Book Group Discussion Guide for Teaching Social Work with Digital Technology
Back in September, Melanie Sage, Nancy Smyth, and I announced a virtual book group for our work – Teaching Social Work with Digital Technology. The goals of the book group were to: 1) create a supportive learning community; and 2) provide space for reflection about one’s own professional development with teaching with technology. You can read more about this blog post:
Teaching Social Work with Digital Technology Book Group
We launched our book group in January and ended it in June 2020, with monthly meetings and a moderated online private Facebook group. The group included a monthly live virtual meeting with discussion moderated by the authors and guest facilitators. Live meetings allowed members to participate and ask questions. In between these live meetings, the facilitators led and moderated discussions about teaching with tech, offering reflective questions and simple learning tasks. Additionally, all live meetings were recorded and archived for later viewing in the group. We will leave the group up as an archive until the end of 2020. Please know that this group will no longer be moderated.
Overall, we had a total of 223 members in the group, and based on the group analytics there were over two hundred posts submitted, and a lot more members reviewing/reading the posts. Although we expected greater engagement, we know that this year brought unexpected challenges for all of us. We believe that good discussion prompts and questions from our facilitators promoted thoughtful reflection and engagement each month. We are sharing these questions and prompts here in this blog post so that others can use them for their own review or to start book groups in their institutions. Here is the discussion guide:
The unprecedented shift into teleworking; a personal story about working remotely in social work education
Editor’s Note: Agata Dera, MSW, is an Associate and LiveSupport Specialist with the Columbia School of Social Work’s (CSW) Online Campus, where she works with social work faculty and students in online courses to optimize the digital learning environment. In this post, she discussed how she transitioned from an office space to remote working. As many of us are working at home because of the COVID19 pandemic, Agata offers practical suggestions and encouragement to this new way of working for many social work professionals. You can connect with Agata on Twitter at @agataddera.
Over the past few weeks of this year, as the world stands together in the face of a pandemic, I have witnessed so many of my colleagues experience an unprecedented shift to working from home. As according to Forbes (Eisenberg, 2020), it is likely that more than half of our workforce is now working remotely, I cannot help but to reminisce of my transition into a virtual workforce. I hope that by sharing my story with you, you will have the insight I wish I once had to enhance your productivity and overall success.
For the past several years, I have been solely working from home due to severe health issues. Working remotely provided me with the flexibility I needed to be able to recover from several major spinal cord surgeries while also continuing my professional career. I truly believe that for me, being able to work from home is a blessing as my career is such a big part of my identity.
Fostering a spirit of collaboration with Social Work Students during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Editor’s note: When COVID19 cases started rising in the US in March 2020, institutions of higher education made significant decisions that required instructors and students to pivot the delivery and design of courses almost overnight. In this blog post, an instructional team from Columbia University’s School of Social Work (CSSW) detail how they approached changes to their course using trauma-informed teaching strategies. The team consists of Matthea Marquart, Director of CSSW’s Online MSW Program, Katherine Seibel, Legislative and Policy Analyst at a nonprofit promoting young people’s wellbeing, and Nicole Wong, Director of Support, Advocacy, & Violence Prevention at Vassar College. For more information related to this post, please reach out to Matthea at @MattheaMarquart.
Our spring semester online course, which is part of Columbia University School of Social Work’s (CSSW) Master’s of Science in Social Work program, began in March 2020, with our first class session on March 10. The next day, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, and the next week was spring break. Columbia University, which is located in New York City, had already been taking steps to protect student safety, such as moving residential courses online, but our course was already online, with our students located across the United States.
As a result, the policy impact that most affected our course came with the University’s announcement on March 20 that all spring semester courses would be graded pass/fail. This policy impact freed us to make significant changes to our course assignments and grading policies mid-semester, in collaboration with each other as the instructional team, as well as with the students. We also implemented trauma-informed teaching strategies in response to the changing circumstances in the world, which had a significant impact on students and which we recognized could contribute to increased experiences of trauma. Trauma-informed teaching recognizes that past and ongoing trauma can impact current student success, and employs strategies to foster a supportive environment and reduce barriers to learning. An example is sharing power with students through collaboration and choice about course decisions.
Virtual Field Education: Harnessing Technology and Campus Partnerships to Provide Learning Opportunities
Editor’s Note: In this blog post, Michael Lynch, Clinical Assistant Professor of Field Education at the University at Buffalo’s School of Social Work, shares how his field program shifted their curriculum from in-person, place-based learning activities to remote learning during the national quarantine from the COVID19 pandemic in March 2020. Specifically, he talks about how social work field programs can leverage partnerships and opportunities within their own institution to quickly meet the educational needs of field students. You can connect with Michael at mrlynch2@buffalo.edu
With the intensification of the global pandemic in March 2020, most higher education programs in the United States quickly switched all of their courses to a distance-learning model. This disruption has forced social work instructors to think creatively about how to deliver content and experiences in new ways. For social work field education programs, this transition poses additional difficulty due to its client-facing, experiential nature. For example, students in field education typically are intervening directly with clients in settings like schools, mental health clinics, prisons, and hospitals. Students provide counseling, mentorship, and other forms of support directly to clients in an in-person environment.
Teaching & Learning in Social Work by Laurel Iverson Hitchcock is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
