Core Competencies and Practice Behaviors

By the completion of the advanced specialization level, advanced clinical social work practice students learn to:
 

1. Identify as a professional social worker and conduct themselves accordingly.
    
   1. Apply professional use of self.
   2. Display professionalism and respect for client systems and colleagues.
   3. Identify appropriate utility and use of supervision.
       
       
2. Apply social work ethical principles to guide professional practice.
    
   1. Identify and confront ethical dilemmas typically encountered in advanced clinical practice in the student's targeted field of practice.
       
       
3. Apply critical thinking to inform and communicate professional judgments.
    
   1. Analyze specific client and/or organizational issues from a multi-systemic and strengths-based perspective grounded in current theories that explain their causes.
       
       
4. Engage diversity and difference in practice.
    
   1. Identify a broad range of variables (e.g., age, ethnicity, culture, immigration status, race, gender, socio-economic status, sexual orientation, ability, disability) that affect the person seeking help, the service provider and the helping relationship.
       
       
5. Advance human rights and social and economic justice.
    
   1. Use knowledge of the effects of oppression, discrimination, and historical trauma on client and client systems to guide assessment, treatment and evaluation planning.
       
       
6. Engage in research-informed practice and practice-informed research.
    
   1. Identify current empirically-based assessment and evidence-based intervention and prevention strategies, and best practices for psychosocial problems faced by individuals, families, groups and communities in the context of the targeted field of practice.
       
       
7. Apply knowledge of human behavior and the social environment.
    
   1. Synthesize and differentially apply theories and/or research of human development and social environments to guide advanced clinical practice.
       
       
8. Engage in policy practice to advance social and economic well-being and to deliver effective social work services.
    
   1. Articulate the relationship between social policy, organizational structures and the impact on the organization and implementation of clinical social work services.
       
       
9. Respond to contexts that shape practice.
    
   1. Describe the environmental context of social work practice in community and organizational settings and the ability to assess and intervene when environmental constraints impinge on clinical practice.
       
       
10. (a) Engage, (b) assess, (c) intervene, and (d) evaluate with individuals, families, groups, organizations, and communities.
     
     
    1. Engagement
        
       1. Apply advanced skills of engagement.
           
           
    2. Assessment
        
       1. Apply advanced skills of assessment and case formulation.
           
           
    3. Intervention
        
       1. Apply advanced skills of clinical intervention.
       2. Apply advanced skills of transitioning and termination.
           
           
    4. Evaluation
        
       1. Apply advanced skills of clinical case evaluation.