Exploring Social Work Strategies and Support

Okay, you should have all gotten a notification. And if you have questions about the program or as I go throughout, just throw them in the chat and Alex will help you because I'll be presenting content. He will help you get the answer that you need, wherever that if we can't answer it today, we will make sure to follow up. So welcome, everyone. My name is Megan Mitchell, and I am the founder of Agents of Change, and I'm so excited to have so many amazing social workers together for our, let's call it our first annual Agents of Change Social Work Month study group. I see a lot of people smiling and shaking their heads. I love March. It's a very, very, very busy time, but I think it's such a wonderful month to celebrate all of you. So, of course, first off, happy Social Work Month. I think we should be celebrated all year, but I'm glad that we at least get a month that our accomplishments and our hard work and determination to be change agents is celebrating. So like I said today, I will do a brief overview of what the Agents of Change platform looks like because I know some people are new and curious about that. And then we will go into content and we will end with. our five practice questions and rationales. Once again, this will be recorded. So if you miss something, don't worry, you can watch the recording at a later time. And also, if you have any questions throughout, go ahead, throw them in the chat. Alex will, if it's like content related, I will definitely get to that and stop and get to that. But if it's program related or just general questions, Alex should be able to, he's the co-host, he should be able to help you with that. So. Without further ado, I have a few more joining. Let's see if we can break 300. That would be very exciting. We're at 290-ish, so we will see. But I will go ahead and start sharing my screen, and we will jump right in. Okay. Can everyone see this? Thumbs up if you can see this. Okay, great. Okay, so Agents of Change, for those of you that are new, it is an audiovisual program. So what does that mean? It means that we really do make a big point of trying to tap into all learning styles. And I could tell you a bunch of science behind learning and adult learning, but everyone learns differently is basically what we know and what is backed up by science. So we do our best to utilize all learning styles. So similar to if you've seen our content on YouTube, we have visuals and then audio that goes along with it. And then these study groups like what you're in now, this is really that hands on collaborative piece that we incorporate. I love the study groups. I think they're the best part of the program. We have these two times a month, every month, except for at the end of December, because we take a little break for the holidays to refresh. And they're on a variety of different topics. So today we're going to be going over strategy. Just last month, we did learning styles. We do ethics. We do a variety of things. And also, I think what makes Agents of Change different than some other programs is we're holistic. So we know that you are adults that have lots going on in your life. And we try to make learning as accessible as possible. So we partner with a mental health nurse practitioner who comes on and does mindfulness groups and teaches us tips on how to combat anxiety. We do a lot around different things that are not just content. So making sure that you are leveling up with your learning, making sure that you are in a place that you are able to sit for the exam because we know that self-care and. It we know self-care is holistic and there's many dimensions of your life. So I feel that we are very holistic program. We try to cover all areas and we're a great community. I mean, we have thousands of people utilizing the program and people are very, very supportive of one another. And we're here to celebrate and cheer each other on. So I think it's an amazing community and I'm really excited for how much it has grown. So this would be your dashboard. If you have the program, this is going to be a test one. So if you're wondering like, why does mine not look like this? This is just the admin test one. So this would be like your dashboard of all the different products you could have. So we'll pretend that we're going to go into the clinical premium package. So we would start the course. This is what our course looks like. It is all going to be. internet-based. So you will need the internet to access it. And it follows in order a study plan. So you will start with getting started and there's different sub chapters. So you'll start with getting started. That will include a lot of the, before you even start content, what does studying look like? What does critical thinking look like? What are KSAs, which are knowledge, skills, and abilities that are put up by the ASWB. And then we move into strategy. breaking down questions, approaching questions, practicing. And then it's the four units that the ASWB KSAs touch on. So human development, assessment and intervention planning, interventions with clients and client systems, professional ethics. This is for the clinical. If you're taking the master's, yours will be tailored to the master's level. And then this, if you have the power pack, all of that info is here. And then you have your practice. practice questions. So say you were taking the exam, you would click into the exam. They are now timed. So you would start the exam there. And the timer here is just for you to kind of get a sense of how your timing is going. Are you on track? It's really to utilize where you are as an assessment tool. So that can be found in there too. I'll go back here. And then if you're ever wondering like, well, this seems like a lot, there's a lot of content? Yes. There's probably about 30 plus lessons. And we do say it takes anywhere between five weeks and eight weeks to get through the program. And we suggest going through the program at least twice. Why that is, is because you might miss something the first time through. And the second time through, you want to make sure that you are catching anything that you missed the first time. And there's just a lot of content, right? So some people say like, what do I do with this dashboard? If you're ever looking, do you have something on community? You could go to the search bar here, type in community and any of the lessons we have. So you can see we have community social work, community social work, practice questions, community organizing and community development. If you were looking for DSM, we have DSM-5, DSM-5 practice questions, DSM-5 case vignettes. And then we always have everything as an audio only file in case you wanted to listen to that on the go. So some people, everyone has different preferences. Some people prefer that. So and then the last thing I want to show you is the study groups that we have that I think is a really good agents of change. Let me that is not our study group. So if I type in study, notice here it says live study groups. So you would go here, you'd click in, you'll find the study groups for the month. But what's really great. If you are a client, you'll get access to past study groups for the past year. So you will see there'll be access. This is just our 2023 study groups, but you will see all of our past 2022 study groups. There's a YouTube link, the resources, which are usually questions that we cover, and then the audio files. So this alone would be hours and hours and hours of content. It's really great. people find the study groups very, very, very helpful. So that's just a little bit of information about the study platform. Like I said, we really try hard to make sure that we tailor to all learning needs. So that you're going to have the videos, you're going to have PDFs, you're going to have tons and tons, I would say there's hundreds of questions, if not 500 questions or more in the study platform. And we really work on strategy because it's Great if you can recall the information, but that's not going to be enough for this exam. You really have to be able to apply it and utilize it in different situations. So that's kind of the quick overview. If you have any questions, Alex will be able to answer them in the chat. But please, if you have any questions, he will be able to answer those for you. And if you're like after today, you still have questions, feel free to email us at any time. We will make sure to get back to you and answer your question. So. We're not going to, we're going to change gears now to the good stuff here. What we're here for is to learn the five, to talk about the five W's and to celebrate together for social work month. So like I said, we're going to be utilizing the chat today and any questions, I might have you stop throughout and ask you different questions. This is, the chat's really going to be used as a reflection tool. So it's really to get your thoughts out. there to be able to see in real time the learning process and for you to interact with our community. So, okay, here's our test strategies and five W's that we're going to be covering today. So, Um, you probably have, you might have heard of the five W's you might not have, but we'll talk about that today. Um, and let's go ahead and jump on in. And like I said, take notes as you would like, totally up to you, um, how you want to utilize your time today. This will be sent out. So you will have access to this afterwards as well. Okay. So first happy social work month. Um, Like I already said, we're so excited to be celebrating with you. If you are not yet, follow us, follow those emails we've been sending and follow us on social because we have a lot of stuff coming down throughout the month. We are on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn. We had planners come out. We're going to have CEUs trackers come out. We're going to have contests too. So we'll be offering, we'll be raffling off the program. We'll be doing a variety of different things. So make sure. that you are checking that out. Bonnie, our social media content creator, she's probably on this call, but she's been doing an amazing job of making sure lots of stuff is going out for social work month. All of our products are going to be $10 off for the entire month. And that's anything that can be practice test, the power pack, anything, just make sure you pop in the code SW 2023. If you are purchasing anything, we want to make sure that you are able to get that. OK. And people are saying that they really like the power pack. I think the power pack like really takes your studying to the next level. It's not necessary. There's going to be two. There's just going to be the basics and there's going to be the power pack. The power pack takes that knowledge to the next level and it really allows you to practice in real time. OK. If you have the premium, you have the power pack. It was it's just an add on. OK. Lots and lots and lots of questions in the chat. Alex will be following up with all of you. It's just there's a lot of questions. So he'll be getting to you. So don't worry. Here, once again, so you'll have this use social work 2023 if you want to purchase anything this month. OK, so this test, what do you need to know about it? No matter what level you're taking, whether that be the bachelor's, master's or clinical, there's going to be three types of questions. You'll just see more different types of questions depending on the level. So. If you are taking the bachelor's, you will see mostly recall questions. These are questions that require you to remember a fact or a piece of information. They're pretty straightforward, right? And these are just, you have a question, maybe it's a medication question or defense mechanism question. You answer and you move on. Bachelors will be very heavy in this. master's in clinical, you'll have very few recall questions. So that's why content's not enough. When you're studying for this exam, you have to be able to take that information and apply it. So then we have application questions. And what are application questions? These are going to take that recall knowledge to the next level. So not only do you have to recall information, but you have to be able to apply it in a case scenario. So it might give you a little vignette or talk about a client that you might have. You need to know more than just a definition. You're starting to use some of those higher level thinking skills. Reasoning. These are going to be on the master's and clinical level exam. You will see a lot of reasoning questions on the clinical level exam. What are reasoning questions? These take your thinking to the highest level, and they're the most difficult questions. They require you to recall and apply information, synthesize that information. examine the details and problem solve. So why are these so difficult? You're using a lot of brain power here, right? These might be ethical dilemmas. These might be, I'm trying to think some other reasoning questions. They might give you distractor information. So you have to synthesize, is this information that I need to answer the question correctly, or is this information to throw me off? So that's going to be those ones that you kind of have to read a couple times because you're just really processing that information. All levels of the exam have 170 questions. 150 of those are scored. You will never know which 20 are not scored. They don't tell us, unfortunately. They're usually for ASWB to be testing out as pilot questions. So unfortunately, you don't know which ones count towards that 150 or not. Test scores. vary depending on what test you get. There's around four or five different versions. Some require, I've seen anywhere from 96 out of 150, correct? The highest I've seen is a 103 out of 150, correct? So I can't tell you which one you're going to get or why some are weighted at different values, but that can all be found on the ASWB website. If you have not checked out the ASWB website and... I just want to make it clear. We are not affiliated with ASWB in any way other than we just know you have to get information from them to be able to sit from the exam. So they will have a lot of like logistical test information. So that's the type of questions you'll see. Like I said, bachelors mostly recall a few application masters, all three. But most are in that application bucket. And then clinical will be. little bit of all three, but mostly in the reasoning section. Okay. So let's talk strategy. If you are like, I don't have a strategy yet, you've come to the right place because you need to have a strategy for answering these questions. A lot of people do flashcards or they read a book and they feel like content wise, they're very strong, but then they get to the exam and there's a lot of case vignettes or complicated wording or things that require you to really think about the subject. Tap into your thinking and apply the information. So you want to make sure that you have a strategy because you have to be efficient. Unless you get extra time, you only get four hours. And I do encourage you if you may be, if English is not your first language, if you have a learning disability, if you have a medical diagnosis and you need extra time, you can definitely get accommodations. And I definitely encourage you to apply. The worst thing the board can tell you is no, right? But sometimes as social workers, we are not our own best advocates. So if you think you need extra time, apply for it. And all that would, we have tons of information on our blog that I can have Alex share our blog link because we have actually a, and I believe we have a YouTube video on how to apply for accommodations for it. So you wanna make sure that you are analyzing information. So how do you do that? You want to read each question twice before looking at the answers. So you're going to have three or four answer choices. If you're testing in 2023, you will have some combination of three and some combination of four. That's a new change that the ASWB has made. You want to read them all twice. Why is that? The first time through, you might miss information. The second time through, you're going to get more information. Read all answers before starting to think about choosing an answer. Some people like to jump ahead. They like to get excited. And, you know, they might say, oh, I know the answer is B. You want one word could change an entire answer here. So you want to make sure that you are reading all of your answer choices and thinking about them before jumping to an answer. 2023 is when the three answer choices rolled out. So you if you are taking it. Now forward, you will see three and four answer choices. Okay. Eliminate answers that are too extreme or do not answer the question stem. So what does this mean? For example, if it said, I'll give you an example of what too extreme would be. If you got a question that said you had a child come into school building with a bruise. An answer that is too extreme would be to call the. police, right? If a child comes in with a bruise, many children come in, we don't have any additional information at this point that would say that the child is in imminent danger. So too extreme, you want to rule those out in process of elimination. The more you can rule out, the easier it's going to be for you to answer. Okay. And then do not, this is really hard if you've been in the field for a while, you don't want to add any information into the question stem. The words. are the words that they give you. An example of this, say you get a question that says you are working with an elderly client in a assisted living setting. We do not want to assume because they are elderly that they cannot care for themselves or that they are not able to make decisions on their own unless the question told us that, right? So we do not want to put any information. or assume anything that's not in the question stem. And you will see as we break these down what that means in just a little bit. Okay, next slide. The helping process. Um, a lot of people find this to be some of the most helpful. This is pretty much the only acronym I teach. It's not even really an acronym. It's a process and I have a study tip for it, but the social work helping process is major because it is going to give us a starting point and an ending point for working with clients. So, um, what is the social work helping process? It's very basic. You might have heard of it as referred to as a generalist model, but it helps us know our process when we're working with clients. So why is this process helpful? Because the way we engage with clients in the engagement phase is very different than how we would engage with clients in the termination phase. Does that make sense, right? The very first time I'm meeting a client, it's going to be very different than if I've worked with them for maybe six weeks or six months. So what is this helping process? Engagement. assessment, planning, intervention, evaluation, and determination. And this, if you're looking for like a little memory trick, eat a pie today is how people remember it. Eat, engagement, a, assessment, pie, planning, intervention, evaluation, today, determination. People have asked, I'm just seeing this in the chat. People have asked, will we ever get an app? That would be very, very down the road because surprisingly, it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to make an app. And we don't have anyone that we know that has a computer engineering background. So that would be down the road. We would love to have an app, but there's tons that goes into an app. So I would love to have an app, too. It's just that would be more in our long term planning. OK, so I will quickly I have a video on YouTube about the helping process. But quickly, engagement is that first session. You're building rapport with the clients. You are going over consent. You are going over confidentiality. Do not move to the assessment phase with a client until you have informed consent. You have to have informed consent to move on. And you're building rapport in the engagement phase. And the purpose of engagement is we want our clients to come back. Okay. We've engaged them. We've gotten their consent. We're building that rapport. We're moving to the assessment phase. And all assessment means is you're collecting information about what's going on for that client, right? It could be the presenting problem. It could be developmental history. It could be a biopsychosocial, a social history. Every agency, every setting is going to have a little bit of a different procedure for assessment. Okay. You've engaged, you've accessed, you collect information. You found out what the presenting problem is. Then you need to work on planning. What are you going to do in treatment with the client to work towards their goals? So planning is usually treatment planning. You want to make sure this is done in conjunction with the client as much as possible, because we don't want to just dictate and say, this is the plan and this is what you're going to do. In the chat, why is planning with the client so important? Why do we want to have their buy-in for this process? Self-determination, absolutely. We don't want to have that position of power where we're telling them what to do. We meet the client where they are. Mutually agreed upon, buy-in, motivation, right? I don't know about you. I would not be very motivated if someone was just telling me this is how things are going to go, right? We want to empower them. So we're definitely working from a strengths-based empowerment model. Patient-centered. Okay. So we've engaged our client. We've assessed. We know the problem. We've treatment planned. Next, you're going to move into the, really the bulk of the work you're going to do. That's intervention. And that's when you're actually doing whatever it is you plan for. So that might be cognitive behavioral therapy or mindfulness or DBT. The intervention is doing the actual work. From there. in a perfect world, right? Like they're meeting their goals, everything's going great. The next step is evaluation. It's listed as the second to last step, but really you need to be taking data at all points throughout the process, right? We know the code of ethics says that we have to be data informed and evaluation means, are you taking information in? This could be Um, this could be a variety of things. This could be screeners. This could be observations. It could be self-reports, but is the client making progress towards their treatment goals? So we are evaluating for progress in the evaluation stage. Um, and then the last stage is termination. And all that means is. You are ending the therapeutic relationship. Termination, if possible, should not just be a one time thing. Right. It's not like, OK, this is our last session. Bye bye. You should prepare your client to terminate. So you need to make sure that they're aware of what determination looks like, what the next steps would be, and really prepare them to utilize the skills that you've used in session outside of the session. So. Let's go through these one more time. Engagement is building rapport. You are meeting them. You are getting consent or going over boundaries. Think of that as kind of the first appointment. Assessment is collecting information. So what information are you using to know what the presenting problem is or how long they've had symptoms? Planning. That's usually treatment planning. That's setting your roadmap for what you're going to do in treatment with the client. intervention is doing the work. So whatever that modality is, evaluation is assessing the progress the client has made. Are they making progress towards their treatment goals? Do you need to change anything? What's their motivation like making changes as needed? And then, like I said, in a perfect world, if they've met all their goals and they're doing wonderfully, you'd move into the termination phase, which means you would be gearing up to end treatment. Okay. Why is this helpful for first and next questions? Because what if it says you are treatment planning with the client? What do you do next? If you're already treatment planning with the client, you know you've engaged with them and you know you've assessed for something. If it says you are terminating a client, that's going to look very different than if you were just meeting them for the first time. So it kind of gives you a sense of the work that you need to do with the client and the work that can be done in the future with the client. So it gives us a timeline of where you are. Okay. So what do you need to know about this helping process or the eat a pie today? The six steps we just went over. What will be most helpful in your studying is to think of a past client or make up a client with a problem that they're coming in to see you and use that as an example of how you can walk through those six stages. So what would engagement look like? What would assessment look like? What would planning look like? What would intervention look like? like, evaluation and termination. Write those six steps down and then come up with that scenario because when we're able to make it stick, especially adult learners, when it can apply to our knowledge that we already have, it's going to take your learning to the next level. So you want to have real life examples as much as possible. So I definitely encourage you if you're ever wondering like, why is this information not sticking? Try to apply it to real life information and that will help you. recall it a little bit better and apply it a little bit better. So I definitely encourage you after today, use that eat a pie today engagement helping process and think of it with a client or make up a scenario. Okay. So now we are going to jump into the five W's. So you have probably heard of who, what, where, when, and why I like to think of this as kind of like a back to basics, all that stuff you learned in fourth. grade where you had to like pull out of an article, who is the main character, what's going on, where is this taking place? This actually is a very easy to remember skill that you can use when you are sitting for your exam. So I encourage you if you have a question that you need to pull out information or you're getting stuck on, you're utilizing the five W's. because what does this do? It synthesizes things, right? If you can say who your client is, what is the problem? Where is the setting? When did symptoms start? And why are we here to help them? You have pulled out most of the information that you need. So it's really a way to organize your thinking, if not anything, right? Because sometimes the question stems can be lengthier. They might be one or two sentences, but you have to synthesize because at the end of the day, I will say. that this exam, it's really a reading comprehension exam, right? And this is where there's kind of a disconnect where people are like, I don't understand. I've been in the field. It's not a skills test, right? It's not like they're coming to your work site and they're determining your skill level. You're reading questions, you're comprehending them, and you're answering them. So it really is a reading comprehension test. So you want to make sure that you're utilizing these five W's and you want to have a toolbox on test day. and not an actual toolbox. Don't bring an actual toolbox into the testing room. They will not allow you to bring that because they're very strict about what can go in and out. This is kind of a mental toolbox. So you want to make sure that you're always adding skills that you can bring to make your life easier on test day, because you're only going to have about 75 seconds to 90 seconds per question. So you don't have much time to answer a question you have to answer and move on or you will run out of time. So this is the five W's is one thing that you can utilize on test day. OK, so here's going to be our practice question that we are using to break down. um, using the five W's. So, um, you can go ahead and read it. I'll read it on the screen as well. A social worker is collecting information for family therapy. The family consists of a mother, father, and two children ages 14 and eight. The parents report they want the family to spend quality time together, but whenever they try, everyone ends up fighting. The 14 year old daughter looks visibly annoyed and states her parents treat her like a baby. The eight-year-old says he wants to play with kids in the neighborhood and go to his friend's house, but his parents say family time at home is more important. The social worker should focus treatment on, and if you've been coming to study groups, we've used this example before, but this has a lot of information in it, right? It's a family. There's a teenager, an eight-year-old, and they're just not really communicating in a way that's helpful. That's probably why they're coming to see us in family therapy. So throughout... These five W's, we're going to use this information to pull apart and synthesize. So our first W is our who. In this stem, who is our client? That's what the who means. Who is your client? Is it an individual client? Is it a couple or is it a family? Is it a group here? Our client is the family system. They're here for family therapy, right? We're not treating each one individually, family as a unit. We know the family unit consists of a mother, father, and two children. And it gives us the ages of the children. Age matters because we know there's developmental milestones that everyone meets at certain times. So by telling us that there's a 14-year-old, we know like what developmentally we should expect of a 14-year-old, right? Adolescent, peer pressure, wanting to be with friends, defiance against family. And then we know the other child is eight, school-aged, wanting to be with friends, right? Starting to gain independence. So age matters. And also age can be a good indicator of if the child is within what we would expect to be developmentally appropriate. For example, if it said you are seeing a 14 year old and they're having regression regression with their toileting skills, that's going to be a major red flag because we would assume a 14 year old teenager has mastered toilet skills. So we don't know. Sometimes we're not going to have all the information. Right. We don't know how old the mother and father is. So we don't have that information. But who is our client? This family, family unit, mom, dad, and the children, you know, the children's ages. So that's our who for this one. The what. Here's the three questions you want to consider when you're figuring out what the what of a question is. What is the presenting problem? What is the question asking? What does the social worker need to do? So here, what is the problem? Parents are coming and bringing the whole family to therapy, which means they need some sort of help, right? They wouldn't be coming to us if they didn't need some sort of help. So here I would say the presenting problem is there's some sort of breakdown in communication or expectations, right? Parents want to spend quality time, but kids are not really feeling that. They're not interested in that right now. And there's some conflict, right? When they do sit down to have this family time, there's disagreement. or conflict, it says they end up fighting. So the family time is not what they envisioned. So that would be the presenting problem. What is the question asking? It's saying, what should we focus treatment on? So that's basically saying, what do you do with this information? And then what does the social worker need to do? Here we need to take all this information, put it together, and work with the family unit. towards a goal. We're not saying I'm going to do this for the kid. I'm going to do this for the mom and dad family as a unit. How do we get them towards goals together? So that's something that's very different than individual therapy or a variety of things. Family therapy. I don't know if any of you do family therapy, but I think it is the most amazing skill. If you can be a very skilled family therapist, just because it's very tough work, you're bringing together lots of personalities and doing a lot of... communication work. So we have our who, we have our what, where, and you might think where, that seems like an odd. piece of evidence. But where is really like, what setting are you in as the social worker? So are you a hospital social worker? Are you a school social worker? Are you a hospice social worker? Are you in person? Are you, I mean, we, we know social worker, social work is so diverse. So we could be at so many different places. And that's why this test can be really challenging in school. And in our careers, we usually specialize, right? We're probably like, like maybe school social workers or hospital or clinical or macro. But this exam is generalist. So you kind of have to have some knowledge on all of the different settings. So where are you? And setting does matter because what you would do in a hospital and the ER is very different than what you do in private practice, right? So think of that. And then where is the client? Is the client physically with you? Is the client on the phone? Is the client at school? Is the client in the hospital? That matters too. Here, notice there's no where. We don't know the setting and we don't know where the client is. So sometimes you're not gonna have all of the pieces of the five Ws, right? It doesn't mean that this is, that that's a bad question or a good question. It just means we don't have that piece of information. Sometimes it might matter. Sometimes it might not matter. So we don't have the where here. We don't know what setting we're in. We just know that we're providing family therapy of some sort. We don't know where. Okay. There is not a default setting because, right, we can just assume they're coming to services. That could be virtually, that could be in person. They're engaging in services. So that's the information that we don't have a default. Okay. So the when is really time sensitive. So when you get the when, time. When did you meet the client? So think of that helping process. When did symptoms occur? And when did the presenting problem start? So here, where do you think in that helping process we would be if we are just collecting information from the family? Go ahead in the chat. What would be the when for this? Definitely the beginning phases. We're either engaging or we're assessing. First, we're definitely not intervening yet. We don't have enough information. We're in those beginning stages, either engagement or assessment, somewhere in there. When did symptoms occur? It doesn't really say, right? We don't know if there's been a problem for five years or five weeks. So we don't have that information. And we don't know when the presenting problem started. But it obviously started before they came to us, which is why they came to us. So it's been happening for some amount of time. Sometimes it will be specific. It might say they've had symptoms for six months or they've had symptoms for three weeks. When you get to the clinical level and you have to diagnose based on DSM, we know that timeframe matters, right? Because certain diagnosis you need to have for certain lengths of time. So we have our who, our what, our where, our when. The last W is our hardest one. And that is our why. Why is the why the hardest? Critical thinking. We have to take all of the information that we have and put it all together. So why is the help of a social worker needed? And why are these clues presented, right? Is it a distractor? Is it important? You're really critically thinking here. So let's analyze this one particularly. Why is the help of a social worker needed? Because there's some sort of communication breakdown, right? They need some skills or they are working towards a solution. So social worker is needed to help this family with their communication. That's why they're here. This is some clues that give us information that there's a breakdown. 14-year-old stating her parents treat her like a baby. And the 8-year-old wanting to play with friends. That would show us that there's some sort of disconnect between the parents' expectations and what... is developmentally appropriate for the children, right? Parent expectations could be the why too. Maybe they're not realistic expectations. Maybe they're not connecting with their parents. Maybe they need some psychoeducation around what happens in adolescence and, you know, childhood. So there's a variety of different things. And why is this information important? Why are they here to see us? Because like I said, there's some sort of communication breakdown. Expectations are, they're not on the same page. That's mostly why people come to family therapy, right? Not on the same page, want to have family time. That's quality and it works for everyone. So I'll give you just a moment there. We'll pause. We got the five W's are who, are what, are where, are when, and are why. I'm going to read the question and now we're going to read the answer choices. For this, for all the questions we're going to cover this evening, it's not important that you get it right. There's no prize for getting the questions right. It's really to practice your skills. So we're going to break questions down together. We are going to work through them. I'm going to highlight and I'm going to show you how I would break them down and how we work on strategy. But it's really a time for you to just be, it's a safe space. You can, you know, it's really here a time to connect where you can work on your skills. You're not being judged. You're not getting a score. You got 100% right. It's really the process here. Process, process, process. So let's do this practice question. Social worker is collecting information for family therapy. The family consists of a mother, father, and two children, ages 14 and 8. The parents report they want the family to spend quality time together, but whenever they try, everyone ends up fighting. The 14-year-old daughter looks visibly annoyed and states her parents treat her like a baby. The 8-year-old says he wants to play with kids in the neighborhood and go to his friend's house, but the parents say family time at home is more important. The social worker should focus treatment on A. Helping the family establish appropriate roles and boundaries. B, developmental levels and communication stages for each child. C, facilitating activity-based family interactions to build on the strengths the family presents with. Or, let me move my bar so I can see. D, connecting the family in meaningful ways through role play. What should be the focus of treatment and why? So go ahead in the chat. What do you think should be the focus of family therapy? And go ahead and put why you think the answer is what it is. And if you're stuck between two, definitely put that in. That helps me see your thinking. So I know like maybe I was between two answers. I'll give you maybe 30 more seconds for that one. We would do process of elimination. And when we go through our practice questions here in just a moment, I will show you what it will look like on my end. We'll like to cross information out and do process of elimination. What I would do to eliminate. I would immediately rule out answer choice B. Social workers should focus treatment on developmental levels and communication strategies for each child. What is wrong with B for a family therapy model? We don't want to just focus on any members of the family, right? Where B only focuses on the children. That does not incorporate everyone, right? So B would be out. We would eliminate that. We want to focus on the family as a unit. It's going to be important that we talk about developmental stages, but that's not going to be our focus. So B is out. Another way that I would, another answer choice that I would rule out is D, connecting the family in meaningful ways to role play. That might be a tool we use, but why is that not what our focus should be on? Have we identified yet that they need to do role playing strategies? I see lots of people shaking their head, right? We don't know if communication. Like if they will do best through role play, we are just starting to collect information. We can't make that determination yet that role play is what they need. Does that make sense? And they're not on the same page yet. So I don't think role play is going to go very good with a teen that's annoyed and an eight-year-old who's very upset, right? They'd be like, this is so silly. You have to build some rapport first. So we're down to A and C. Do we help the family establish appropriate roles and boundaries? or facilitate activity-based family interactions to build on the strengths the family presents with. So what would be the best focus of treatment, given that we know that quality time is going poorly and kids want something different than parents? C is not a bad answer, but it's not the best answer. We might build upon activity-based interactions, but first we need to help them establish roles and boundaries before doing any activities, right? If they're not on the same page with boundaries, expectations, what each person wants out of the family time, what each person expects, we can't really move forward with anything because you'll be doing activities and they're not on the same page. So you got to align first. So the correct answer here is a help the family establish appropriate roles and boundaries. You want to do that as your starting point before you do anything else. Doesn't mean you won't do these other things, but you got to get everyone on the same page. Right. It's think of like when you're working in a group, you don't just start working on the task right away. You're not like, OK, you got to set some boundaries, set some expectations first. So. For this one, the focus of treatment should be the base, the foundation. Any questions on that one? It's a little bit tricky one. I did a complicated one so you can kind of see the strategy pulling out the information. So we will get to practice questions. But if you are looking for the, our website is here. Alex can put this in the chat. This is our email and this is our website. So there's tons and tons and tons of information here. You will have the slide deck so you can see. So this will be available to you. I'm going to stop sharing this for just a moment. And I do want to make sure that we respect everyone's time. So we are going to do three practice. There'll be five practice questions that you will get information to, but we're only going to be able to cover three this evening. So you'll get to try two on your own, which I actually think will be great because you can use those five W's. You can work through them and there always will be rationales to go with each one as well. So let me pull up our practice questions. Exit out of this. I will make this a little bit bigger. So our study groups. Generally, 95% of the time we end with practice questions unless we're doing a self-care or something like that. So the way that it will look is you'll have the blank questions and then every question you will see with agents of change has rationale. And I tell people when you're looking for questions, if it does not provide you a rationale, it's not a good question. Because how are you going to know what you're doing if you're on the right track? If you are analyzing the question correctly, if you don't have rationale. So you will always see we will have rationales at the end of all of them. And that's for any questions you get with agents of change, because it's really important that you know why the answer is the way it is and why the answer. Sometimes it's like really like important to know why the other choices are not correct. So you always get rationales to help you better understand. And I say that practice questions are a data point. Right. It's to assess your learning. How are you doing? use it as a tool. You're going to get something out of every single practice question. So we're going to have three that we go through today. We're going to be utilizing the chat. I'm going to highlight, I'm going to show you how I break them down. And then, like I said, you'll get access to this. So you'll get to see, try the last two questions on your own. We're only going to have time to get through the first three, but be thinking of those five W's who, what, where, when, and why, as we're breaking them down. So let me make this a little bit bigger. Okay. Number one. And this one has three answer choices, A, B, and C, because remember, 2023, they made those changes. We now have three and four answer choices. Number one, a couple enters couples therapy due to experiencing conflict in their relationship. The husband blames the wife for all their problems, while the wife feels helpless and demoralized. What would be the most appropriate intervention for the social? A, connect both the husband and wife with individual services in conjunction with couples therapy. B, help the couple identify and communicate their feelings and needs. C, assess for potential emotional abuse that is leading to the relationship conflict. Go ahead in the chat. What would you choose and why? Why is just as important. Why did you choose the answer that you did? Think of what your role would be as a couples therapist, right? That's very different than if you were an individual therapist. So once again, who is your client? Okay, so here is what I would pull out from this question. Who is our client? A couple. So we know that couples therapy is a little bit different than individual, right? They're, they're, they're, I don't know why this is, I don't want that to change. I want this. Okay. So our, who is the couple? What's the presenting problem? They're having conflict. Husband is saying the wife's the problem and she's feeling helpless and demoralized. Where? Does not say, right? We don't know what our setting is, but we do know we're working with a couple. Who, what, where, when? Does not say. We don't know how long these issues have been happening for. Why do they need us? Well, they're coming because they obviously want to work on this, right? There's this couple and they're not on the same page. So what would be the most appropriate intervention? So here we're talking about how do you intervene? What do you do with this information? So process of elimination. If they are there to see you for couples therapy, would you say you should go see your own individual counselors? That might be something they need, but that's not why they're here to see us. Right. Like that is not what we're going to focus treatment on, especially not as a couples therapist. So now we're down to B and C. Do we have to assess for potential emotional abuse right now? Do we have, that would be an assumption. Do we have any information that says either one of them is feeling as if emotional abuse is occurring, right? There's definitely some sort of breakdown of communication, but we don't want to assume because the husband's blaming her that there's emotional abuse going on. We don't have the full picture yet whatsoever. So C is out. We don't want to assess yet not enough information. That would be jumping to conclusion. It's a process of elimination. We need to help the couple identify and communicate their feelings and needs. Why is B the best starting point for couples that are not communicating well? Seems very good starting point, right? What's your feelings and what do you need? Think of Maslow's hierarchy, right? What are your needs? Yeah, starting point. You got to hear like, that's our starting point. point. C is too extreme and we're not going to focus treatment on having them go to their individual services if we are here to serve the couple. We're starting where the clients are and this is where they are. And we as the clinician need to know what their feelings and needs are, because we're going to be collecting that information. Any questions about number one? Number two? A social worker is working with a client who has a history of substance abuse and is currently in recovery. The client tells the social worker that they have been feeling strong cravings for drugs lately. What would be the most appropriate intervention for the social worker? A. Help the client resist cravings. B. Help the client identify triggers and develop a plan to manage them. C. Encourage the client to attend a support group meeting. Or D. Schedule an appointment for the client with a substance abuse counselor. What would you do as a client in recovery if you're having some cravings and why? So who? is our client, someone that is experiencing substance, has a history, they're not even currently experiencing that, history of substance abuse, that's in recovery. What's the presenting problem? They tell you they're starting to have some cravings, right? That could be very normal part of recovery. I see people shaking their head, yes, so that would be something we need to know. Who or what? When? We don't know. Right. It just says that they've been feeling lately. So that actually is our like this is a newer behavior if it says lately. So I'm going to put that in here. Who, what, where? We don't know when. Why do they need us? Why? Why are they telling us this information? They don't want to relapse. Right. They're like, can you help me through this? Right. I'm having these cravings. What can we do to meet the client where they're at and support them through this? Right. So let's start eliminating. Do we need to schedule an appointment with a substance abuse counselor? Too extreme right now, right? The client is not even using right now, right? So we're not going to say go to a substance use. And is that meeting the client where they're at in their therapeutic relationship with us? No, right? If they started to use and need a substance abuse program, we would definitely do that. We're not there yet. We do not have that information. Can we help this client resist cravings? Can we do that for the client? No. That would be wonderful in a world if we could just control people and help them, you know, get into their mind and do things. But that is absolutely not how things work. So that's just not possible. So A is out. Has the client said anything about wanting to attend a support group meeting or that they've even been engaged in support groups before? Assumption, right? If it said. Support groups are very helpful for the client. That would be a different answer, but we don't have that. We don't have that information provided, process of elimination. What can we do? Help the client identify triggers and develop a plan to manage them. And why do you think identifying those triggers for a client that has a previous history with substances, why would that be the best response? So that they can have some tools for prevention, right? Here is what your triggers are. it allows them to identify the triggers. And then together, you're coming up with a plan so they can work on coping skills or avoiding situations that are causing them this, right? It's a tool, right? And in B, this is totally done in conjunction with the client. We're not telling them what to do, right? We would be doing this as a process together with them. Does that one make sense? Yeah. The last one we'll have time for tonight. is number three. And like I said, you'll get access to the other two to practice. So you'll get that emailed out to you. So number three, this is a, oh, this is a four answer choice. So I'm going to hop this onto the next page so we can see it better. Number three, a social worker is working with a teenager who has been restricting food intake and has lost a significant amount of weight. The teenager reports feeling overweight and out of control. He expresses a desire to lose more weight. What should the social worker do next? So before you even answer, let's pull these important information. Who is our client? Teenager. So what do we know about teenagers? Developmentally, what do we know about teenagers? Self-esteem, comparing self to others, right? Okay. Social media, big during this time, right? A lot of comparing self to others. Identity versus role confusion. Okay. So who we're working with as a teenager, what is the presenting problem? Restricting food and has lost weight. We don't know what that means though, right? Like what is significant to this person? What does that mean? And the teenager reports feeling out of control and overweight. And he wants to lose more weight. So we have our who, our what, where. We don't know. The setting is not here. We don't know. Who, what, where, when. It does not say. So we do not know when this happened. Why is a social worker needed? Why do you think a social worker would be needed? And why do we need this information? change, right? So also why think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs? Why is food such a big red flag for us when we have clients that are restricting food or losing weight? Basic need? Yes. Think of how weight loss can affect you physically, right? Lots of different things to consider. So Um, it says, what should the social worker do next? So this isn't what should this means we've got this information client says restricting food and we know loss losing weight. What do we do next? A refer the teenager to a dietitian to assess their nutritional needs. B develop a plan with the client that meets their nutritional needs while also addressing their concern and fears around food. C assess the teenager's risk for eating disorder and provide appropriate intervention or D, schedule an appointment to collaborate with the client's medical doctor. Remember, next means you got to put these in order. Client is here telling us, I feel out of control. I want to lose more weight. What do we do and why? You can probably get it down to two, but remember, you need next means what's your immediate next step. I will give you a clue here. We would probably do all of these things at some point, but we're looking for the next step. None of these are going to cause harm to the client. What can we start to rule out? What would I not do next? I'm not going to refer them out yet to a dietician to address their nutritional needs, but they do need to see probably a dietician once we have more information. We don't have enough information yet to know specifically what's going on. So we're not going to refer them out just yet. B is also out. We can't develop a plan that meets their nutritional needs. First of all, we probably would not be giving nutritional advice, right? We would want to do that in conjunction with a nutritionist. And then we're not addressing these fear. We don't know if there is a fear around food. We don't have that information yet. We don't know why they're restricting food. So B is out. So what do we do next? Assess for an eating disorder and provide appropriate intervention or schedule an appointment to collaborate with the client's medical doctor. You would do both of these things, but what are you going to do next? You're going to definitely want them to see the doctor, but not when they're here telling us I'm restricting food. I feel out of control. I want to lose weight. I need more information first. And then I would, and we don't know like. what significant amount for their, everyone has significant. Is that for their, like, were they on a plan that they, they, were they told they needed to lose weight? There can be a variety of different things going on. Do they have a medical condition that they're losing weight? Right. Like sometimes clients have conditions and then they just lose a lot of weight or gain a lot of weight. So what I would want to do next, because for safety purposes, I need to assess, I need more information. They, I would say, given the information we have, they are at risk for an eating disorder. We don't know if they meet criteria, but they're definitely at risk due to the food intake, losing weight and reporting like wanting to lose more. And what do you know about eating disorders? Very serious, very, very, very serious. We want to make sure that we're assessing properly. And then from there, involving medical professionals, involving nutritionists, involving parents, but we don't have enough information yet. We need to assess, though, what the risk level is and then from there make an appropriate next step. So I would actually say this is a safety type question, right? Because what if we just gloss this over? That's very problematic, right? Because the client's telling us some important things. So I will say with eating disorders, you want to make sure that you act quickly because we know how important it is for the body and how significant treatment. can be in helping clients that are experiencing an eating disorder. Any questions about number three? Okay. So I have gone over our time here. You will get two more questions to work on on your own, and they'll have rationales. One is a policy macro question, and the other is a domestic violence safety question. I hope that you took some strategies from today. And what did I want to end with? First of all, thank you. I'm going to stop sharing here. I want to thank you all for this amazing study group. We had over 350 people. That's absolutely amazing. I hope that you will check out some of the awesome stuff we have coming out for the rest of the month of March. And I will say Agents of Change has something for everyone. We have free, we have paid. You will find something that... you can utilize. We have some other exciting stuff coming, hopefully for 2023 that includes CEUs and more training. So we're knock on wood waiting for some approval on that. But like I said, I hope that if you have any questions, Alex can once again, put our email in the chat. He'll put our website in the chat. You will be getting this recording. You will be getting the PowerPoint and you will be getting the practice questions. So if you missed anything. You will get that. I do encourage you to try those last two questions once you get the materials sent out to just see if you were able to use those five W's able to use the helping process. Because it can be they can you can miss something right like they're they're pretty dense questions. So thank you everyone for joining tonight. Happy Social Work Month. I hope that you found this helpful. Like I said, come in, come and check us out. We have something for everyone. Thank you, everyone. Happy Social Work Month. Oh, yes. If you're testing soon, good luck. Good luck, good luck, good luck. And we still got 25 plus more days of this month. So many, many more opportunities to celebrate you. And this takes a little bit of time. So some people are like, when will this be sent out? Probably later this evening. We got to upload it to YouTube and make sure that we, tomorrow at the latest. Thank you everyone. Thank you for joining. Bye-bye.

So welcome, everyone. My name is Megan Mitchell, and I am the founder of Agents of Change, and I'm so excited to have so many amazing social workers together for our, let's call it our first annual Agents of Change Social Work Month study group. I see a lot of people smiling and shaking their heads. I love March. It's a very, very, very busy time, but I think it's such a wonderful month to celebrate all of you.

So, of course, first off, happy Social Work Month. I think we should be celebrated all year, but I'm glad that we at least get a month that our accomplishments and our hard work and determination to be change agents is celebrating. So like I said today, I will do a brief overview of what the Agents of Change platform looks like because I know some people are new and curious about that.

And then we will go into content and we will end with. our five practice questions and rationales. Once again, this will be recorded. So if you miss something, don't worry, you can watch the recording at a later time.

And also, if you have any questions throughout, go ahead, throw them in the chat. Alex will, if it's like content related, I will definitely get to that and stop and get to that. But if it's program related or just general questions, Alex should be able to, he's the co-host, he should be able to help you with that.

So. Without further ado, I have a few more joining. Let's see if we can break 300. That would be very exciting. We're at 290-ish, so we will see. But I will go ahead and start sharing my screen, and we will jump right in.

Okay. Can everyone see this? Thumbs up if you can see this. Okay, great. Okay, so Agents of Change, for those of you that are new, it is an audiovisual program.

So what does that mean? It means that we really do make a big point of trying to tap into all learning styles. And I could tell you a bunch of science behind learning and adult learning, but everyone learns differently is basically what we know and what is backed up by science.

So we do our best to utilize all learning styles. So similar to if you've seen our content on YouTube, we have visuals and then audio that goes along with it. And then these study groups like what you're in now, this is really that hands on collaborative piece that we incorporate. I love the study groups. I think they're the best part of the program.

We have these two times a month, every month, except for at the end of December, because we take a little break for the holidays to refresh. And they're on a variety of different topics. So today we're going to be going over strategy.

Just last month, we did learning styles. We do ethics. We do a variety of things. And also, I think what makes Agents of Change different than some other programs is we're holistic. So we know that you are adults that have lots going on in your life.

And we try to make learning as accessible as possible. So we partner with a mental health nurse practitioner who comes on and does mindfulness groups and teaches us tips on how to combat anxiety. We do a lot around different things that are not just content. So making sure that you are leveling up with your learning, making sure that you are in a place that you are able to sit for the exam because we know that self-care and. It we know self-care is holistic and there's many dimensions of your life.

So I feel that we are very holistic program. We try to cover all areas and we're a great community. I mean, we have thousands of people utilizing the program and people are very, very supportive of one another.

And we're here to celebrate and cheer each other on. So I think it's an amazing community and I'm really excited for how much it has grown. So this would be your dashboard.

If you have the program, this is going to be a test one. So if you're wondering like, why does mine not look like this? This is just the admin test one.

So this would be like your dashboard of all the different products you could have. So we'll pretend that we're going to go into the clinical premium package. So we would start the course.

This is what our course looks like. It is all going to be. internet-based. So you will need the internet to access it.

And it follows in order a study plan. So you will start with getting started and there's different sub chapters. So you'll start with getting started. That will include a lot of the, before you even start content, what does studying look like?

What does critical thinking look like? What are KSAs, which are knowledge, skills, and abilities that are put up by the ASWB. And then we move into strategy.

breaking down questions, approaching questions, practicing. And then it's the four units that the ASWB KSAs touch on. So human development, assessment and intervention planning, interventions with clients and client systems, professional ethics. This is for the clinical. If you're taking the master's, yours will be tailored to the master's level.

And then this, if you have the power pack, all of that info is here. And then you have your practice. practice questions.

So say you were taking the exam, you would click into the exam. They are now timed. So you would start the exam there.

And the timer here is just for you to kind of get a sense of how your timing is going. Are you on track? It's really to utilize where you are as an assessment tool.

So that can be found in there too. I'll go back here. And then if you're ever wondering like, well, this seems like a lot, there's a lot of content?

Yes. There's probably about 30 plus lessons. And we do say it takes anywhere between five weeks and eight weeks to get through the program.

And we suggest going through the program at least twice. Why that is, is because you might miss something the first time through. And the second time through, you want to make sure that you are catching anything that you missed the first time. And there's just a lot of content, right?

So some people say like, what do I do with this dashboard? If you're ever looking, do you have something on community? You could go to the search bar here, type in community and any of the lessons we have. So you can see we have community social work, community social work, practice questions, community organizing and community development. If you were looking for DSM, we have DSM-5, DSM-5 practice questions, DSM-5 case vignettes.

And then we always have everything as an audio only file in case you wanted to listen to that on the go. So some people, everyone has different preferences. Some people prefer that.

So and then the last thing I want to show you is the study groups that we have that I think is a really good agents of change. Let me that is not our study group. So if I type in study, notice here it says live study groups. So you would go here, you'd click in, you'll find the study groups for the month.

But what's really great. If you are a client, you'll get access to past study groups for the past year. So you will see there'll be access. This is just our 2023 study groups, but you will see all of our past 2022 study groups.

There's a YouTube link, the resources, which are usually questions that we cover, and then the audio files. So this alone would be hours and hours and hours of content. It's really great. people find the study groups very, very, very helpful.

So that's just a little bit of information about the study platform. Like I said, we really try hard to make sure that we tailor to all learning needs. So that you're going to have the videos, you're going to have PDFs, you're going to have tons and tons, I would say there's hundreds of questions, if not 500 questions or more in the study platform.

And we really work on strategy because it's Great if you can recall the information, but that's not going to be enough for this exam. You really have to be able to apply it and utilize it in different situations. So that's kind of the quick overview.

If you have any questions, Alex will be able to answer them in the chat. But please, if you have any questions, he will be able to answer those for you. And if you're like after today, you still have questions, feel free to email us at any time.

We will make sure to get back to you and answer your question. So. We're not going to, we're going to change gears now to the good stuff here. What we're here for is to learn the five, to talk about the five W's and to celebrate together for social work month. So like I said, we're going to be utilizing the chat today and any questions, I might have you stop throughout and ask you different questions.

This is, the chat's really going to be used as a reflection tool. So it's really to get your thoughts out. there to be able to see in real time the learning process and for you to interact with our community.

So, okay, here's our test strategies and five W's that we're going to be covering today. So, Um, you probably have, you might have heard of the five W's you might not have, but we'll talk about that today. Um, and let's go ahead and jump on in. And like I said, take notes as you would like, totally up to you, um, how you want to utilize your time today. This will be sent out.

So you will have access to this afterwards as well. Okay. So first happy social work month. Um, Like I already said, we're so excited to be celebrating with you.

If you are not yet, follow us, follow those emails we've been sending and follow us on social because we have a lot of stuff coming down throughout the month. We are on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn. We had planners come out. We're going to have CEUs trackers come out.

We're going to have contests too. So we'll be offering, we'll be raffling off the program. We'll be doing a variety of different things. So make sure.

that you are checking that out. Bonnie, our social media content creator, she's probably on this call, but she's been doing an amazing job of making sure lots of stuff is going out for social work month. All of our products are going to be $10 off for the entire month.

And that's anything that can be practice test, the power pack, anything, just make sure you pop in the code SW 2023. If you are purchasing anything, we want to make sure that you are able to get that. OK. And people are saying that they really like the power pack.

I think the power pack like really takes your studying to the next level. It's not necessary. There's going to be two.

There's just going to be the basics and there's going to be the power pack. The power pack takes that knowledge to the next level and it really allows you to practice in real time. OK. If you have the premium, you have the power pack. It was it's just an add on.

OK. Lots and lots and lots of questions in the chat. Alex will be following up with all of you. It's just there's a lot of questions. So he'll be getting to you.

So don't worry. Here, once again, so you'll have this use social work 2023 if you want to purchase anything this month. OK, so this test, what do you need to know about it?

No matter what level you're taking, whether that be the bachelor's, master's or clinical, there's going to be three types of questions. You'll just see more different types of questions depending on the level. So.

If you are taking the bachelor's, you will see mostly recall questions. These are questions that require you to remember a fact or a piece of information. They're pretty straightforward, right?

And these are just, you have a question, maybe it's a medication question or defense mechanism question. You answer and you move on. Bachelors will be very heavy in this.

master's in clinical, you'll have very few recall questions. So that's why content's not enough. When you're studying for this exam, you have to be able to take that information and apply it.

So then we have application questions. And what are application questions? These are going to take that recall knowledge to the next level.

So not only do you have to recall information, but you have to be able to apply it in a case scenario. So it might give you a little vignette or talk about a client that you might have. You need to know more than just a definition. You're starting to use some of those higher level thinking skills. Reasoning.

These are going to be on the master's and clinical level exam. You will see a lot of reasoning questions on the clinical level exam. What are reasoning questions? These take your thinking to the highest level, and they're the most difficult questions. They require you to recall and apply information, synthesize that information.

examine the details and problem solve. So why are these so difficult? You're using a lot of brain power here, right? These might be ethical dilemmas.

These might be, I'm trying to think some other reasoning questions. They might give you distractor information. So you have to synthesize, is this information that I need to answer the question correctly, or is this information to throw me off?

So that's going to be those ones that you kind of have to read a couple times because you're just really processing that information. All levels of the exam have 170 questions. 150 of those are scored. You will never know which 20 are not scored.

They don't tell us, unfortunately. They're usually for ASWB to be testing out as pilot questions. So unfortunately, you don't know which ones count towards that 150 or not.

Test scores. vary depending on what test you get. There's around four or five different versions. Some require, I've seen anywhere from 96 out of 150, correct? The highest I've seen is a 103 out of 150, correct?

So I can't tell you which one you're going to get or why some are weighted at different values, but that can all be found on the ASWB website. If you have not checked out the ASWB website and... I just want to make it clear. We are not affiliated with ASWB in any way other than we just know you have to get information from them to be able to sit from the exam. So they will have a lot of like logistical test information.

So that's the type of questions you'll see. Like I said, bachelors mostly recall a few application masters, all three. But most are in that application bucket.

And then clinical will be. little bit of all three, but mostly in the reasoning section. Okay.

So let's talk strategy. If you are like, I don't have a strategy yet, you've come to the right place because you need to have a strategy for answering these questions. A lot of people do flashcards or they read a book and they feel like content wise, they're very strong, but then they get to the exam and there's a lot of case vignettes or complicated wording or things that require you to really think about the subject. Tap into your thinking and apply the information. So you want to make sure that you have a strategy because you have to be efficient.

Unless you get extra time, you only get four hours. And I do encourage you if you may be, if English is not your first language, if you have a learning disability, if you have a medical diagnosis and you need extra time, you can definitely get accommodations. And I definitely encourage you to apply. The worst thing the board can tell you is no, right? But sometimes as social workers, we are not our own best advocates.

So if you think you need extra time, apply for it. And all that would, we have tons of information on our blog that I can have Alex share our blog link because we have actually a, and I believe we have a YouTube video on how to apply for accommodations for it. So you wanna make sure that you are analyzing information.

So how do you do that? You want to read each question twice before looking at the answers. So you're going to have three or four answer choices. If you're testing in 2023, you will have some combination of three and some combination of four. That's a new change that the ASWB has made.

You want to read them all twice. Why is that? The first time through, you might miss information.

The second time through, you're going to get more information. Read all answers before starting to think about choosing an answer. Some people like to jump ahead.

They like to get excited. And, you know, they might say, oh, I know the answer is B. You want one word could change an entire answer here.

So you want to make sure that you are reading all of your answer choices and thinking about them before jumping to an answer. 2023 is when the three answer choices rolled out. So you if you are taking it.

Now forward, you will see three and four answer choices. Okay. Eliminate answers that are too extreme or do not answer the question stem.

So what does this mean? For example, if it said, I'll give you an example of what too extreme would be. If you got a question that said you had a child come into school building with a bruise. An answer that is too extreme would be to call the. police, right?

If a child comes in with a bruise, many children come in, we don't have any additional information at this point that would say that the child is in imminent danger. So too extreme, you want to rule those out in process of elimination. The more you can rule out, the easier it's going to be for you to answer.

Okay. And then do not, this is really hard if you've been in the field for a while, you don't want to add any information into the question stem. The words. are the words that they give you.

An example of this, say you get a question that says you are working with an elderly client in a assisted living setting. We do not want to assume because they are elderly that they cannot care for themselves or that they are not able to make decisions on their own unless the question told us that, right? So we do not want to put any information.

or assume anything that's not in the question stem. And you will see as we break these down what that means in just a little bit. Okay, next slide.

The helping process. Um, a lot of people find this to be some of the most helpful. This is pretty much the only acronym I teach.

It's not even really an acronym. It's a process and I have a study tip for it, but the social work helping process is major because it is going to give us a starting point and an ending point for working with clients. So, um, what is the social work helping process? It's very basic. You might have heard of it as referred to as a generalist model, but it helps us know our process when we're working with clients.

So why is this process helpful? Because the way we engage with clients in the engagement phase is very different than how we would engage with clients in the termination phase. Does that make sense, right? The very first time I'm meeting a client, it's going to be very different than if I've worked with them for maybe six weeks or six months. So what is this helping process?

Engagement. assessment, planning, intervention, evaluation, and determination. And this, if you're looking for like a little memory trick, eat a pie today is how people remember it. Eat, engagement, a, assessment, pie, planning, intervention, evaluation, today, determination.

People have asked, I'm just seeing this in the chat. People have asked, will we ever get an app? That would be very, very down the road because surprisingly, it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to make an app.

And we don't have anyone that we know that has a computer engineering background. So that would be down the road. We would love to have an app, but there's tons that goes into an app.

So I would love to have an app, too. It's just that would be more in our long term planning. OK, so I will quickly I have a video on YouTube about the helping process.

But quickly, engagement is that first session. You're building rapport with the clients. You are going over consent. You are going over confidentiality.

Do not move to the assessment phase with a client until you have informed consent. You have to have informed consent to move on. And you're building rapport in the engagement phase. And the purpose of engagement is we want our clients to come back. Okay.

We've engaged them. We've gotten their consent. We're building that rapport. We're moving to the assessment phase.

And all assessment means is you're collecting information about what's going on for that client, right? It could be the presenting problem. It could be developmental history. It could be a biopsychosocial, a social history.

Every agency, every setting is going to have a little bit of a different procedure for assessment. Okay. You've engaged, you've accessed, you collect information. You found out what the presenting problem is.

Then you need to work on planning. What are you going to do in treatment with the client to work towards their goals? So planning is usually treatment planning. You want to make sure this is done in conjunction with the client as much as possible, because we don't want to just dictate and say, this is the plan and this is what you're going to do. In the chat, why is planning with the client so important?

Why do we want to have their buy-in for this process? Self-determination, absolutely. We don't want to have that position of power where we're telling them what to do. We meet the client where they are.

Mutually agreed upon, buy-in, motivation, right? I don't know about you. I would not be very motivated if someone was just telling me this is how things are going to go, right? We want to empower them.

So we're definitely working from a strengths-based empowerment model. Patient-centered. Okay.

So we've engaged our client. We've assessed. We know the problem. We've treatment planned. Next, you're going to move into the, really the bulk of the work you're going to do.

That's intervention. And that's when you're actually doing whatever it is you plan for. So that might be cognitive behavioral therapy or mindfulness or DBT. The intervention is doing the actual work. From there.

in a perfect world, right? Like they're meeting their goals, everything's going great. The next step is evaluation. It's listed as the second to last step, but really you need to be taking data at all points throughout the process, right? We know the code of ethics says that we have to be data informed and evaluation means, are you taking information in?

This could be Um, this could be a variety of things. This could be screeners. This could be observations.

It could be self-reports, but is the client making progress towards their treatment goals? So we are evaluating for progress in the evaluation stage. Um, and then the last stage is termination. And all that means is. You are ending the therapeutic relationship.

Termination, if possible, should not just be a one time thing. Right. It's not like, OK, this is our last session.

Bye bye. You should prepare your client to terminate. So you need to make sure that they're aware of what determination looks like, what the next steps would be, and really prepare them to utilize the skills that you've used in session outside of the session.

So. Let's go through these one more time. Engagement is building rapport. You are meeting them.

You are getting consent or going over boundaries. Think of that as kind of the first appointment. Assessment is collecting information. So what information are you using to know what the presenting problem is or how long they've had symptoms? Planning.

That's usually treatment planning. That's setting your roadmap for what you're going to do in treatment with the client. intervention is doing the work.

So whatever that modality is, evaluation is assessing the progress the client has made. Are they making progress towards their treatment goals? Do you need to change anything? What's their motivation like making changes as needed?

And then, like I said, in a perfect world, if they've met all their goals and they're doing wonderfully, you'd move into the termination phase, which means you would be gearing up to end treatment. Okay. Why is this helpful for first and next questions?

Because what if it says you are treatment planning with the client? What do you do next? If you're already treatment planning with the client, you know you've engaged with them and you know you've assessed for something.

If it says you are terminating a client, that's going to look very different than if you were just meeting them for the first time. So it kind of gives you a sense of the work that you need to do with the client and the work that can be done in the future with the client. So it gives us a timeline of where you are. Okay. So what do you need to know about this helping process or the eat a pie today?

The six steps we just went over. What will be most helpful in your studying is to think of a past client or make up a client with a problem that they're coming in to see you and use that as an example of how you can walk through those six stages. So what would engagement look like? What would assessment look like?

What would planning look like? What would intervention look like? like, evaluation and termination.

Write those six steps down and then come up with that scenario because when we're able to make it stick, especially adult learners, when it can apply to our knowledge that we already have, it's going to take your learning to the next level. So you want to have real life examples as much as possible. So I definitely encourage you if you're ever wondering like, why is this information not sticking? Try to apply it to real life information and that will help you. recall it a little bit better and apply it a little bit better.

So I definitely encourage you after today, use that eat a pie today engagement helping process and think of it with a client or make up a scenario. Okay. So now we are going to jump into the five W's. So you have probably heard of who, what, where, when, and why I like to think of this as kind of like a back to basics, all that stuff you learned in fourth. grade where you had to like pull out of an article, who is the main character, what's going on, where is this taking place?

This actually is a very easy to remember skill that you can use when you are sitting for your exam. So I encourage you if you have a question that you need to pull out information or you're getting stuck on, you're utilizing the five W's. because what does this do? It synthesizes things, right? If you can say who your client is, what is the problem?

Where is the setting? When did symptoms start? And why are we here to help them?

You have pulled out most of the information that you need. So it's really a way to organize your thinking, if not anything, right? Because sometimes the question stems can be lengthier. They might be one or two sentences, but you have to synthesize because at the end of the day, I will say.

that this exam, it's really a reading comprehension exam, right? And this is where there's kind of a disconnect where people are like, I don't understand. I've been in the field. It's not a skills test, right? It's not like they're coming to your work site and they're determining your skill level.

You're reading questions, you're comprehending them, and you're answering them. So it really is a reading comprehension test. So you want to make sure that you're utilizing these five W's and you want to have a toolbox on test day.

and not an actual toolbox. Don't bring an actual toolbox into the testing room. They will not allow you to bring that because they're very strict about what can go in and out.

This is kind of a mental toolbox. So you want to make sure that you're always adding skills that you can bring to make your life easier on test day, because you're only going to have about 75 seconds to 90 seconds per question. So you don't have much time to answer a question you have to answer and move on or you will run out of time. So this is the five W's is one thing that you can utilize on test day. OK, so here's going to be our practice question that we are using to break down.

um, using the five W's. So, um, you can go ahead and read it. I'll read it on the screen as well.

A social worker is collecting information for family therapy. The family consists of a mother, father, and two children ages 14 and eight. The parents report they want the family to spend quality time together, but whenever they try, everyone ends up fighting.

The 14 year old daughter looks visibly annoyed and states her parents treat her like a baby. The eight-year-old says he wants to play with kids in the neighborhood and go to his friend's house, but his parents say family time at home is more important. The social worker should focus treatment on, and if you've been coming to study groups, we've used this example before, but this has a lot of information in it, right? It's a family.

There's a teenager, an eight-year-old, and they're just not really communicating in a way that's helpful. That's probably why they're coming to see us in family therapy. So throughout...

These five W's, we're going to use this information to pull apart and synthesize. So our first W is our who. In this stem, who is our client?

That's what the who means. Who is your client? Is it an individual client? Is it a couple or is it a family?

Is it a group here? Our client is the family system. They're here for family therapy, right? We're not treating each one individually, family as a unit. We know the family unit consists of a mother, father, and two children.

And it gives us the ages of the children. Age matters because we know there's developmental milestones that everyone meets at certain times. So by telling us that there's a 14-year-old, we know like what developmentally we should expect of a 14-year-old, right? Adolescent, peer pressure, wanting to be with friends, defiance against family. And then we know the other child is eight, school-aged, wanting to be with friends, right?

Starting to gain independence. So age matters. And also age can be a good indicator of if the child is within what we would expect to be developmentally appropriate. For example, if it said you are seeing a 14 year old and they're having regression regression with their toileting skills, that's going to be a major red flag because we would assume a 14 year old teenager has mastered toilet skills. So we don't know.

Sometimes we're not going to have all the information. Right. We don't know how old the mother and father is.

So we don't have that information. But who is our client? This family, family unit, mom, dad, and the children, you know, the children's ages. So that's our who for this one.

The what. Here's the three questions you want to consider when you're figuring out what the what of a question is. What is the presenting problem? What is the question asking? What does the social worker need to do?

So here, what is the problem? Parents are coming and bringing the whole family to therapy, which means they need some sort of help, right? They wouldn't be coming to us if they didn't need some sort of help. So here I would say the presenting problem is there's some sort of breakdown in communication or expectations, right? Parents want to spend quality time, but kids are not really feeling that.

They're not interested in that right now. And there's some conflict, right? When they do sit down to have this family time, there's disagreement.

or conflict, it says they end up fighting. So the family time is not what they envisioned. So that would be the presenting problem. What is the question asking?

It's saying, what should we focus treatment on? So that's basically saying, what do you do with this information? And then what does the social worker need to do? Here we need to take all this information, put it together, and work with the family unit.

towards a goal. We're not saying I'm going to do this for the kid. I'm going to do this for the mom and dad family as a unit.

How do we get them towards goals together? So that's something that's very different than individual therapy or a variety of things. Family therapy.

I don't know if any of you do family therapy, but I think it is the most amazing skill. If you can be a very skilled family therapist, just because it's very tough work, you're bringing together lots of personalities and doing a lot of... communication work. So we have our who, we have our what, where, and you might think where, that seems like an odd. piece of evidence.

But where is really like, what setting are you in as the social worker? So are you a hospital social worker? Are you a school social worker?

Are you a hospice social worker? Are you in person? Are you, I mean, we, we know social worker, social work is so diverse. So we could be at so many different places.

And that's why this test can be really challenging in school. And in our careers, we usually specialize, right? We're probably like, like maybe school social workers or hospital or clinical or macro. But this exam is generalist.

So you kind of have to have some knowledge on all of the different settings. So where are you? And setting does matter because what you would do in a hospital and the ER is very different than what you do in private practice, right?

So think of that. And then where is the client? Is the client physically with you?

Is the client on the phone? Is the client at school? Is the client in the hospital? That matters too. Here, notice there's no where.

We don't know the setting and we don't know where the client is. So sometimes you're not gonna have all of the pieces of the five Ws, right? It doesn't mean that this is, that that's a bad question or a good question. It just means we don't have that piece of information.

Sometimes it might matter. Sometimes it might not matter. So we don't have the where here. We don't know what setting we're in.

We just know that we're providing family therapy of some sort. We don't know where. Okay.

There is not a default setting because, right, we can just assume they're coming to services. That could be virtually, that could be in person. They're engaging in services.

So that's the information that we don't have a default. Okay. So the when is really time sensitive.

So when you get the when, time. When did you meet the client? So think of that helping process. When did symptoms occur?

And when did the presenting problem start? So here, where do you think in that helping process we would be if we are just collecting information from the family? Go ahead in the chat. What would be the when for this?

Definitely the beginning phases. We're either engaging or we're assessing. First, we're definitely not intervening yet. We don't have enough information. We're in those beginning stages, either engagement or assessment, somewhere in there.

When did symptoms occur? It doesn't really say, right? We don't know if there's been a problem for five years or five weeks.

So we don't have that information. And we don't know when the presenting problem started. But it obviously started before they came to us, which is why they came to us.

So it's been happening for some amount of time. Sometimes it will be specific. It might say they've had symptoms for six months or they've had symptoms for three weeks.

When you get to the clinical level and you have to diagnose based on DSM, we know that timeframe matters, right? Because certain diagnosis you need to have for certain lengths of time. So we have our who, our what, our where, our when.

The last W is our hardest one. And that is our why. Why is the why the hardest? Critical thinking.

We have to take all of the information that we have and put it all together. So why is the help of a social worker needed? And why are these clues presented, right? Is it a distractor? Is it important?

You're really critically thinking here. So let's analyze this one particularly. Why is the help of a social worker needed? Because there's some sort of communication breakdown, right? They need some skills or they are working towards a solution.

So social worker is needed to help this family with their communication. That's why they're here. This is some clues that give us information that there's a breakdown.

14-year-old stating her parents treat her like a baby. And the 8-year-old wanting to play with friends. That would show us that there's some sort of disconnect between the parents' expectations and what... is developmentally appropriate for the children, right?

Parent expectations could be the why too. Maybe they're not realistic expectations. Maybe they're not connecting with their parents. Maybe they need some psychoeducation around what happens in adolescence and, you know, childhood. So there's a variety of different things.

And why is this information important? Why are they here to see us? Because like I said, there's some sort of communication breakdown.

Expectations are, they're not on the same page. That's mostly why people come to family therapy, right? Not on the same page, want to have family time.

That's quality and it works for everyone. So I'll give you just a moment there. We'll pause. We got the five W's are who, are what, are where, are when, and are why. I'm going to read the question and now we're going to read the answer choices.

For this, for all the questions we're going to cover this evening, it's not important that you get it right. There's no prize for getting the questions right. It's really to practice your skills. So we're going to break questions down together.

We are going to work through them. I'm going to highlight and I'm going to show you how I would break them down and how we work on strategy. But it's really a time for you to just be, it's a safe space. You can, you know, it's really here a time to connect where you can work on your skills.

You're not being judged. You're not getting a score. You got 100% right. It's really the process here.

Process, process, process. So let's do this practice question. Social worker is collecting information for family therapy. The family consists of a mother, father, and two children, ages 14 and 8. The parents report they want the family to spend quality time together, but whenever they try, everyone ends up fighting.

The 14-year-old daughter looks visibly annoyed and states her parents treat her like a baby. The 8-year-old says he wants to play with kids in the neighborhood and go to his friend's house, but the parents say family time at home is more important. The social worker should focus treatment on A.

Helping the family establish appropriate roles and boundaries. B, developmental levels and communication stages for each child. C, facilitating activity-based family interactions to build on the strengths the family presents with.

Or, let me move my bar so I can see. D, connecting the family in meaningful ways through role play. What should be the focus of treatment and why?

So go ahead in the chat. What do you think should be the focus of family therapy? And go ahead and put why you think the answer is what it is.

And if you're stuck between two, definitely put that in. That helps me see your thinking. So I know like maybe I was between two answers.

I'll give you maybe 30 more seconds for that one. We would do process of elimination. And when we go through our practice questions here in just a moment, I will show you what it will look like on my end. We'll like to cross information out and do process of elimination. What I would do to eliminate.

I would immediately rule out answer choice B. Social workers should focus treatment on developmental levels and communication strategies for each child. What is wrong with B for a family therapy model? We don't want to just focus on any members of the family, right? Where B only focuses on the children.

That does not incorporate everyone, right? So B would be out. We would eliminate that. We want to focus on the family as a unit.

It's going to be important that we talk about developmental stages, but that's not going to be our focus. So B is out. Another way that I would, another answer choice that I would rule out is D, connecting the family in meaningful ways to role play. That might be a tool we use, but why is that not what our focus should be on? Have we identified yet that they need to do role playing strategies?

I see lots of people shaking their head, right? We don't know if communication. Like if they will do best through role play, we are just starting to collect information.

We can't make that determination yet that role play is what they need. Does that make sense? And they're not on the same page yet. So I don't think role play is going to go very good with a teen that's annoyed and an eight-year-old who's very upset, right?

They'd be like, this is so silly. You have to build some rapport first. So we're down to A and C.

Do we help the family establish appropriate roles and boundaries? or facilitate activity-based family interactions to build on the strengths the family presents with. So what would be the best focus of treatment, given that we know that quality time is going poorly and kids want something different than parents? C is not a bad answer, but it's not the best answer.

We might build upon activity-based interactions, but first we need to help them establish roles and boundaries before doing any activities, right? If they're not on the same page with boundaries, expectations, what each person wants out of the family time, what each person expects, we can't really move forward with anything because you'll be doing activities and they're not on the same page. So you got to align first.

So the correct answer here is a help the family establish appropriate roles and boundaries. You want to do that as your starting point before you do anything else. Doesn't mean you won't do these other things, but you got to get everyone on the same page.

Right. It's think of like when you're working in a group, you don't just start working on the task right away. You're not like, OK, you got to set some boundaries, set some expectations first. So.

For this one, the focus of treatment should be the base, the foundation. Any questions on that one? It's a little bit tricky one. I did a complicated one so you can kind of see the strategy pulling out the information. So we will get to practice questions.

But if you are looking for the, our website is here. Alex can put this in the chat. This is our email and this is our website.

So there's tons and tons and tons of information here. You will have the slide deck so you can see. So this will be available to you.

I'm going to stop sharing this for just a moment. And I do want to make sure that we respect everyone's time. So we are going to do three practice. There'll be five practice questions that you will get information to, but we're only going to be able to cover three this evening. So you'll get to try two on your own, which I actually think will be great because you can use those five W's.

You can work through them and there always will be rationales to go with each one as well. So let me pull up our practice questions. Exit out of this. I will make this a little bit bigger.

So our study groups. Generally, 95% of the time we end with practice questions unless we're doing a self-care or something like that. So the way that it will look is you'll have the blank questions and then every question you will see with agents of change has rationale.

And I tell people when you're looking for questions, if it does not provide you a rationale, it's not a good question. Because how are you going to know what you're doing if you're on the right track? If you are analyzing the question correctly, if you don't have rationale. So you will always see we will have rationales at the end of all of them. And that's for any questions you get with agents of change, because it's really important that you know why the answer is the way it is and why the answer.

Sometimes it's like really like important to know why the other choices are not correct. So you always get rationales to help you better understand. And I say that practice questions are a data point.

Right. It's to assess your learning. How are you doing? use it as a tool. You're going to get something out of every single practice question.

So we're going to have three that we go through today. We're going to be utilizing the chat. I'm going to highlight, I'm going to show you how I break them down. And then, like I said, you'll get access to this.

So you'll get to see, try the last two questions on your own. We're only going to have time to get through the first three, but be thinking of those five W's who, what, where, when, and why, as we're breaking them down. So let me make this a little bit bigger.

Okay. Number one. And this one has three answer choices, A, B, and C, because remember, 2023, they made those changes. We now have three and four answer choices.

Number one, a couple enters couples therapy due to experiencing conflict in their relationship. The husband blames the wife for all their problems, while the wife feels helpless and demoralized. What would be the most appropriate intervention for the social?

A, connect both the husband and wife with individual services in conjunction with couples therapy. B, help the couple identify and communicate their feelings and needs. C, assess for potential emotional abuse that is leading to the relationship conflict. Go ahead in the chat. What would you choose and why?

Why is just as important. Why did you choose the answer that you did? Think of what your role would be as a couples therapist, right?

That's very different than if you were an individual therapist. So once again, who is your client? Okay, so here is what I would pull out from this question. Who is our client? A couple.

So we know that couples therapy is a little bit different than individual, right? They're, they're, they're, I don't know why this is, I don't want that to change. I want this.

Okay. So our, who is the couple? What's the presenting problem? They're having conflict. Husband is saying the wife's the problem and she's feeling helpless and demoralized.

Where? Does not say, right? We don't know what our setting is, but we do know we're working with a couple. Who, what, where, when? Does not say.

We don't know how long these issues have been happening for. Why do they need us? Well, they're coming because they obviously want to work on this, right?

There's this couple and they're not on the same page. So what would be the most appropriate intervention? So here we're talking about how do you intervene? What do you do with this information?

So process of elimination. If they are there to see you for couples therapy, would you say you should go see your own individual counselors? That might be something they need, but that's not why they're here to see us.

Right. Like that is not what we're going to focus treatment on, especially not as a couples therapist. So now we're down to B and C. Do we have to assess for potential emotional abuse right now? Do we have, that would be an assumption.

Do we have any information that says either one of them is feeling as if emotional abuse is occurring, right? There's definitely some sort of breakdown of communication, but we don't want to assume because the husband's blaming her that there's emotional abuse going on. We don't have the full picture yet whatsoever. So C is out.

We don't want to assess yet not enough information. That would be jumping to conclusion. It's a process of elimination. We need to help the couple identify and communicate their feelings and needs.

Why is B the best starting point for couples that are not communicating well? Seems very good starting point, right? What's your feelings and what do you need?

Think of Maslow's hierarchy, right? What are your needs? Yeah, starting point.

You got to hear like, that's our starting point. point. C is too extreme and we're not going to focus treatment on having them go to their individual services if we are here to serve the couple. We're starting where the clients are and this is where they are.

And we as the clinician need to know what their feelings and needs are, because we're going to be collecting that information. Any questions about number one? Number two? A social worker is working with a client who has a history of substance abuse and is currently in recovery. The client tells the social worker that they have been feeling strong cravings for drugs lately.

What would be the most appropriate intervention for the social worker? A. Help the client resist cravings.

B. Help the client identify triggers and develop a plan to manage them. C. Encourage the client to attend a support group meeting.

Or D. Schedule an appointment for the client with a substance abuse counselor. What would you do as a client in recovery if you're having some cravings and why? So who? is our client, someone that is experiencing substance, has a history, they're not even currently experiencing that, history of substance abuse, that's in recovery. What's the presenting problem?

They tell you they're starting to have some cravings, right? That could be very normal part of recovery. I see people shaking their head, yes, so that would be something we need to know.

Who or what? When? We don't know.

Right. It just says that they've been feeling lately. So that actually is our like this is a newer behavior if it says lately.

So I'm going to put that in here. Who, what, where? We don't know when. Why do they need us? Why?

Why are they telling us this information? They don't want to relapse. Right.

They're like, can you help me through this? Right. I'm having these cravings. What can we do to meet the client where they're at and support them through this? Right.

So let's start eliminating. Do we need to schedule an appointment with a substance abuse counselor? Too extreme right now, right?

The client is not even using right now, right? So we're not going to say go to a substance use. And is that meeting the client where they're at in their therapeutic relationship with us? No, right? If they started to use and need a substance abuse program, we would definitely do that.

We're not there yet. We do not have that information. Can we help this client resist cravings?

Can we do that for the client? No. That would be wonderful in a world if we could just control people and help them, you know, get into their mind and do things.

But that is absolutely not how things work. So that's just not possible. So A is out.

Has the client said anything about wanting to attend a support group meeting or that they've even been engaged in support groups before? Assumption, right? If it said.

Support groups are very helpful for the client. That would be a different answer, but we don't have that. We don't have that information provided, process of elimination.

What can we do? Help the client identify triggers and develop a plan to manage them. And why do you think identifying those triggers for a client that has a previous history with substances, why would that be the best response?

So that they can have some tools for prevention, right? Here is what your triggers are. it allows them to identify the triggers. And then together, you're coming up with a plan so they can work on coping skills or avoiding situations that are causing them this, right? It's a tool, right?

And in B, this is totally done in conjunction with the client. We're not telling them what to do, right? We would be doing this as a process together with them. Does that one make sense?

Yeah. The last one we'll have time for tonight. is number three.

And like I said, you'll get access to the other two to practice. So you'll get that emailed out to you. So number three, this is a, oh, this is a four answer choice. So I'm going to hop this onto the next page so we can see it better.

Number three, a social worker is working with a teenager who has been restricting food intake and has lost a significant amount of weight. The teenager reports feeling overweight and out of control. He expresses a desire to lose more weight. What should the social worker do next? So before you even answer, let's pull these important information.

Who is our client? Teenager. So what do we know about teenagers?

Developmentally, what do we know about teenagers? Self-esteem, comparing self to others, right? Okay. Social media, big during this time, right? A lot of comparing self to others.

Identity versus role confusion. Okay. So who we're working with as a teenager, what is the presenting problem?

Restricting food and has lost weight. We don't know what that means though, right? Like what is significant to this person? What does that mean?

And the teenager reports feeling out of control and overweight. And he wants to lose more weight. So we have our who, our what, where.

We don't know. The setting is not here. We don't know.

Who, what, where, when. It does not say. So we do not know when this happened. Why is a social worker needed? Why do you think a social worker would be needed?

And why do we need this information? change, right? So also why think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs?

Why is food such a big red flag for us when we have clients that are restricting food or losing weight? Basic need? Yes. Think of how weight loss can affect you physically, right? Lots of different things to consider.

So Um, it says, what should the social worker do next? So this isn't what should this means we've got this information client says restricting food and we know loss losing weight. What do we do next?

A refer the teenager to a dietitian to assess their nutritional needs. B develop a plan with the client that meets their nutritional needs while also addressing their concern and fears around food. C assess the teenager's risk for eating disorder and provide appropriate intervention or D, schedule an appointment to collaborate with the client's medical doctor. Remember, next means you got to put these in order. Client is here telling us, I feel out of control.

I want to lose more weight. What do we do and why? You can probably get it down to two, but remember, you need next means what's your immediate next step. I will give you a clue here. We would probably do all of these things at some point, but we're looking for the next step.

None of these are going to cause harm to the client. What can we start to rule out? What would I not do next?

I'm not going to refer them out yet to a dietician to address their nutritional needs, but they do need to see probably a dietician once we have more information. We don't have enough information yet to know specifically what's going on. So we're not going to refer them out just yet. B is also out. We can't develop a plan that meets their nutritional needs.

First of all, we probably would not be giving nutritional advice, right? We would want to do that in conjunction with a nutritionist. And then we're not addressing these fear. We don't know if there is a fear around food.

We don't have that information yet. We don't know why they're restricting food. So B is out. So what do we do next?

Assess for an eating disorder and provide appropriate intervention or schedule an appointment to collaborate with the client's medical doctor. You would do both of these things, but what are you going to do next? You're going to definitely want them to see the doctor, but not when they're here telling us I'm restricting food.

I feel out of control. I want to lose weight. I need more information first. And then I would, and we don't know like.

what significant amount for their, everyone has significant. Is that for their, like, were they on a plan that they, they, were they told they needed to lose weight? There can be a variety of different things going on.

Do they have a medical condition that they're losing weight? Right. Like sometimes clients have conditions and then they just lose a lot of weight or gain a lot of weight.

So what I would want to do next, because for safety purposes, I need to assess, I need more information. They, I would say, given the information we have, they are at risk for an eating disorder. We don't know if they meet criteria, but they're definitely at risk due to the food intake, losing weight and reporting like wanting to lose more.

And what do you know about eating disorders? Very serious, very, very, very serious. We want to make sure that we're assessing properly. And then from there, involving medical professionals, involving nutritionists, involving parents, but we don't have enough information yet.

We need to assess, though, what the risk level is and then from there make an appropriate next step. So I would actually say this is a safety type question, right? Because what if we just gloss this over?

That's very problematic, right? Because the client's telling us some important things. So I will say with eating disorders, you want to make sure that you act quickly because we know how important it is for the body and how significant treatment. can be in helping clients that are experiencing an eating disorder. Any questions about number three?

Okay. So I have gone over our time here. You will get two more questions to work on on your own, and they'll have rationales. One is a policy macro question, and the other is a domestic violence safety question.

I hope that you took some strategies from today. And what did I want to end with? First of all, thank you.

I'm going to stop sharing here. I want to thank you all for this amazing study group. We had over 350 people. That's absolutely amazing.

I hope that you will check out some of the awesome stuff we have coming out for the rest of the month of March. And I will say Agents of Change has something for everyone. We have free, we have paid. You will find something that... you can utilize.

We have some other exciting stuff coming, hopefully for 2023 that includes CEUs and more training. So we're knock on wood waiting for some approval on that. But like I said, I hope that if you have any questions, Alex can once again, put our email in the chat. He'll put our website in the chat. You will be getting this recording.

You will be getting the PowerPoint and you will be getting the practice questions. So if you missed anything. You will get that.

I do encourage you to try those last two questions once you get the materials sent out to just see if you were able to use those five W's able to use the helping process. Because it can be they can you can miss something right like they're they're pretty dense questions. So thank you everyone for joining tonight. Happy Social Work Month.

I hope that you found this helpful. Like I said, come in, come and check us out. We have something for everyone.

Thank you, everyone. Happy Social Work Month. Oh, yes.

If you're testing soon, good luck. Good luck, good luck, good luck. And we still got 25 plus more days of this month. So many, many more opportunities to celebrate you.

And this takes a little bit of time. So some people are like, when will this be sent out? Probably later this evening.

We got to upload it to YouTube and make sure that we, tomorrow at the latest. Thank you everyone. Thank you for joining.

Bye-bye.

Transcript for:Exploring Social Work Strategies and Support

Transcript for:
Exploring Social Work Strategies and Support