An Educator's Guide to the Development of Advanced Practice Competencies in Clinical Social Work

Abstract

The 2008 Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards identified 10 core competencies that all social work graduates should master. MSW programs found themselves with a need to identify knowledge, values, and skill statements that reflected what concentration-year students were expected to know and be able to do. In 2009 a group of educators convened at the Council on Social Work Education in Alexandria, VA to develop a model of advanced practice in clinical social work. This article describes the work group's process; identifies and describes the resulting advanced clinical knowledge, values, and skills statements; discusses the key debates and issues that arose during the development of the statements; and concludes with the implications for social work education and practice.

Keywords:

• advanced social work practice
• CSWE EPAS Standards
• Advanced Critical Social Work Competencies
• curriculum
• accreditation standards
• MSW

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Erratum

Acknowledgments

We thank the members of the CSWE work group with whom we developed the model of Advanced Social Work Practice in Clinical Social Work discussed in this article. We also thank anonymous reviewers for their practical and helpful comments.