Writing your values-based teaching philosophy
This blog post is one of a three-part series about how to write a values-based teaching philosophy. In this blog post, we (April Love and Laurel Hitchcock) cover tips for writing and presenting a values-based teaching philosophy. The first post offers a process for identifying your teaching values and in the third post, we share our own values-based teaching philosophies. This post is cross-published on April’s Blog – Genuine Curiosity: Navigating Nursing Education Now.
If you are reading this blog post, then you have already done some work to identify your teaching values – see our first blog post – How to define your Teaching Values. We know you’ve worked hard and put in the time to truly identify teaching values that speak to the heart and practice of your professional identity. You’ve reviewed, compared, and reflected on various teaching values and now feel confident that those you’ve selected represent you well and that you’re ready to share them with others.
In addition to identifying your teaching values, you’ve also spent some time collecting “evidence” as to how these values are showing up in your work. Maybe you have a special process that encourages students to speak freely in your classroom, which is a great example of how you’re living the value of “safety” or “inclusion.” Maybe it’s a new technology that you’ve introduced to your department that has you leading the charge for “innovation” or “creativity.” Whatever those examples are that showcase how you’re walking the walk and talking the talk, you’ll want to display them in your teaching philosophy. Actions often speak louder than words.
Now is the time to transform your values and evidence into a two-page written statement of teaching philosophy that you can share with others in a variety of ways depending on your audience and other environmental considerations.
Developing a Personalized Social Media Policy for Social Work Practice
Editor’s Note: This blog post is adapted from the Second Edition of the Social Media Toolkit for Social Work Field Educators.
There are many reasons for social workers to have a personalized social media policy – to maintain boundaries, protect privacy and confidentiality, and model professional behavior. To be clear, I am not referring to the policy that your organization or institution might have, directing the faculty, staff, and students on when it is okay to use social media, but one that you develop and follow as an individual practitioner, student, and/or educator. The purpose of a social media policy is to inform clients, students, colleagues, and others about when, how, and why you use social media in a professional capacity. From an ethical lens, this is a recommended practice per National Association of Social Worker’s (NASW) Technology in Social Work Practice Standard 2.10 – Social Media Policy and fits with the NASW Code of Ethics standards of informed consent with clients (1.3e-i), respect with colleagues (2.1), and when conducting supervision and consultation (3.1).
The following steps provide a guide for developing a social media policy that can be used as an assignment in a classroom with students or adapted for practitioners:
Internet Survival Guide for Social Workers
Agata Dera, MSW, is an Associate and Live Support Specialist with the Columbia School of Social Work’s (CSSW) Online Campus, where she works with social work faculty and students in online courses to optimize the digital learning environment. In this blog post, she shares tips and practices when connecting to the internet for online learning and engagement.
Introduction
At the Columbia School of Social Work (CSSW) my primary responsibility is to provide technical support to our online community. At the time of writing this piece, I have supported roughly 27 unique online social work courses at CSSW. In the last few years, I have offered technical guidance to hundreds of students, faculty members, Deans, guest speakers and other personnel.
As an award-winning online program, our goal is to provide our students with the highest quality of online learning in the most thought-provoking, innovative, engaging and accessible environment. One of the things that makes this possible is our program’s technology standards for hardware, particularly when it comes to internet connection. As part of our program’s tech requirements, students, faculty and guests connect to our live class sessions via Ethernet, (a wired connection to the internet), as opposed to Wi-fi, (a wireless connection). This allows us to design creative classrooms which focus on student growth while limiting any potential interruptions due to technical issues such as loss of internet connection.
In this post, you will find tips and resources about connecting to the internet, which I have found to be really useful. Please note that this post is based on my experience proving tech assistance to an online social work community, and its intention is to support anyone interested in learning more about the internet and ways to stabilize their connection.
A review of Teaching & Learning in Social Work for 2020
2020 was a strange year with many firsts for me – first global pandemic, first sabbatical, first live sessions in an online course, etc. Because of all these firsts, blogging took a bit of back seat to some of my other projects and goals for the year. I had four goals for the blog over the year, and some minor successes. They were:
#1 – Publish 30 posts – only published 19
#2 – Enhance the reach of the blog – there were almost 45,500 visitors from 153 different countries with each visitor spending an average of 1 minute on the blog.
#3 – Build a culture of engagement – only had 10 comments for the year.
#4 – Publish content in other places – there will be two articles in 2021 with content from the blog.
Outside of these goals, I did update content on the blog and created an archive page. The two most popular blog posts of 2020 were:
A Love Letter to Social Workers on the Front Lines of COVID-19 (4/10/20) by Melanie Sage with over 24,000 visits
The Power of Lighting in a Virtual Classroom: Tips on Improving Webcam Lighting for Online Educators (3/16/20) by Agata Dera with over 3,000 visits
Pinterest Assignment for the Social Work Classroom
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.
Virtual Volunteering for Social Work Education during COVID19
Each semester, I teach courses with service learning requirements in our BSW program. As many of you know, service learning combines volunteer work with critical reflection so that students can make connections between real-life experiences and their academic course work. It is consider a high-impact educational practice in higher education and the pedagogical constructs embedded within service learning are a natural fit for social work education. Many undergraduate social work programs require volunteer hours for admission into their professional social work programs. At the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), our students volunteer for 20 hours as part of a semester-long, one-credit hour lab course, which is connected to a practice course. While volunteering in community-based settings, our BSW students get experiences with different types of agencies, social problems, client populations, and activities that social workers do on a daily basis. Then, they bring these experiences back into the classroom to deepen their understanding of generalist social work practice with individuals, groups and organizations. Students take three service learning lab courses prior to their field semester, which gives them a grounding for what to expect during their field placement along with 60 hours of volunteer experience for their professional development and resume.
In March 2020, the COVID19 pandemic disrupted our lives and how we teach our courses. Within the span of a week, I had to shift over 100 students in our three service learning lab courses from doing in-person volunteering at five community locations in the Greater Birmingham area to doing virtual volunteer work. In this blog post, I want to share how I did this and offer resources for social work educators who also need virtual volunteer opportunities for their students.
Teaching & Learning in Social Work by Laurel Iverson Hitchcock is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License