Field Directors

We have probably more than half of our sites that do not have a BSW or MSW with two years of experience to provide supervision. Over the years, we have been able to pay our faculty and adjunct to take on the supervision for students. As our program grows, this is becoming more costly, and our university is looking into alternative ways to compensate faculty. I believe there are universities that provide a class for supervision, but I am not sure. I am wondering if anyone has information on alternative ways that supervision is provided to students. If you do offer a class, how is it structured, how many units etc. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. 

Hi Kimberly, like Tiffany, we have often used alumni and other community practitioners as volunteers in this capacity. Sometimes there are social workers who have been field instructors for us before and have left to go into private practice, or maybe some other setting where they don't currently have the capacity to take a student, but still like supervising. If usually send out a request through a general listserv we keep asking for volunteers and seeing who I can get. This is something that I always mention to current students as well, telling them to keep in mind that once they graduate and have 2 years of experience, they can get in touch about being a field instructor, this can be a good way to gain some early supervisory experience. We've had pretty good luck with this approach.

I will say, as this need has continued to grow, I do also have one field supervisor that we hire at the rate of an adjunct and she supervises 8 students. I have this setup for her to do group supervision most weeks, but to provide each student with individual supervision 1-2 times per month. This helped supplement the needs when I had more placements needing this than volunteers.

Best,