The Role of the Interpretation Guide in the Self-Study: CSWE Accreditation
Editor’s note: Melissa Freedman, MSW, is a social work educator and consultant specializing in leadership, supervision, administration, and quality management and assurance. In this blog post, she shares an overview of the interpretation guide to write a self-study for social work accreditation by the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE). I found using CSWE’s interpretation guide both useful and overwhelming at the same time, and the tips that Melissa shares in this post helped break down the guide for me. She can be reached via email at freedman121@comcast.net.
As a social work program navigating the accreditation process, this blog post assumes you have created a work plan, identified your core accreditation team members and their roles, assigned writing responsibilities to these team members and/or other key individuals, and started to develop an internal timeline for task completion. If you are still contemplating how to start the self-study process or have not yet addressed all key planning steps, you may read the Five Steps to Planning your Social Work Program’s Self-Study: CSWE Accreditation the first blog post in this series on CSWE Accreditation.
Before social work programs begin writing their self-study(ies), I vehemently encourage them to follow a few recommendations. First, to actively use the interpretation guide. Second, TO ACTIVELY USE THE INTERPRETATION GUIDE!
What is the interpretation guide? CSWE identifies it as the “official companion document” to Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS). Currently, there are two versions of the guide available: one for social work programs seeking accreditation under the 2015 EPAS and another for programs seeking accreditation under the 2022 EPAS. Here are the links to the most recent version of each guide:
Five Steps to Planning your Social Work Program’s Self-Study: CSWE Accreditation
Editor’s note: Melissa Freedman, MSW, is a social work educator and consultant specializing in leadership, supervision, administration, and quality management and assurance. In this blog post, she shares guidance for social work educators about how to start planning for the important task of reaffirmation and the initial process of accreditation with the Council on Social Work Education. I can also envision social work faculty and staff applying these guidelines to the adoption of new accreditation standards and policies and sharing them with institutional leadership when asking for support and resources. She can be reached via email at freedman121@comcast.net.
The time has come to begin writing your accreditation self-study with the Council of Social Work Education (CSWE). As with any major project, preparation and planning are key. Simple, right? And then it’s time to put the metaphorical pen to paper, and the landslide of anxiety and overwhelming doubt begins. To help alleviate some of the agony, this blog serves to provide introductory guidance to identify your accreditation team and the initial tasks necessary to develop the most appropriate plan of action for your program(s). This guidance stems from my years of a career spent in leadership, training, and quality management and assurance. I will start with this…it truly takes a village, and writing a self-study should never be a siloed process.
How Becoming an Adjunct Improved My Social Work Practice
Editor’s Note: Christa McCrorie (she/her), LICSW-PIP, is an adjunct instructor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and a social worker with a private practice, Creative Therapeutic Solutions, LLC, where she specializes in queer needs and trauma processing. In this blog post, she shares how her time as an adjunct instructor has improved her own social work practice and offers reflection prompts for those interested in adjunct teaching as a social worker. You can reach her through her practice at https://creativetherapeutic.solutions/
As someone with almost ten years of experience as a social worker, I had already branched into independent roles; I was leading my own private practice, was providing supervision to master’s level social workers, and was frequently asked to consult for publications in niche mental health topics such as stress management for teens, and queer education. I enjoyed all of it, but one of my personal goals has been to shift into a teaching role, and contributing as an adjunct professor for the local university’s social work educational program seemed like a great fit. After seeking this position for several years, I finally found an opportunity in 2022 and was signed up for my first class!
Key Components for Effective Social Work Assignments
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?
Teaching & Learning in Social Work by Laurel Iverson Hitchcock is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
Laurel Hitchcock
Photo Credit: Jared Bash
