Toward a Reflection-centered Model of Graduate Social Work Education: Implications for Enhanced Practice

ABSTRACT

Reflective practice emphasizes the importance of providing practitioners with opportunities to reflect on their work in order to manage the complexity of day-to-day practice. This study found that graduate students who engaged in a reflection-centered educational model reported enhanced practice through reflection-on-action, reflection-in-action, helping clients reflect, holding clients emotionally, tolerating ambiguity, and making ethical decisions. Students identified the institutionalized nature of reflection within their graduate program as a key facilitator of their development of reflective practice capacities, and ultimately their enhanced practice with clients. This underscores the potentially critical role of reflection in the education and training of graduate-level social workers.

KEYWORDS:

• Reflective practice
• reflective supervision
• social work
• seminars
• MSW students

Notes

1. Throughout the document, Erikson Institute will be referred to as Erikson.

2. The methods presented in this article have been described elsewhere (Curry & Epley, 2020).

3. Although we gathered faculty perspectives for the larger study, we focus specifically on student and alumni perspectives in the analysis for this paper.

4. All of the MSCD participants were part of the infancy specialization.

5. A portion of the data related to participants’ conceptualizations of reflective practice has been described elsewhere (Curry & Epley, 2020). It is presented here to briefly introduce and provide context to the rest of the findings.

6. We were unable to differentiate in any meaningful way between student and alumni experiences so the data are presented together.

7. The limitations presented in this article have also been described elsewhere (Curry & Epley, 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Faculty Innovation Fund at Erikson Institute.