[jamescw1234]

So here you are, after three or two years of social work school this is what it comes to. The fourth year placement (4DD6) and placement class (4D06) is supposed to prepare you for professional practice. Here is where you're supposed to come out with the skills to be a generalist social worker. The placement process is the same as 3DD6, so you go through Sheila Sammon and have your interview and all that jazz. Unlike 3DD6/3D06, you cannot be exempt if you have relevant experience. My placement was on a high intensity community mental health team and I loved it. It is expected you have more responsibilities fourth year and the evaluation is more in depth.

The class itself had some issues, as students we felt that it lacked the appropriate content to prepare us for professional practice. We had some interesting topics such as suicide, mental health, and discussion of AOP, but we would have liked to have seen topics such as preparing for a job interview, resume skills, and more practical discussion of social work practice. There were also concerns about the assignments as they were very micro based and may not apply to students in community development placements. However, my professor said they are revamping the class next year because of the criticisms of the current format. Like 3D06, the class started off with 'check in' where we go around in a circle and discuss how placement went. As the seminar was quite large we split into two groups, the prof and TA would take turns sitting in each group.

Ann Fudge Schormans was my seminar leader, she is absolutely brilliant and I loved her very much. She really made you think and had some great insights into social work practice. She is also one of the few profs at Mac that helped me be a bit more critical of AOP. I was very impressed with her approach as a seminar leader, she was able to challenge us but in a non confrontational way. I was also lucky enough to have Will Rowe as my TA, if you're in social work you should know him and his awesomeness.

Course Breakdown:
Facilitation of Checkin/Critical Review: 5%
Every week a student facilitated the check in part of class. It was pretty easy to do, you need to make sure things run smoothly and ask questions, also you get marked on things such as eye contact and how you payed attention to classmates. If you were not comfortable doing this, you could also critically review a reading in the course pack, but most people opted for the facilitation.

Group Reading Assignments: 10%
During weeks 2 and 3, we were to do the readings for class and as a group summarize the readings and lead a group discussion. Ann would also ask the group questions to see if we could be critical about the readings. A pretty simple assignment.

Ethical Dilemma: 15%
Pick an ethical dilemma from your placement, it can be a specific case or a broader topic. Explore what has been done and what you would do. Also explore the social contexts of the situation. It should be about 8-10 pages in length. Outside resources are not necessarily needed. I did not particularly like the structure of this assignment, I was not sure how to analyze a dilemma or what constituted to be an ethical dilemma. Ann stated that other faculty members including herself were going to redo this assignment for next year.

Group Supervision: 20%
The majority of post-check in seminar consisted of this. We were supposed to pick an issue from placement and present it to the class and lead a 30 minute presentation/discussion on the issue. We also needed to find two readings to assign to the class. I actually really liked this assignment and enjoyed participating in class discussion.

Process Recording: 20%
Do a process recording with someone from placement. If you can't because of confidentiality reasons you can do a mock interview with your field instructor. This process recording is nowhere near as intense as the 40something paged 2A06 one. You just need to submit a transcript of certain parts of the interview that you will analyze, or the case notes if you did not record the interview. Then you are to do a chart like the 2A06 one, but it only needs to be four pages, so just pick the most relevant parts to analyze and reflect upon. After this do an 8-10 page analysis of the whole interview. Talk about what theories you may have used, overall strengths/weaknesses and look at the bigger picture.

Assessment: 20%
This assignment also created a lot of confusion among classmates and instructors. We were to complete an assessment of a particular policy or case from placement. We were told to do it in a way that would work best for us. So I did a long-form assessment from my placement and then a macro analysis of the case. Many people did it differently as well. So again, they are going to revamp this assignment.

While I loved Ann, I did not like this class, I didn't find the assignments helpful in preparing me to be a social worker, nor were the topics. There needs to be a greater emphasis on preparing to be social workers as most people graduate after doing 4D06/4DD6