Pinterest Assignment for the Social Work Classroom

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Sep 16, 2020

A few years back, my colleague, Dr. Lisa Baker at Samford University’s Department of Social Work, and I collaborated on a study about a technology-meditated assignment that we developed for a Human Behavior and the Social Environment (HBSE) course. Our goal was to breathe some new life into a stale assignment.  In this post, I want to share how we approached the development, assessment, and dissemination of our study related to this tech-mediated assignment.   

Podcast Assignment for the Social Work Classroom

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Jan 15, 2020

Editor’s Note: This blog post shares information about a podcast assignment developed and implemented in multiple social work classrooms over the past year.  This assignment is a collaboration between myself and Melanie Sage, Todd Sage & Michael Lynch of the University at Buffalo’s School of Social Work.  We share a copy of the assignment and rubric along with information about why social work educators might want to try this assignment in their own classroom.

Podcasts are now a well-known part of social work education.  With so many different types of social work podcasts, it is easy for an educator to assign a podcast instead of an article, asking students to listen instead of reading.  Examples of podcasts designed specifically for social work include:

• The Social Work Podcast by Dr. Jonathan Singer

• inSocial Work Podcast Series by the University at Buffalo’s School of Social Work

For a more comprehensive list of podcasts, check out this blog post written by one of us (Melanie):

• List of Podcasts for Social Work

Briefly, a podcast is an audio file made available on the Internet for downloading to a portable media player, computer, or other device.  Podcasts are easy to create and do not require many technical skills which making the technology a good fit for student assignment and for faculty who do not have a lot of technology experience.  One of us (Laurel) has been using and writing about podcast assignments for several years.  Here are links to a series of posts she wrote back in 2014 when she first started using podcasts in her classroom:

Digital Advocacy in the Social Work Classroom: Students speaking out online

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Aug 7, 2019

Editor’s Note:  Julia Kleinschmit is a clinical associate professor in the School of Social Work at The University of Iowa, and Breanne Benson is a currently MSW student in the School of Social Work at The University of Iowa.  In this blog post, Julia writes about an assignment that uses social media to promote advocacy skills and professionalism among social work students.  Breanne offers her experience with the assignment as a student and reflects on how she grew her skills as a future social worker.  Julia can be found on LinkedIn, and Breanne is on Instagram at _bmbenson.

Addressing Technology in Changing Social Work Environment

The Council on Social Work Education’s (CSWE) Competency 1: Demonstrate Ethical and Professional Behavior requires social workers to use technology ethically and appropriately to facilitate practice outcomes. Many have focused on the need for confidentiality in electronic communication and social media boundary management. These are important issues, but at the University of Iowa’s School of Social Work, Megan Gilster, Stephen Cummings, and I believed we could also teach MSW students to use their online identities and social media as powerful tools for effective advocacy.

Sharing power with students by seeking their input on a grading rubric

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Jun 19, 2019

Editor’s Note: Matthea Marquart is the Director of Administration for the Online Campus at the Columbia School of Social Work and Elise Verdooner is an Associate with the Columbia School of Social Work.  In this blog post, Matthea & Elise share how they sought input from social work students in one of their courses to revise and update an assignment rubric.  This practice offers social work educators at all levels the opportunity to bring equity to the classroom.

Introduction:  Why did we decide to try sharing power with students around the rubric for our final assignment?

This spring, we worked together to teach a course on Staff Development, Training, and Coaching at Columbia University’s School of Social Work (CSSW).  This is an elective course for second-year students in their final semester of our MSW program.  Matthea was the instructor and Elise was the Associate (similar to a TA, an Associate at CSSW provides academic support to graduate social work students).  

As we were planning the course, Matthea attended a workshop on “Grading, Rubrics, and Feedback for Equity and Inclusion,” which was hosted by Monique M. Jethwani, Director of Faculty Development at CSSW, and led by Amanda M. Jungels and Chandani Patel of Columbia’s Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL).  Matthea’s key takeaway from the workshop was to try an activity to increase inclusiveness around grading by giving students the power to amend the rubric for the final assignment, and Elise was willing to give it a try as well.  The activity appealed to us because as social workers we believe in creating an inclusive classroom.

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!

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: