The Role of the Interpretation Guide in the Self-Study: CSWE Accreditation

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Oct 24, 2023

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.

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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:

Becoming an awesome adjunct professor in social work

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Apr 23, 2019

Editor’s note: Patricia (Trish) Desrosiers, PhD, LCSW, is an associate professor of social work and the Chair of the Department of Social Work at Western Kentucky University.  Her research interests include social work education and leadership for social work practice.  In this blog post, Trish shares how she encourages social work practitioners to become adjunct instructors in her Department. She tweets at @DrD_Empowers.‏

As chair of the Department of Social Work, recruiting adjunct instructors is a big part of my job and the first thing that I tell a prospective adjunct is “Social Work needs you!” According to the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), in 2017, over half of all social work educators in the US were adjunct instructors.  One reason is that as university budgets decline, one way to save money is to increase part-time faculty utilization. Another reason is that part-time instructors bring their practice experience into the classroom, making book content come alive for students.  As a result, program directors are constantly seeking out well-qualified faculty members in order to maintain quality educational programming. However, strong part-timers are hard to find. If you have ever considered teaching in social work, now is the time to commit to giving back to the profession. There are many reasons to do so.

Three things I learned at #IPECSpring18

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on May 16, 2018

About two weeks ago, I attended my fourth conference of the spring semester – the 2018 Spring Institute of the Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC) held in Washington, DC from April 30 – May 2, 2018.  As I was flying home, I tried to reflect on what I had learned at the IPEC Conference as compared to my other three conferences from the semester. Not surprisingly, I struggled to remember the names and even locations of the other three conferences, including one that I attended in mid-April.  Even now as write this post in mid-May, my memories of the IPEC conference are fading.  Given all the time, energy, and resources that goes into attending a conference, I wondered about what I was learning at all of these conferences, how it was informing my work as a social work educator; and  how I might be able to utilize or share my learning with others.

A quick internet search turned up a few articles about the impact of academic conferences on scientific research, professional development of individual academics, and on disciplines as a whole.  A blog post by Donald Nicolson, The last great unknown? The impact of academic conferences, offers a good answer to my own questions and proposed another – How do academic conferences make a difference in the lives of academics and wider society?  The short answer is we really don’t know, especially in social work education and practice.  Here is a ripe research opportunity for someone with more time and energy than me.  I am not looking for another research project, so feel free to let your doctoral students know about this one.  I did, however, come up with a solution to my challenge of integrating what I learned at conference into my professional life as a social work educator – I should blog about every conference.  Not only will I able to reflect on my conference experiences through the process of writing, blogging also lets me share my thoughts with others adding value (hopefully) for those who couldn’t attend the conference or maybe are interested in a social worker’s perspective on a conference.

So how do I go about blogging about a conference?  For a few years now, I have been posting information about my own conference presentations.  My structure for these post is to take my original conference session proposal, add copies of the slides or handouts, and include some information about the conference and my co-presenters, and viola, a quick and easy blog post.  Here is my most recent conference blog post from the third annual Social Work Distance Education Conference in April 2018.  While this is a great way to re-use that conference proposal, these blog posts are not reflective of my own learning nor do they offer professional insight about a conference as a whole.  To help me write about academic conferences I went back to the internet and I found this blog post, 12 ways to write a conference blog post by Alison Bolen.  She her suggestions for blogging about conferences range from a simple summary of one’s impressions from the conference to sharing a to-do list of actions and ideas that you plan to pursue following the conference.  Another of Bolen’s ideas is to discuss one’s personal lessons learned, which resonated with me as the IPEC Conference was all about new ideas for me.  So without further ado, here are the three most valuable things I learned about Interprofessional Education (IPE) at #IPECSpring2018:

#APM17 – Harnessing Technology for one’s own Good: Professional Learning Networks in Social Work

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Oct 21, 2017

On 10/22/17, the last day of CSWE’s 2017 Annual Program Meeting, at 10:00 AM in the Dallas Ballroom A-2, Nancy J. Smyth, Melanie Sage, Jonathan Singer, and I are presenting about how social work educators can use technology for career-long learning.  Nancy, Melanie and I introduced the idea of professional learning networks (PLN) to a packed room at Social Work Distance Education Conference in April, and wanted to bring the practice to the #APM17 crowd.   A PLN incorporates technology-based tools and processes in a way that allows individuals to stay up-to-date and share information about current news, practice knowledge and current research findings.  We will be talking about the mechanics, advantages and disadvantages of establishing a PLN. One resources we will be sharing is our Professional Learning Network (PLN) Worksheet, which takes a social worker through the steps of creating their own PLN.  You can get your own copy here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByR_E-iQH7PdT2t1WV9YYnlZV00/view?usp=sharing

You can access a copy of the presentation slides here: https://www.slideshare.net/laurelhitchcock/professional-learning-networks-for-social-work-81048022 

Teaching Technology-Mediated Practice in a Clinical MSW Program

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Jul 7, 2017

Janet Vizina-Roubal, DSW, MSW, is an Associate Professor of Social Work at Ferris State University in the Department of Social Work. In this blog post, she writes about her inspiration for a technology-mediated practice assignment with MSW students.  Assignments like this one will be increasingly valuable for social work students preparing to use technology with clients while meeting professional and ethical practice standards such as the NASW Code of Ethics and the NASW, ABSW, CSWE & ACSW Standards for Technology in Social Work Practice. If you have questions about the assignment, you can reach Dr. Vizina-Roubal on Twitter at @jvizina.

I started teaching my first clinical MSW course the fall of 2014 with excitement and nervousness. With almost eight years of clinical experience in school social work and outpatient therapy, I had a great toolbox of practice tips to share with my students.  Adding to the excitement was the idea of creating a technology-based assignment where students could learn and practice technology-enhanced therapy skills.  Because I had completed and presented research with a colleague about the benefits of using iPhones in child welfare work, I was curious about how I could create a technology-based assignment for MSW social work students.

Clinical MSW social work classes typically rely on a vast amount of face-to-face role-plays, requiring students to play the part of client and social worker. This experiential learning is challenging, however is very effective at teaching students critical clinical skills.  I was interested in stretching this experiential learning process into role-plays for a technology-mediated learning environment, with the goal of helping students learn how to engage with clients via technology-based communication tools.    Based on this idea, I worked to structure assignments that would allow students to learn how to use technology within clinical social work.  As I embarked on this journey, I searched for curricula or assignments on how to teach online therapy along with best practices. Bewildered, I found almost nothing (Cardenas, Serrano, Flores, & De 2008). I did stumble upon research that showed promising findings that online therapy might be as effective as face-to-face therapy (Chester & Glass, 2006; Dowling & Rickwood, 2013; Holmes & Foster, 2012).  This finding legitimized my interest in pursuing this course of instruction and compelled me to develop assignments where students gained experience within online therapy; practicing as the client as well as the therapist.