Grant sustains critical reflection for Social Work students post-graduation

Congratulations to Dr. Laura Béres, Associate Professor and Graduate Program Coordinator in the School of Social Work, who has received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Grant for “Sustaining skills of critical reflection on practice.” Congratulations also to her co-applicants, School of Social Work faculty Drs. Stephanie Baird, Assistant Professor; Jane Sanders, Assistant Professor; and Rosemary Vito, Associate Professor. All contributed to the planning and writing of the grant.

King’s Master of Social Work (MSW) program prepares Social Work graduates to join the field with advanced practice skills. To maintain ethical practice and ongoing development of competencies for registration in the Ontario College of Certified Social Workers and Social Service Workers (OCCSWSSW), social workers need to critically reflect upon their practices.

The research project’s aim is to understand how to effectively foster the integration of critical reflection on practice (CRoP) across courses and into ongoing social work practice for MSW students so that it becomes a professional habit. Students had previously indicated it was difficult to sustain these skills learned within a classroom context without further support once they were out in the field with all its demands and pressures.

“We teach a Critical Reflection on Practice course, but we wanted to ensure that skills learned in that course would be sustained throughout field education placements and beyond into ongoing practice,” says Dr. Béres.

The project will result in a CRoP manual that can be used by Schools of Social Work internationally, and a series of short videos to demonstrate and further disseminate the skills of CRoP. The manual will enhance curriculum and teaching material, specifically fine-tuning the integration of CRoP in the MSW curriculum beyond the initial CRoP course, and into field education seminars so that it has a greater chance of becoming a habit post-graduation. The videos will provide an introduction to the application of theories that make up CRoP, demonstrate the two-stage process of asking questions in a small group setting to deconstruct and reconstruct a practice incident, and provide examples of how to integrate CRoP into the classroom curriculum, field education settings as well as more informally post-graduation.

Dr. Béres says the project will be “especially important as CRoP has not been intentionally incorporated into Canadian field education settings previously and sharing these results will provide a template for other universities to adopt.”

Dr. Béres is the Principal Investigator due to her previous writing and research into CRoP. During the 2016-2017 academic year, Dr. Béres developed and taught SW 9807A/B: Critical Reflection and Appraisal of Social Work Practice for the first time. At that time, she collaborated with Dr. Jan Fook, developer of CRoP, on researching the teaching of CRoP in a classroom context, resulting in the book Learning Critical Reflection: Experiences of the Transformative Learning Process. Five of the chapters in this book were written by former MSW students who were part of the first cohort of the CRoP course.

Drs. Béres and Baird each taught one section of the CRoP course during the 2021-2022 academic year. Following this course, all four colleagues (Drs. Baird, Béres, Sanders and Vito) facilitated a practicum integration seminar. Qualtrics online surveys were used to gather information from students, both before and after the seminars, asking how prepared the students felt to continue using CRoP in the field, what could assist them in sustaining these new skills and how much they had continued to integrate it. This constituted a pilot project which will inform how the School of Social Work teaches and supports CroP in the first year of this three-year SSHRC-funded project.

“It is wonderful having the opportunity to work in this manner with colleagues within the School of Social Work. The collegiality of King’s and the School helps with this enormously. It’s lovely to be able to enjoy working together,” says Dr. Béres.