Academic Innovation

To truly professionalize the child welfare workforce, students in social work and other academic programs should be prepared through knowledge gained but also understand the complexities and realities of working with vulnerable families. The Academic Innovation (AI) initiative is working to achieve this through a comprehensive approach: creating child welfare exposure opportunities for students, organizing strategic child welfare engagement events to generate interest and create networking opportunities, and implementing robust instructional innovation across disciplines. Changes to the curriculum are the initial focus of the GROW Center’s Academic Innovation agenda and is being led by the Florida State University (FSU) College of Social Work (CSW) in collaboration with other university affiliates. Child welfare issues will eventually be infused intentionally as a component of all courses through a Problem-based/Case-based Learning (PBL/ CBL) teaching method, which is an empirically proven approach to educating professionals working in highly complex systems of care, e.g., health care, law, business. Moving to PBL/CBL pedagogy is a major and transformative re-direction of Florida university social work programs. The proposed teaching methodology is a focused effort to provide social work and other interdisciplinary students with enhanced real-life training that will better prepare them to engage with the demands of working with children and families in any social work area, but specifically in child welfare. It also seeks to improve the availability and recruitment of well-prepared candidates for the workforce, increasing workforce stability and sustainability through the preparation of resilient and informed social workers. This curriculum innovation encompasses the implementation and evaluation of an innovative educational approach intended to enhance the preparation and training of students poised to enter the child welfare workforce and engage meaningfully with children and families involved in the child welfare system. To achieve this goal, the two overarching objectives are: 1) design, implement, and

THE VISION:

Provide students with the necessary skills to effectively navigate real-life practice challenges by transforming the classroom into an engaging and collaborative casebased learning environment that supports the development of advanced problemsolving skills, complex reasoning, ethical decision-making, and student-driven learning.

evaluate an innovative and interactive Problem-Based Learning (PBL) and Case-Based Learning (CBL) instructional approaches into social work curricula; and 2) design, implement, and evaluate a shared learning opportunity across disciplines, specifically criminal justice, law, and family and child sciences.

The aim is to enhance the transfer of knowledge gained through teaching to skill acquisition and retention. This can be accomplished by providing pre-service real-to-life case exposure to 1) optimize the development of needed social work skills; 2) strengthen student self-efficacy and resiliency; 3) increase students’ motivation to be lifelong learners; 4) improve decision-making and cognitive reasoning skills; 5) enhance their competence to effectively navigate; and 6) address complex family cases and systems.

LEARN MORE:

PRE-SERVICE REAL-TO-LIFE CASE EXPOSURE LEADS TO: