Using digital technology in practice teaching- what a difference a decade makes

By Hilary Lawson

I have been working with practitioners involved in the teaching of social work practice for over 10 years, and World Social Work Day has given me an opportunity to reflect on how the increased availability of digitalised audio and visual technology has positively impacted on teaching and learning techniques.

Good social work practice rests and falls on the practitioner’s ability to build trusting purposeful relationships with others. The same applies to the teaching of social work students. The practice teaching relationship, where small gestures and phrases convey understanding and collaboration, can be the site of enormous learning and change. How can we help practice teachers get this right?

When a new course for practice teachers was introduced in the early 1990s we experimented with the idea of asking the practice teachers to tape themselves working with their student. The tape was brought to the seminar and discussed in a small supportive group of other trainee practice teachers. This intense focus on the way the practice teacher conducted the session – their manner, their responses, how they helped the student reflect on theory and practice- was consistently rated as producing huge learning for all involved. However, it always felt that such was the difficulty in finding and using the technology, it was a fine line between the technology both facilitating  but also hindering learning.

Back then, making a video tape of a practice teacher supervising a student required an enormous amount of setting up. Family centres were one of the few places where a video recorder could be found, and these were large cumbersome things on tri-pods. The practice teacher and student had to visit the centre to record themselves. When we then watched the resultant video in the seminar there would be acres of footage of both the student and practice teacher looking at the camera with anxious expressions and the practice teacher shouting to some off-camera assistant “is it on? Is it recording?”. When they had satisfied themselves that it was indeed “on” it could take many minutes before the pair relaxed into anything that resembled their “normal supervision”.

Watching the video in the small group of peers could also be stressful for the practice teacher. Their obsession with how often they saw themselves twiddle their hair, their astoundment at “do I really sound like that?” would interfere so much with what they could learn about their supervisory practice, that I often gave them the tape at the end for them to look at again at home once they had become more sensitised to what they looked like on camera.

So, when, last week, I was teaching another generation of practice teachers I reflected on the difference a decade makes. When I set them the task of bringing in a recording of themselves, there was little fuss.  Today we are used to using technology to capture moving images of ourselves and most people were able to lay their hands very easily on a smartphone, portable camcorder or pocket sized digital recorder. They transferred their recording onto a dvd or usb stick and we viewed their work huddled around lap-tops or, for those who could bear seeing themselves movie-star size, on the seminar room projector screen.

Sometimes the student had opted to remain audible but invisible and in these cases we watched just the practice teacher and her responses – still a very valuable learning experience for those who are worried about compromising their student’s or supervisee’s confidentiality. I hope the use of visual and audio technology will play an increasingly important role in both teaching social work students and indeed in the continuing professional development of supervisory staff throughout the organisation.