“If there was one piece of advice I could give you as you go on placement it would be about ‘soft skills’”: Practice Teacher’s advice to Social Work students

Niamh Flanagan; Elaine Wilson

doi:10.1921/jpts20242416

Authors

Niamh Flanagan Maynooth University https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1431-7132
Elaine Wilson Assistant Professor in the School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1916-9776

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1921/jpts20242416

Keywords:

practice placement, soft skills, professional self, questioning, communication, mistakes, reflexivity, advice

Abstract

Practice teachers are the fulcrum of social work practice education: the point around which practice placement revolves and the principal point of support for students on placement. Given their experience, practice teachers are best placed to advise students about going on placement. This research sought to garner the principal advice that Irish social work practice teachers would offer to students as they set out on their placement. Contrary to expectation, the practice teachers largely chose to focus their advice on the, somewhat neglected area of soft skills, elevating this to similar status as the ‘hard skills’ of practice. Preliminary research findings from this research were shared in a social-media-friendly spoken-word-video in order to rapidly disseminate the advice to students (Flanagan & Wilson, 2023a) and this article further interrogates the advice, placing it in the context of academic literature on soft skills and their contribution to the development of a ‘professional self’. The article maps the key soft skills essential to placement and practice according to literature and operationalises these skills in the advice of practice teachers.

Author Biographies

Niamh Flanagan, Maynooth University

Associate Professor Niamh Flanagan is Head of Department, Department of Applied Social Studies, Maynooth University

Elaine Wilson, Assistant Professor in the School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice

Elaine Wilson is Assistant Professor in the School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice. She teaches primarily on the Professional Masters of Social Work (PMSW) programme, specialising in the areas of grief and loss, palliative care and practice education. Her pedagogic expertise originates from her time as a social work practitioner and informs her academic practice and engagement with students in the classroom setting. Elaine’s teaching philosophy highlights her commitment to engaged and participatory research and her research is applied, collaborative and designed to contribute to knowledge about practice learning.

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