Placements are crucial for the education of student social workers, but they have a huge benefit for the teams they're placed with too. Deirdre Fitzpatrick, ScOPT Trustee, has made a short video illustrating the advantages to teams of having a student and the benefits, too, to the student. It's just one minute long.
The Practice Pyramid is a learning tool that supports social work students' ability to integrate their understanding of personal and professional values, theory and practice during field placements. Although it has been used by practice educators in Scotland for over 20 years, it is not well known elsewhere and has yet to be evaluated. This paper, written by a practice educator and a student social worker, describes the Practice Pyramid and provides a case example to illustrate how it contributed to one student's learning during a practice placement.
Written for Learning at Work week, this is a list of resources relating to the assessment of learners.
Written for Learning at Work week, this is about a tool which enables wider feedback on a student's practice.
ALPS is the Assessment and Learning in Practice Settings, Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning
This is a suite of generic assessment tools for use in practice. The formative assessment tools were mapped to three identified Common Competences; Communication, Team Working and Ethical Practice.
The Field Educator is an online journal published by the Simmons School of Social Work that promotes knowledge exchange among the social work field education community.
Since the academic year 2013-14 within England, Practice Educators (PEs) have been required to assess social work students during field placements using the Professional Capabilities Framework (PCF) and according to the principles of holistic assessment. Whilst the adoption of the PCF as part of the national change agenda is currently being scrutinised and debated, there has been little research or analysis regarding the practice assessment of social work students on placement and, in particular, the views and experiences of PEs charged with this responsibility.
A resource to begin conversations among groups of learners on defining supervision.
This toolkit was developed to support Work-place Supervisors and Practice Educators assessing Social Work students on practice based placements in Herefordshire.
