How Becoming an Adjunct Improved My Social Work Practice

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Apr 19, 2023

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/

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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

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Jan 26, 2023

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?

Tips for the new Social Work Adjunct Instructor

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Aug 25, 2022

In my role as the Director of our undergraduate social work program this summer, I have been onboarding several new adjunct instructors to our Department. It is a fun process as new adjuncts bring new ideas and energy to the role, and I have been reminded of my early days in social work education as an adjunct instructor. I taught statistics to social work students for four years while working on my Ph.D. I often think back to that experience as my boot camp for my career as an academic in social work education. One of my teaching mantras is “if I can teach stats, I can teach anything.” If you are unsure that you want to be an adjunct instructor, please read this post by my colleague, Dr.  Trish Desrosier, at Western Kentucky University, who will explain why you might want to teach a class for your local social work program. If you already have a new adjunct teaching position, congratulations and welcome! In this post, I write about a list of tips I share with our new social work adjuncts based on my experiences and their questions.

Collect the key course materials as soon as you can. Start by getting a copy of the course syllabus as soon as possible, along with the textbook and other materials such as PowerPoint slides, lecture notes, and handouts. This includes digital content from the institution’s learning management system. The syllabus is your road map for the course, and the other content will make the ride through the semester smooth. 

Technology Disruption Readiness Plan: A Best Practice for the Social Work Classroom

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on May 20, 2022

In social work education, one lesson we can take away from the COVID pandemic has brought many lessons to social work education is to be ready when a crisis or disruption requires an instructor and students to quickly shift an entire course, a class session, or even an assignment. In today’s world, this typically means understanding when and how to adapt our learning environments to incorporate or adjust for digital technologies, both hardware (i.e., portable devices, laptops, WiFi access) and software (i.e., learning management systems). A social work educator can prepare for future disruption in their classroom by developing a course-level Technology Disruption Readiness Plan. Such a plan aims to thoughtfully and systematically think through how one will manage disruptions due to technology to the educational process and then share this information with students. This approach is recommended in the NASW Standards for Technology in Social Work Practice under Standard 4.06 Technological Disruptions, which focuses on what to do when technology fails with online teaching, such as a power outage or a laptop failure. It is easy to transfer this idea to other forms of educational disruption, including situations unique to an individual  (i.e., serious illness and military deployment) or community-level crises such as natural disasters. Further, the disruptions occur with instructors as well, and having a plan to hand off one’s class to another instructor can make the transition less traumatic for you and your students.