Modern Social Work Practice

Teaching and Learning in Practice Settings

Mark Doel, Steven M. Shardlow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780754641216
• eBook ISBN: 9781351916967
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

Modern Social Work Practice is an interactive book designed to provide readers with an opportunity to engage with key aspects of current social work practice. It also provides an excellent digest of the significant literature. Each chapter is introduced with an activity or exercise designed to aid student learning in discrete aspects of practice, building up to a complete curriculum for practice learning. The book builds upon the success and style of Social Work Practice (1993) and The New Social Work Practice (1998). Mark Doel and Steven M. Shardlow have shaped the book to take account of the National Occupational Standards for Social Work, aiming to provide a creative, practical and up-to-date resource for teaching and learning in line with current practices.

PART I
Foundations of Practice

CONTEXT: New opportunities for practice learning

Social work students learn much of their practice in field settings. In the United Kingdom this kind of practice learning has long constituted 50 per cent of the programme; this continues to be the case with the three-year social work undergraduate degree which has become the minimum qualification for social workers across the UK.

During the 1990s the content of practice learning in the UK was closely prescribed by ‘six core competences’ (CCETSW, 1991a). This approach reflected the view that students should focus on learning competences, which in turn centred on the training function of placements. It emphasized what social workers do rather than what social work is.

However, during this same period, the notion of the reflective practitioner also gained ground. Here, learning about social work practice was based on principles of adult learning, with an emphasis on the education, rather than the training, of students, and a greater awareness of context and meaning. The tension between these two approaches led many to polarize the debate. Eventually, however, a holistic view of this apparent conflict emerged, which enabled students and practice teachers to find ways to synthesize competence and context (Doel et al., 2002).

Taking the most common structure for the new award in the UK, the move from a two-year period of study (the Diploma in Social Work) to a three-year undergraduate degree is increasing the length of time for students to learn about social work practice by over 50 per cent (on average, from 130 days to 200 days).¹ However, it is not just the amount of time which has increased. A desire to see changes in the kind of learning has been reflected in a change of language, such as the development of the notion of a ‘practice learning opportunity’ rather than a traditional placement. Although the occupational standards for social work practice have to be taught, learnt and demonstrated, like the six core competences before them, there is less prescription about how, when and where (TOPSS, 2002).

Where does social work take place?

This may seem a strange question to ask, but the hegemony of local government social services departments in England and Wales and social work departments in Scotland since the early 1970s has created a very close association between the profession of social work and the way in which social workers have been employed. This has not necessarily been the case in many other countries, where examples can be found of the service user’s own place of work acting as the main provider of social work services. Now, the situation is changing in the UK. Increasingly, social workers are being employed outside social services departments, which themselves are finding new names such as ‘Social Care and Health’ and ‘Housing and Social Care’. Yesterday’s vision of a unified social work service, epitomized by the social services department, has transformed into a variety of forms, with significant movements into health and education. This trend is likely to be accelerated by developments such as the consolidation of children’s services across health, education and social services. It is too early to say whether this will constitute a dilution of social work (as it gets stirred into some kind of multiprofessional soup) or whether this represents an opportunity to extend its influence and impact (spicing the soup with its own distinctive flavour). Whether it is a case of diluting or spicing, social work is no longer consolidated in one primary location.

This diversification opens the way for more flexibility. There are indications that the search for practice learning opportunities is widening. In the state sector, practice learning sites are likely to extend from the traditional base of social work and social care settings into health, education, prisons, police and so on; in the voluntary, independent and private sectors, these opportunities could extend to the wider world of social welfare, including small, community projects and user-led organizations. Social work students will therefore have more opportunities to learn about social work processes in settings which are not primarily social work agencies, even theatre groups (Billington and Roberts, 2002). The practice learning opportunity should therefore do exactly what it says on the tin, and not be seen as ‘work experience’.

Students will also need to be broad-minded and creative in their approach, which means not being ‘concerned that unless they have a certain type of placement their employment prospects following the course will be hampered’ (Billington and Roberts, 2002: 31). Employers, too, will need to be less restrictive in their selection criteria for interviewing newly qualified social workers.

Teaching and supervising the student’s practice learning

There is a difference between being a good practitioner or an experienced service user and being able to help somebody learn about good practice or to benefit from your experience. There are already a number of excellent texts to guide this transformation (Bogo and Vayda, 1987; Brown and Bourne, 1996; Caspi and Reid, 2002; Gardiner, 1989; Hawkins and Shohet, 2000; Shardlow and Doel, (forthcoming) Shulman, 1999). However, despite the growing literature on practice learning, Brodie’s (1993) verdict still stands: that we know very little about what actually takes place within the supervision process generally or the practice tutorial (supervision session) specifically. This also seems to be the case in North America: ‘much of what occurs in supervision goes on behind closed doors, leaving all involved unsure whether the [student] is receiving quality education’ (Caspi and Reid, 2002: 177). By and large, what happens between students and practice teachers remains a very private affair. We hope that using the activities in this book together with other students and their practice teachers will open up these processes. They can, after all, remain confidential without being hidden.

The Code of Practice for practice teachers published by the National Organisation for Practice Teaching (NOPT, 2000) is a useful checklist of the areas which teachers and work-based supervisors need to consider, listed under these headings:

• Anti-oppressive / anti-discriminatory statement
• Preparation for placement
• Assessment
• Managing marginal or failing students
• Monitoring and evaluation
• Professional development.

In addition to referring to the NOPT code of practice and reading some of the wider literature mentioned earlier, it is important that everyone involved in the student’s learning asks themselves ‘What will make for a good practice learning experience?’. Those who need to ask this question are not just the student, practice teacher/ assessor, work-based supervisor and college tutor, but also other team members, agency managers and service users and carers involved in helping the student to learn about practice.

Clarke et al.’s (2003: 110) findings in respect of the three key factors which help to create a positive placement experience for student nurses are relevant to social work, too:

• the ward was prepared for them and had some structure to support the learning of the students
• staff were interested in them and they felt valued in their role;
• students were able to work with their mentor. (Clarke et al., 2003:110)

It is always important to discover what an individual considers important in the context of this particular experience. This is increasingly significant as opportunities for practice learning sites are sought outside traditional ‘placements’, in sites where experience of social work students (or any from higher education) is limited. There also needs to be agreement about how the aspirations for a good practice learning experience will be transformed into concrete reality.

Some state that there has to be a ‘fit’ between student and teacher/supervisor. However, ‘the establishment of a positive supervisory relationship is not solely based on the “fit” between supervisor and supervisee personalities’ (Caspi and Reid, 2002: 124), whatever the term ‘fit’ might be taken to imply. It is erroneous to assume that people with the same kind of biography (gender, ethnicity, age, and so on) are bound to have a better fit, or that aiming for similarity is automatically beneficial to learning. If a core social work value is concerned with the celebration of diversity, let this be modelled in the student–teacher relationship.

Nor, in the excitement about the possibility of new learning opportunities, must we overlook the potential pitfalls. These are likely to become most transparent when making assessments of the student’s performance. Of the common mistakes noted by Kadushin (1992: 365–68), the ‘contrast error’ may be the most frequent. This is the mistake of comparing the student’s performance to other workers or to the supervisor’s own standard, rather than to criteria that have been mutually agreed (see the next section, ‘The Learning Agreement’) and which reflect the fact that this is a student, not a practitioner.

In particular, new work-based supervisors and assessors need access to support and consultation from experienced practice teachers, otherwise the following findings are likely to be replicated:

[I] asked colleagues about their supervisory approaches and received two [kinds of] response. One group said that they drew upon their own experiences as supervisees, attempting to do (or not do) what their supervisors did with them. The second group said that they worked extemporaneously, ‘winging it’ and learning through trial and error. (Caspi and Reid, 2002: 173)

Current and future students deserve better.

Benefits of supervising students

There are many benefits to supervising students. A study by Shardlow et al. (2002) found that practice teachers regarded supervision as an opportunity to reflect on their own practice, which brought increased confidence and motivation to acquire more knowledge of research and theory. Students were seen as providing a challenge, in the best sense of the word.

Experienced practitioners can drift into automatic decision-making, in which service users ‘are assessed as only needing services that the agency currently provides within its mission and area of expertise’ (Wayne and Cohen, 2001: 18). Teaching and supervising a student encourages practitioners to slow down, in order to explain the thinking behind their actions. This helps not just the student, but also the practitioner, to consider fresh approaches and new perspectives, and to question any automatic tendencies in their own practice.

What are the economics of a student placement? Busy teams are often reluctant to offer a placement to students because of pressure of work, but the balance of input and output can work in favour of the agency (Shardlow, 1988). The memory of an individual student who has been the centre of concern, and perhaps much angst, sadly lives on well beyond the fonder remembrance of the twenty students who gave the agency a good experience. In reality, the benefits to an agency or project of those twenty students far outweigh the resources allocated to the one failing student.

A mindset change is needed in order to perceive students as a potential resource, able to develop innovative services for the agency. For example, practice teachers at the 2003 annual workshops of the National Organization for P...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Foundations of Practice
• PART II Direct Practice
• PART III Agency Practice
• PART IV Themes of Practice
• Appendix: National Occupational Standards
• Glossary of acronyms
• Glossary of terms
• Bibliography
• Index