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.
How to define your Teaching Values
Editor’s Note: 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) offer a process for identifying your teaching values. The second post covers tips for writing and presenting a values-based teaching philosophy, and in the third post, we share our own values-based teaching philosophies that resulted from this process. This post is cross-published on April’s Blog – Genuine Curiosity: Navigating Nursing Education Now.
Having an articulated teaching philosophy is an expectation in higher education, but writing a teaching philosophy is hard work. It requires an educator to define their professional identity in a way that explains why and how they teach. Additionally, today’s educators are constantly asked to weigh in on various issues, such as when, how, and how often to use innovation for instruction, how much time should be focused on content versus reserved for flexible discussion, and whether to use a traditional or flipped classroom model, where there’s no clear right or wrong answer. And, because the topics can be as diverse as the courses and students we teach, it’s important to have a values-based framework that can support your decision-making process. Having a clear understanding of your personal values and, perhaps more importantly in this instance, your teaching values can help you navigate challenging or crucial conversations by giving you the language to express your views and understand their origin.
The process of getting to one’s teaching philosophy is reflective, requiring time and deep thinking about one’s beliefs related to teaching and learning. Identifying one’s teaching values offers an educator clarity about what is important and meaningful, and makes it easier to set and prioritize goals as well as make decisions by aligning these tasks with one’s values. Not only is the process highly personalized, so is the end product. While there is no one right way to explore one’s teaching values, we have adapted a common approach for identifying values to focus on the practices of teaching and learning.
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.
Teaching & Learning in Social Work by Laurel Iverson Hitchcock is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
