A flipped classroom – Can it help to equip social work students with practical skills?

Abstract

Learning interviewing and relationship building skills is an integral part of social work training. Traditionally, lecture and in-class role-play practices are common means for disseminating these skills and knowledge to students. With support from a CUHK Micro-Module Courseware Development Grant, an eLearning component was developed based on the flipped classroom approach, to help equip students with the knowledge and skills for client engagement and problem exploration.

The flipped classroom approach engages students in active learning, and ensures that they do the preparation necessary for a productive class time. The design for this flipped classroom includes mini video lectures for concept explanation, online pre-video questions (MCQs), skills demonstration and post-video questions. This flipped classroom approach shifts the pedagogy from a teacher-centered to a learner-centered mode, enables students to gain knowledge with reflection outside the classroom, and facilitates students to learn according to their own pace and style.

Feedback on the flipped classroom learning approach has recently been collected from the social work students. A comparison of the pre- and post-MCQ scores indicates that there was an improvement in their knowledge. In addition, about 75% of students were satisfied with this new learning strategy, and 73.8% indicated that the videos contributed to their learning. In our presentation, we will share our experiences in using a flipped classroom in social work teaching as well as the evaluation results obtained so far.