ABSTRACT Continuous professional development (CPD) underpins safe, effective practice by ensuring that social workers acquire and sustain up-to-date knowledge and skills. Additionally, CPD is critical to theoretically rooted, evidence-informed decision-making and intervention. Despite the reported benefits, there are many barriers such as high caseloads and the time required to participate. This paper presents the findings from a proof-of-concept study which piloted a new model for CPD: the Social Work Online Team Training (SWOTT) toolkit. Each themed toolkit incorporates research evidence and/or new theoretical frameworks and is built upon a team-based, peer learning approach. Toolkits have two components: an online module and peer group supervision using a complex case study. The pilot and evaluation integrated two data collection workstreams: a pre-intervention survey and a post-intervention survey; and interviews. Participants reported that the CPD was relevant, accessible, enabling them to refresh knowledge of core theory and acquire new theoretical and evidence-informed knowledge. The toolkit design facilitated deep learning as participants used the online training to critically discuss the complex case study using peer reflection. Overall, findings demonstrated the value of shared learning experiences through the combined modes of learning (online/in-person) resulting in evidence-informed CPD with real-world relevance to practice contexts.

ABSTRACT The launch of ChatGPT sent ripples across higher education, particularly in attempts to detect its use by students using it to complete assignments. This paper reflects on the past semester of ‘life with ChatGPT’, starting with a narrative of current practices in assessment writing at the Singapore University of Social Sciences, before embarking on a test of the response generated by ChatGPT in answering a case study-based exam question. Taken together with the author’s experiences grading assignments that had been at least partially generated by artificial intelligence (AI) but not known at that time, it is surmised that case studies tend not to lend themselves well to having good-quality responses being generated by AI tools such as ChatGPT, at this current stage of their development. However, implications for assessment writing involving case studies include the need for sufficient details, both essential and peripheral, so that students have to ‘separate the wheat from the chaff’, and decipher how best to apply the concepts being examined based on the unique circumstances of the case scenario. At this point in time, the use of complex, detailed, and well-written case studies in assessment questions appears to be ChatGPT’s kryptonite and could ensure authentic assessments.

ABSTRACT This paper describes a collaboration between a university and a local child welfare agency in the development and delivery of a Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) child welfare course featuring lived experience knowledge and learning situated in community-based child welfare sites. We present results of an exploratory mixed methods pre-post survey and focus group evaluation which examined changes in student general knowledge, perceptions of skills for decision- making and orienting beliefs about child welfare families. The results did not yield uniform significant results. The discussion delves into lessons learned about the importance of supporting students to develop skills for respectfully gathering and critically analyzing information and how to break through what we observed as student reluctance to learn about child welfare wrongdoings. We reflect on why, despite centering curriculum on lived experience knowledge, we were not successful in overturning students’ negative orienting beliefs about families and children receiving child welfare services. We conclude with considerations for new directions in BSW child welfare curriculum.

ABSTRACT Critical social work practice should transcend across micro, mezzo, and macro levels, and it is a social work educator’s responsibility to foster skills that are contextualized and connected to social justice and anti-oppressive frameworks. Despite the importance of addressing and integrating systemic oppression in cross-cultural social work practice, students struggle with being able to translate their knowing into doing. Using a video case of a client named Glen who is receiving services in an outpatient addiction counseling program, we discuss how to incorporate a critical, systemic, and structural lens in social work mental health practice. Psychotherapy process research cautions against weighing an entire session equally and underlines the importance of examining critical moments within the session. Guided by a psychotherapy process research approach, we illustrate how we train students to identify significant in-session moments and encourage students to brainstorm and practice in-session social work tasks that integrate a structural lens with clinical interventions. This teaching approach also illustrates how to translate critical scholarship and approaches into micro-level teachable moments in classroom to guide students’ cross-cultural practice. The pedagogical approach using a micro-analysis of in-session social work tasks heightens students’ awareness and competence in how to intervene with culturally diverse clients.

ABSTRACT Suicide is complex and multifactorial, with social, cultural, and economic components, exacerbated by inequalities, social injustice, marginalization important contexts, along with the immediate presenting crisis. Social workers are uniquely equipped for suicide crisis support, employed across clinical and non-clinical settings. However, how social workers access pre- service suicide education and training at the university qualifying level is poorly understood. Despite taking on roles in which they will be required to respond to suicidal people immediately upon graduation. All Australian qualifying social work programs are required to adhere to the Australian Social Work Education and Accreditation Standards (ASWEAS). These standards identify that mental health content is to be embedded in Australian university curriculum. However, there are no clear directions regarding inclusion of suicide prevention in social work curriculum. An analysis of suicide-related education within 33 Australian universities with accredited social work qualifying degrees revealed that 1484 subjects are offered across all pre-service qualifying awards, only one currently offers standalone suicide focused subject. The focus on standalone suicide prevention reflects that suicide is not always connected to a mental ill-health presentation. Seeking to explore if targeted training to Social Work students on suicide intervention, postvention, and prevention occurs including recommendations for curriculum development.

ABSTRACT This paper details an exercise used to collaboratively develop guidelines that support establishing classroom norms. It is one that has been used with practice-based classes that require students to participate in experiential learning activities, and to engage in complex discussions. This short paper consists of three parts: first it makes a brief case for classroom guidelines. Second, it details the exercise. And third, it discusses pedagogical benefits.

ABSTRACT Within social work education there has been extensive interest and use of simulation for learning purposes. In recent years, this interest has broadened to the use of Virtual Reality Simulation (VRS) for teaching because of the benefits that include a safe environment in which to learn, flexibility and self-efficacy. Several examples of VRS have been developed that range from specifically designed computer-based programs through to Google Cardboard VR. While such efforts are to be lauded, what is missing is a deliberate attempt to build on the knowledge of such developments. This article will detail the creation and implementation of a VRS with Social Work and Early Help practitioners, but unlike previous examples, the study builds on the practitioners’ sense of presence and reality. In doing so, it was found that the practitioners’ practice experience and knowledge influenced their perception of the VRS. This finding has significant implications for the development of VRS for social work, in particular showing that there is a need to make a distinction between students and practitioners, and to appreciate that learners are not passive beings.

ABSTRACT Although, arguably, the origins of social work in the UK have been closely aligned to community development in the past few decades, social work has occupied a bureaucratic landscape focusing primarily on individual risks and needs, leading to both fields drifting further apart. Dismantling of shared values and practices was fueled by layers of government policy and legislation, driven by a neoliberal agenda and public management reforms. However, a horizon of hope emerged when university staff in Social Work and Community Development Departments in Northern Ireland were approached to examine the need to reintroduce community development principles and practices into social work training. This paper aims to trace the development of a post-graduate diploma in community development approaches for professional social workers and analyses research that explores community development as the essence of social work. The programme was developed through a synergistic partnership between university, health trusts and the professional awarding body. Tracking 4 years of programme delivery, the paper highlights the effectiveness of, and learning from, collaboration between the two professions at strategic, technical, and operational levels. We posit here well-learned lessons for future collaborations and make recommendations providing a route map to mainstreaming community development in social work practice.

ABSTRACT This article examines the urgency and centrality of relational social work with adults. It discusses the relevance and potential of social pedagogy for empowerment and social justice and introduces a Social Pedagogy Toolkit for social workers. Written by a Principal Social Worker and Lecturer in Social Work, it discusses threshold concepts in social work education, arguing the need for creative resources that support transformative processes. It concludes with a discussion on further development and application of the toolkit.