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.

Consciously Connecting and Proactively Collaborating: The CoActEd Learner Mapping Tool in #SocWorkEd

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Jun 11, 2019

Editor’s Note: Amanda Taylor-Beswick is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Work, Care and Community at the University of Central Lancashire.  She is also an author of the book, The LearningWheel Book, whichprovides educators with a model for helping students and practitioners develop digital literacy skills.   In this blog post, Amanda describes one of the tools from her book, the CoActEd Learner Mapping Tool. She tweets at @AMLTaylor66.

From the moment a social work student steps into the educational environment, they are engaged in a socialising process that involves exposure to, familiarisation with, and the development of professional norms. Through this carefully crafted learning experience a student’s Professional Learning Network (PLN), amongst other things, begins to form; professional relationships with academics, with practice partners, with practitioners and with student peers are built. This professional network is primarily local, largely institutional and generally geographically bound. However, digitisation means that the professional network no longer needs to be so rigid, so limited or so confined. The availability and affordances of social technologies (those that are #GDPR compliant) offer opportunities for social work students to connect outside of their direct or more natural community of learning.  They can engage with the global social work community which, in previous times, may have been out of reach. The use of a medium through which to map and to therefore build connections forms the basis of this blog.

‘App’- lying the digital in social work… Or why we should not be teaching the same way for 20 years

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Jun 4, 2019

Editor’s Note: Denise Turner, PhD is a senior lecturer in the Department of Social Work at London Metropolitan University.  Her research interests focus on the innovative use of digital technology in teaching and practice.  In this blog post, Denise shares her collaborations and process when developing an app for mobile devices for social work students and practitioners.  You can follow Denise on Twitter at @DeniseT01.   

The Background

Recently, my first draft of an article focussed on creating digital resources to update social work education, was returned with the question, ‘Does it really matter that this has been taught the same way for over twenty years?’ After the inevitable, slightly nonplussed reaction to article reviews, I was forced to give this question some considerable thought. Certainly, Steve Wheeler, whose work on e-learning I hugely admire, counsels against using technology simple because it is ‘new and shiny’ (Wheeler, 205, p. 7).  In response to the reviewer, I had to ask myself if this applied to me.  Was this what I was doing? Simply jumping on a digital bandwagon because it was trendy?  Certainly, my ever-advancing years and my own lack of digital acuity suggested this might be the case. As the old adage suggests, was I one of those who taught because I couldn’t do?  On reflection, I returned to the original source of the problem in order to try and find an answer.

Reviewing my 2019 grading practices for #SocWorkEd – Part 2

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on May 27, 2019

As I started the Spring Semester back in January, I reviewed my grading practices to make this assessment process more manageable and enjoyable for me. I wrote about this review in the following post – Changing my grading practices in 2019: Tips for #SocWorkEd.  I focused on feedback from colleagues on Twitter to identify three main practices I wanted to adopt: 1) Rubrics and Grading Comments; 2) A list of Common Writing Mistakes; and 3) Creating Intentional Grading Practices. In this post, I want to share what I learned, how it worked, and some of the tools I developed.