Editor’s observe: Melissa Freedman, MSW, is a social work educator and advisor specializing in management, supervision, administration, and high quality administration and assurance. On this weblog publish, she shares steerage for social work educators about the way to begin planning for the necessary activity of reaffirmation and the preliminary technique of accreditation with the Council on Social Work Training. I may envision social work college and workers making use of these pointers to the adoption of recent accreditation requirements and insurance policies and sharing them with institutional management when asking for assist and sources. She could be reached through electronic mail at freedman121@comcast.net.
The time has come to start writing your accreditation self-study with the Council of Social Work Education (CSWE). As with all main venture, preparation and planning are key. Easy, proper? After which it’s time to place the metaphorical pen to paper, and the landslide of hysteria and overwhelming doubt begins. To assist alleviate among the agony, this weblog serves to offer introductory steerage to determine your accreditation group and the preliminary duties essential to develop probably the most acceptable plan of motion in your program(s). This steerage stems from my years of a profession spent in management, coaching, and high quality administration and assurance. I’ll begin with this…it actually takes a village, and writing a self-study ought to by no means be a siloed course of.
The first step is to find out the members of your accreditation group. The composition of your group will depend on which social work program(s) you supply and the way your tutorial unit is structured. For instance, you supply each baccalaureate and grasp’s diploma applications. The accreditation group members would come with the baccalaureate program director, the grasp’s program director, the director of area schooling, an evaluation coordinator, and the lead directors of the tutorial unit, be it a School, Faculty, or Division – Dean, Affiliate Dean, Director, or Chair. As a result of nature of their outlined roles, these people are assigned main tasks for making choices regarding social work schooling. Except for these members, it is best to search for further college and workers to affix your group. In doing this, I encourage you to contemplate who else might have the talents and/or expertise to successfully present assist. Your choices doubtless depend upon how your tutorial unit is organized within the total institutional construction. For instance, how may IT assist be built-in into the method? How might an institutional analysis and evaluation workplace be utilized? Who may aid you preserve a centralized file or platform that may function the first repository for all supplies and documentation? Are you aware somebody who can help with copy enhancing? That is particularly necessary when a number of authors are concerned within the writing course of. And lastly, do you want an exterior advisor to help your group in totally writing to the minimal threshold necessities of the accreditation requirements?
The subsequent step is to determine who would be the main authors of the self-study, and who might be accountable for authoring responses to which particular accreditation requirements. You probably have co-located applications, who will guarantee related data (i.e., insurance policies, procedures, standards) is constant between the applications? Which requirements will this system director(s) write, and which requirements might be written by administrative management? It’s typically assumed that this system administrators will draft responses associated to this system’s mission and consistency with the occupation’s objective and values, the rationale for this system’s curriculum design, and the way the skilled observe neighborhood informs this system’s curriculum. Shifting past the core curriculum and program requirements, who will write responses for college requirements, together with principal assignments to this system(s), college credentials, faculty-to-student ratios, and the recruiting and hiring of school? It’s crucial to determine these writing tasks as early as potential, not solely to divide the workloads but in addition to be clear concerning the dedication required of every particular person and the incentives to assist college and workers efforts. After your group is assembled, I additional encourage you to contemplate back-ups ought to any member of your group be unable to meet their position as initially deliberate. Life occurs.
The third step is to critically study your group members’ information and understanding of CSWE’s Instructional Insurance policies and Accreditation Requirements (EPAS). Are group members new to social work schooling? Are members new to CSWE accreditation? New to the reaffirmation course of and necessities? Have they beforehand authored a self-study, be it parts or a whole self-study? Have any members served as web site guests? From this, you possibly can determine the group’s strengths and wanted areas of coaching, each inside and exterior. CSWE provides an array of assist – see their Accreditation Scope & Services webpage – and encourages applications to make the most of their accreditation providers and sources. As a part of its providers, CSWE provides 30-minute session appointments with a program’s CSWE accreditation specialist. The observe of warning right here is that accreditation workers don’t decide compliance; solely CSWE’s Board of Accreditation can render this choice. This occurs after you submit the self-study. In brief, be ready that the sure or no response you search will not be obtainable. Having a community of social work educators with accreditation expertise shouldn’t be missed in your preparation. Whereas utilizing self-study examples from different applications just isn’t inspired by CSWE, they could assist to encourage resourcefulness in your writing and organizing content material. Having others to attach with who’ve lived experiences helps to normalize what your group could also be experiencing.
The fourth step is to evaluate your consolation with ambiguity and uncertainty. Dangers are all the time inherent in an accreditation course of, and radically accepting the potential of dangers from the beginning establishes a practical pathway ahead. For instance, CSWE identifies continuously cited requirements on an annual foundation and shares this data on its web site and at conferences. In the event you have been to submit a self-study tomorrow, what space(s) may end in findings that should be addressed through the web site go to? What sources do it’s important to remediate recognized dangers? Are there areas that, regardless of how a lot effort and time you dedicate to, will nonetheless end in compliance under the minimal threshold? Whereas perfection is one thing we will conform to, it will not be sensible, or essential. Be at peace along with your greatest. Realizing when to name the query is critical. Some applications are all the time going to do it higher and sooner than you. Whereas the requirements are designed to be universally utilized, the truth is that applications situated in establishments with steady and plentiful budgets, extra sources, and higher autonomy have a bonus over smaller applications. The aim of the self-study is to inform your story – there aren’t any proper or improper methods for a social work program to exist. However, there are proper and improper methods to reply compliance statements to display a minimal stage of compliance. Extra on this later.
And lastly, for the executive management, sometimes serving as this system’s main contact with CSWE, what’s your imaginative and prescient for the accreditation/reaffirmation course of? How concerned will you be, or do you want to be within the course of? How will your management model be exacted – Are you a micromanager? Are you a servant chief? Fascinated by the longer term, what do you hope to achieve or accomplish because of the self-study?
Do you might have another suggestions for planning out the self-study course of? Please share your ideas within the remark part under.
cite:
Freedman, M. (2023, June 30). 5 Steps to Planning your Social Work Program’s Self-Examine: CSWE Accreditation. Educating and Studying in Social Work Weblog. https://laureliversonhitchcock.org/2023/06/30/five-steps-to-planning-your-social-work-programs-self-study-cswe-accreditation/
