The Shared Case Study: An online activity for Interprofessional Teamwork

Natalie Curry, MSW

Natalie Curry, MSW

Natalie Curry, LCSW is a Clinical Instructor at Missouri State University’s (MSU) School of Social Work. She has been on the faculty with MSU for two years and prior to that was an adjunct instructor for MSU, Drury University, and Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to entering academia, her practice background includes working with individuals who were homeless in various capacities, inpatient psychiatric care, and behavioral health consulting in primary care.  In this post, she writes about an online, interprofessional learning activity that she helped to develop and implement with colleagues at MSU You can follow Natalie on Twitter at @natalielcsw

Last fall, there was considerable interest around interprofessional education in the College of Health and Human Services (CHHS) at Missouri State University (MSU), where I work. My colleagues and I believed that we were doing well at talking with our students about how much collaboration they would do in their careers with other healthcare professionals.  But we wanted to go further and figure out ways to provide the students real opportunities for interprofessional practice in their educational programs. That was part of the motivation for bringing together faculty from all 11 disciplines (such as social work, nursing, medicine and others) within CHHS, in addition to the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Pharmacy which was already in partnership with MSU. The other part of motivation was a growing recognition that interprofessional activities were no longer just encouraged in many of our disciplines’ accreditation standards; they were required.

Starting in Fall 2015, our committee to begin developing interprofessional educational activities for our students. We met monthly and eventually decided that it was not feasible to develop one activity, project, or experience that all students from CHHS could do together and still be  meaningful. We decided on four “menu items” that each discipline could choose to participate in, depending on the needs of their students. We wanted to have a mix of interprofessional activities, ranging from one-day experiences to projects that could be implemented over the course of a semester.

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Review of Teaching & Learning in Social Work Blog Posts for 2016

The end of a year is a natural time for reflection, and this year I offer a review of all the posts that appeared on Teaching & Learning in Social Work Education during 2016.  My goal for this blog is to write or publish at least two posts a month, which happened more months than not.  I also recruited other social work educators to write about their own experiences in the classroom or with scholarship, and also write about about all of my presentations, either at conferences or as a part of a workshop.  This year, I published a total of 25 blog posts, representing work with numerous collaborators and good colleagues.  Below is a list of this year’s post grouped around the topics of assignments, projects, guest educator posts, and conference presentations.

Assignments:  These blog posts provide information, how-to tips, and ideas about different types of technology-based assignments for the social work classroom:
– Job Shadowing on Twitter with Joy Jones on 1/8/16
– Tweet, Tweet!: Using Live Twitter Chats in Social Work on Education with Dr. Jimmy Young on 1/29/16
– Using #MacroSW in the Classroom with the @OfficialMacroSW Partners on 3/14/16
– Using Pinterest in Undergraduate Social Work Education – #BPDTX16 with Dr. Lisa Baker on 3/31/16
– Revised Technology-Based Learning Task List for Social Work Education with Drs. Melanie Sage and Nancy J. Smyth on 6/13/16

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Social Work Educator’s Guide for #SWVirtualPal

This guide to explains the hashtag #SWVirtualPal and how you might incorporate it into course content, a class assignment or learning activity.  You can also download a PDF version of this guide.

The purpose of the #SWVirtualpal hashtag is to create professional connections between social work students, practitioners, and academics across the planet.  It was created by  Amanda Taylor from the University of Central Lancashire in the United Kingdom, and Laurel Iverson Hitchcock from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in the United States. To learn more about #SWVirtualPal, read this blog post.

Why #SWVirtualpal in Social Work Education?

Pen Pals have been a ‘thing’ for a very long time.  The earliest record of their usage, that we can find, is reported as being led by an ‘innovative Iowa teacher’ called Birdie Matthews, who at the time employed the methodology to bring the realities of WW II into the classroom (Myers-Verhage, 1995). Matthews  creativity in the classroom quite possibly led to one of the most famous pen pal relationships of all time, and this was between Juanita Wagner (her student at the time) and Anne Frank.  So why are we telling you all of this?  Well, before the internet the likelihood of a social work academic in the US, working closely and supportively with a social work academic in the UK would have been ‘virtually’ unheard of, or indeed a fairly disparate affair, which would have been laborious to maintain.  However, thankfully for us technologies have changed the way we work and the way we connect.  Today’s digital and social media  present all sorts of possibilities and opportunities; and being social workers with our default set on creativity, we decided quite a way back now to exploit all it is that technology affords.

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Using Learning Wheels: The #APLOL16 Connected Conference

In this short blog, we (Amanda Taylor and Laurel Hitchcock) outline the success of the #APLOL16 Conference LearningWheel and through doing so hope to encourage social work and indeed other professions to consider this methodology as a conduit for collating and disseminating conference content.

Why a Conference Learning Wheel?

aplearningwheelI  reached out to Amanda earlier this year about setting up a Conference LearningWheel for Alabama Possible’s 2016 Lifetime of Learning Conference because I had previously participated in the development of LearningWheels for other conferences, and saw several benefits for #APLOL16.  First, a Conference LearningWheel helps document learning that occurs during and after a conference.  By contributing short sentences (which become spokes of the wheel), conference attendees can share their insights, feedback and comments about the different conference sessions with an audience beyond that session and even beyond the conference.  Second, the LearningWheel also captures how conference attendees can best communicate with each other during or after a conference, and with others such as colleagues, students, community partners, or any like-minded person.  This is ideal for encouraging conference attendees to apply what they learned in their professional settings and promote collaborations.  Finally, I hope Alabama Possible can use the Conference LearningWheel as an evaluation tool to help assess the outcomes from #APLOL16 and to plan next year’s conference.  

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