Assignment: Practice Decision
Purpose: In this assignment students will have a beginning-level opportunity to use their critical thinking and practice experiences to inform and communicate professional judgments. This assignment will help students prepare for engaging in research-informed practice and practice-informed research.
In social work practice we must often make decisions quickly, sometimes with limited background information. Consequently, we will occasionally make errors or think of better ways to handle a situation after the fact.
Sometimes these errors are influenced by an over-reliance on tradition or authority. In other circumstances, the flaws in our practice decisions or actions reflect an error in human inquiry: inaccurate observation, overgeneralization, selective observation, or ego involvement in understanding.
Directions: Think of a practice decision that you have made or a situation to which you responded in a social work, human service, or social justice organization that was flawed. Alternately, you can pick a practice decision that someone else made or a practice situation they handled that could have been handled better.
Part 1, The Practice Decision or Situation: Describe the decision or the way that the situation was handled.
Part 2, Errors in Thinking or Inquiry: Briefly discuss how the situation was related to one or more of the problems listed above (i.e., over-reliance on tradition or authority, inaccurate observation, overgeneralization, selective observation, or ego involvement in understanding).
Part 3, An Alternative, Better Way to Handle the Situation: Explain how the use of a scientific approach, critical thinking skills, and/or the empirical literature may have improved the practice experience.
Format and other requirement: This written assignment should be no more than 2 typed pages, 12-point Times New Roman font, double spaced. Citing sources of information is required in this assignment. Be sure to provide full APA formatted references.
