owe it to our students to present feedback with care. This can be as simple as avoiding capitalizing words (the online equivalent of shouting), and intentionally leading/ending feedback with what the student has done well in the assignment. Research on feedback tells us that affirmative comments acknowledges students’ efforts and encourages learning, instead of emphasizing grades (Stipek & Chiatovich, 2017). It is also an excellent way to model strengths-based approaches with our students!

List of Podcasts for Social Work

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Jan 30, 2019

Editor’s Note: Melanie Sage is an assistant professor of social work in the School of Social Work at the University at Buffalo. In this blog post, she gives an overview of podcasting in social work and shares her crowdsourced list of social work podcasts.

Once upon a time in not-so-long-ago history, broadcast media was limited to the hands of radio professionals with fancy recording devices. Regular people on tight budgets have long tried to harness the power of audio recording and broadcasting, from ham operators to low-fi analog reel or tape recorders. Suddenly, in the last decade, affordable high-quality recording devices fit in the palms of our hands, along with the means to broadcast our voices internationally at very little cost.

Early social work podcast pioneer greats include Jonathan Singer, who launched the Social Work Podcast in 2007 and has over 125 episodes, and inSocialWork, which launched in 2008 at the University at Buffalo School of Social Work, and now has over 250 episodes. You can listen to either of them in your favorite podcast streamer, such as Apple’s iTunes Podcast Streamer or Spotify, for over 300 hours of learning from experts in our field. You can listen during your commute, at the gym, while doing chores, or when you’re getting ready in the morning. They make it so easy to fit lifelong learning into your day. Learn more about how to listen to podcasts by watching this short video.

Using an Interprofessional Perspective for NASW’s Technology Standard for Social Work Education

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Nov 10, 2018

On Saturday, November 10, 2018 at 7:30 am in Dolphin, Walt Disney World Resort, Asia 3, Lobby/Third Level, I will be presenting with Drs. Melanie Sage and Nancy J. Smyth about our crowd sourced work, Social Work Educators’ Perspectives on NASW’s Technology Standard for Education, Training, and Supervision.  We will be distributing printed copies of our booklet and sharing how social work educators can bring an interprofessional perspective to teaching with technology.

In 2017, new Standards for Technology in Social Work Practice were issued by NASW (and written in conjunction with CSWA, CSWE, and ASWB) to address the intersections of social work practice and technology. One of the standards (standard 4) focuses on technology for social work education, training, and supervision, while the other standards focus on the use of technology in social work practice.

After the standards came out, social work educators told us they wanted more information about how to actually use the guidance from the standards in their classrooms and universities.  We (Laurel Hitchcock, Melanie Sage, and Nancy Smyth) reached out to social work educators and supervisors who have specialized knowledge of teaching and supervision with technology to provide more information related to interpretations.   We used Google Docs to create a place for contributors to share their comments for how the educational standards should look in practice, the best practices related to standards, and the ways educators and supervisors can aspire to best practices related to technology.  Then, we edited the ideas and comments by all the contributors into a cohesive document to provide guidance for educators.

To help disseminate this work, the University at Buffalo’s School of Social Work agreed to publish it as a booklet, and we distributed this for the first time in at the 2018 Social Work Distance Education Conference in San Antonio, TX.

Here you will find a link to the digital copy of crowd-sourced technology standards: https://tinyurl.com/SWEdTechStandards

You can access a copy of presentation slides here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/17MUD49n79hkwzlqcq20cvtt5IZJc9Rge/view?usp=sharing

Here is our conference proposal with learning objectives:

By the end of the session, participants will:

Teaching in the open: How I published a free textbook

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Nov 1, 2018

Editor’s Note: Matthew DeCarlo is an assistant professor of social work in the School of Social Work at Radford University.  In this blog post, he describes the concept of open teaching and how he adapted a research methods textbook for social work education.

 What does it mean to teach in the open?

When I tell people I like to teach “in the open,” their first response is often “I already do that!”  In way, they are right.  To be an instructor is to be open and vulnerable by proclaiming yourself an expert (or at least a useful guide) and engaging students in the learning process.  Students see through your eyes as you help them understand the social work knowledge base, and you are often faced with the limitations of your own knowledge.

In a different way, when I talk about teaching “in the open,” what I really mean is, “I want to share my educational resources with other educators and build on the resources that others have shared.”  As a junior faculty member, I am constantly trying to figure out how best to teach new course content and improve my instruction.  Faculty at both universities at which I have had the pleasure of teaching were open with me.  Before beginning a new course preparation, at least two professors would happily meet with me so they can discuss their syllabi, review tips and tricks, and most importantly, share their materials.  The message I received was, “take all of these materials, use whatever you want, don’t worry about giving me credit, and let me know if you have any questions.”  Without these resources, junior faculty and adjuncts would be stuck reinventing the wheel—for instance, coming up with yet another prompt for an article presentation or slideshow on random sampling.

Using Mobile Apps with with Social Work Students

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Oct 26, 2018

In this blog post, Steven Sturman, Instructional Designer at the University at Buffalo’s School of Social Work writes about how social work educators can incorporate mobile apps into the social work classroom. 

Mobile apps put a wealth of information and resources at your fingertips for a variety of topics from bullying prevention to political engagement.  They have the potential to be very useful in both social work education and practice.  Integrating apps into student education provides students with a safe environment to experience mobile technology while they are learning about how to use an app, and how it might be implemented into a clinical setting.  Additionally, they can experiment with what technology will and won’t work for them, and determining how the technology will fit in their professional development.

There are several things to consider when integrating apps into your classes, including how to pick the right apps, how to make sure the apps align well with your learning objectives, and how to make sure that your usage meets the NASW Standards for Technology in Social Work Practice.  When considering the adoption of apps for educational purposes instructors must assess: