Foundations & Values
Models & Phases of Work
History & Social Justice
Tuning In & Engagement
Contracting & Culture
100

This framework, abbreviated PIE, reminds social workers to consider how family, culture, and society shape a person’s behavior.

What is Person-in-Environment?

100

Shulman describes practice unfolding across the preliminary, beginning, middle, and this final phase.

What is the ending (and transition) phase?

100

Called “The Mother of Social Work,” she co-founded Hull House.

Who is Jane Addams?

100

This term describes the worker’s effort to get in touch with a client’s possible feelings and concerns before a session even begins.

What is (tuning in) preparatory empathy?

100

This contracting skill helps an overwhelmed client break a large problem into smaller, more manageable pieces.

What is partializing?

200

Social workers “challenge social injustice” and pursue change on behalf of the oppressed in the name of this core NASW value.

What is social justice?

200

This four-step model of practice — study, diagnosis, treatment, evaluation — can lead to “linear thinking,” as in the broken-leg example.

What is the medical model?

200

This social work pioneer’s “Friendly Visitors” approach is considered the origin of social casework, now called direct practice.

Who is Mary Richmond?

200

Along with aligning with the client’s perspective and asking open-ended questions, this is the third key engagement strategy.

What is recognizing strengths?

200

This is the client’s granting of permission to the worker and agency to use specific intervention procedures, including diagnosis and treatment.

What is informed consent?

300

Reflective of a worker’s own values, knowledge, and experience, this is called social work’s most important tool.

What is the (professional) use of self?

300

This model instead views worker and client in a dynamic, reciprocal interaction, where each is constantly affected by the other’s “movement.”

What is the interactional model?

300

This journalist and anti-lynching pioneer was joined in her activism by Mary Church Terrell.

Who is Ida B. Wells-Barnett?

300

Along with trust and caring, this is the “general sense of getting along well with the worker” — one of three elements of the working relationship.

What is rapport?

300

Hepworth et al. (2017) describe reassuring, premature advising, and lecturing as examples of this broader category of unhelpful communication.

What are counterproductive communication patterns?

400

Barker (2003) defines this term as “the customs, beliefs, standards of conduct, and principles considered desirable by a culture, a group of people, or an individual.”

What are values?

400

This is the assumption of the interactional model holding that growth and change happen in relationship, because we need each other.

What is the assumption of symbiosis?

400

Of the Four I’s of Oppression — ideological, institutional, interpersonal, and this fourth type — this one is nicknamed “the oppressor within.”

What is internalized oppression?

400

The deepest “level of tuning in” asks whether the service setting is associated with a majority or dominant group — tuning in to the impact of this.

What is oppression?

400

This term names the “brief and commonplace daily indignities” that send hostile or negative slights to a person or group.

What are microaggressions?

500

This 2021 addition to the NASW Code of Ethics calls on social workers to engage in critical self-reflection and recognize clients as experts of their own culture.

What is cultural humility?

500

This psychologist, quoted in Module 2, wrote that understanding another person is risky because “I might be changed by that understanding.”

Who is Carl Rogers?

500

This five-letter acronym for cross-cultural practice stands for Accept, Wonder, Ask, Research, and Explain.

What is AWARE?

500

Per Shulman, this is “a social worker’s effort to feel, as best as possible, the emotions of a client.”

What is empathy?

500

This kind of practice draws upon “the positive strengths of diverse cultural beliefs and practices.”

What is culturally sensitive practice?