Let me respond first to the first topic you wrote about in your self-evaluation report - what you learned about inter-professional collaboration with teachers in your role as a school social worker.
I raised this issue in my mid-placement evaluation. It was a prominent concern of mine, as your fieldwork teacher, at that time in the light of your graphic portrayal of those "poor teachers" that you came across soon after you began to contact them in your school social work role. I counseled in that report that "inter-professional work is best premised on an open dialogue, shared interest, and mutual understanding". I was aspiring for a paradigmatic shift in your positional view. It was important because "teacher bashing" would have seriously undermined the potential contribution of school social work to provide service to students, not to say shaping the school culture or providing professional consultation to teachers.
So I am very pleased that you did give this aspect of your fieldwork experience a high priority, judging from the scope you gave to inter-professional collaboration in your self-evaluation report. I did find a 'paradigm shift' in your positional view, being brought about by your lived experience in the second half of the placement. You came to appreciate teachers as collateral who shared the same interest as yours in tending to the well being of students. No longer did you confine the relationship to teachers in instrumental terms - getting information about your clients or changing teachers' attitudes or behaviours towards their students. Now, they became your colleagues even though the nature of their job was quite different from yours and hence they looked at students from a very different positional view. I am particularly pleased that you had come to "know more about the teacher's situation". Indeed, you came to understand why they were negative about their students and why they were not positively cooperative with you - at least in the beginning. It was in the evolving working relationship that you came to know them better: "they were concerned about their students" in a way different from social workers, "they might focus more on students' performance and discipline". I suppose they too would have come to know you better as a school social worker. It was premised on this growing relationship as collateral that could become influential in helping teachers to come to understand their students outside the walls of the classroom and the school. Your conclusion was right to the point: "we needed open mind to discuss about the clients (with teachers)". At the core of inter-professional collaboration in school social work is the difference in the positional view between teachers and social workers.
As I noted in the mid-placement report, you impressed me as being 'gifted' in relating to students with a good sense of boundary issue - how you define your role as a social worker to your students. Thus, your natural endowment in relating to your students could then be balanced by a clear sense of the nature of the relationship in the context of school social work service. A parallel can be drawn in the relationship between outreaching social workers and their clients. Being friendly may be an asset and, for some social workers, they may even feel assured that students (clients) like them. And then there is the other extreme when some social workers are keen in distancing themselves from students in order to maintain their professional authority. Many teachers subscribe to this view in the way that they approach the teacher-student relationship. I raise this issue again because you haven't mentioned it in your self-evaluation report at the end of the placement. I wish to let you know that this is an important issue and one that you have been handling very well in this placement - judging from what I observed of your interaction with students when I visited you (and your field partner).
I feel less confident about the way you practise in counseling and group work. I am not saying that you are not competent. I don't expect students to be competent in their first fieldwork placement. Indeed, they shouldn't be since even beginning social workers may not be competent either. What I wish to bring up here is my concern of having little access to your practice (the same applies to other students), other than what you described in written practice accounts. We seldom dwelled into your practice experience in our supervision time. Rarely did you bring up practice issues for discussion. I would have serve you better in learning about the practice aspects if we could focus our attention on this, particularly so if there was taped practice sessions to work on. I would advise you to focus on what takes place inside practice in your next placement.
Your recording practice had gone through a process of gradual improvement since we last examined this issue in our mid-placement evaluation. I agreed with you that there had been a visible shift in emphasis in your written re-presentation of your practice sessions - an emphasis on your thoughts and experience, as well as the learning available to you. The shift would have been apparent to readers who study the series of group recordings. It would help if you could review what you picked up in the process of reflective writing on your practice (experience) and revisited the issue raised in our mid-placement evaluation - about "using theories" and "linking practice with the intellectual base of social work". It is a pity to me that you did not made use of the final self-evaluation report as a medium for doing just that. Whilst you did "think (about your) practice experience in terms of approaches, concepts, and theories", you did not examine closer what you learned about them and how they would have related to your practice. This is an important aspect of field-based learning. Again, I would advise you to carry on pursuing this in your second fieldwork placement.
Finally, I wish to appreciate your active participation in our supervision time. You were articulate and also capable of engaging in a sustained discussion on your practice without the insecure feeling that many students would have. I repeated the point raised in our mid-placement evaluation - "I am very pleased with the way you have been using supervision time". In the second half of the placement, I had attempted to make deliberate reference to the intellectual base of social work, hence the example you cited about making reference to Reality Therapy. It would be even more productive if you could re-visit the theory of RT after that supervision session and attempt more explicit link to your work with your students, and return to RT in our later supervision sessions. So, you did need the time to read, but this seems to be a tall order to you since you had made known to me several times how difficult it was to manage time use productively in this placement. In this placement, you thought the problem had to do with the nature of school social work and the work pattern of it. Do examine this issue in the second placement. I think how social workers manage their time use is going to be a general issue across practice settings.
On the whole, I am very pleased with the way you learned and pursued your practice assignments in this placement - and hence a relatively high grade (A 'B+' grade) in my final assessment of your performance (in learning to practise) in this placement.
Student: 70144153
Instructor: W M Kwong
Copyright ©2001 by City University of Hong Kong. All right reserved.