Class Descriptions

Developing Practice Skills Through Role-Play and Client Simulation

SW703

Course Description

In this seminar, students will apply multiple techniques for developing, performing and analyzing client simulations at the individual, family, group, and community level. Through these simulations, students will deepen their understanding of clients’ lives, explore research and clinical literature relevant to the problems and issues of the simulated client systems, apply evidence-based practice methods and analyze the social justice issues implicit in the simulations. This seminar will place these techniques in historical context, critically examining how simulation and role play developed in theater, psychotherapy and other fields. Student's deep engagement with the characters they create and enact in the simulations will provide a forum for self-reflection and professional growth.

Objectives

1. Become familiar with the history of the use of simulation and theater techniques in social
work intervention.
2. Conduct an assessment of coping resources and strengths; biophysical, emotional, behavioral
and cognitive functioning; intra-personal and environmental systems.
3. Deepen their understanding of the strengths and limitations of diagnostic categories in
guiding interpersonal practice interventions.
4. Deepen their ability to communicate empathically, and help enhance the motivation for
change, cultivate hope, and address ambivalence and internal and external barriers to
change.
5. Describe the impact of the key diversity dimensions such as ability, age, class, color, culture,
ethnicity, family structure, gender (including gender identity and gender expression),
marital status, national origin, race, religion or spirituality, sex, and sexual orientation
on the dynamics of intervention.
6. Identify one’s own social and cultural identities and group memberships, and how these
relate to working with diverse group members, colleagues, and other professionals.
7. Demonstrate their ability to critically analyze how power operates in interpersonal helping
efforts.
8. Deepen their ability to reflect on how their own personal histories impact upon encounters
with clients in interpersonal practice settings.
9. Develop role-playing and simulation skills that they can use in intervention situations
with clients.
10. Critically apply evidenced based practice approaches.
11. Identify common problems that emerge in practice and strategies to resolve these problems.
12. Operationalize ethical codes (i.e. the NASW Code of Ethics and other ethical codes such
as the ASGW) as they apply to value dilemmas that arise in direct social work practice.