Aims of assessment
The aims of the assignment are to develop your reflective skills and for you to demonstrate your own learning and show an awareness of your own values and attitudes in relation to work and working with others in the health and social care sector.Topic: A Social worker meeting a service user for the first time about housing issue.Assessment length
Role Play 8 to 10 minutes
Reflective Essay – 1000 words
*Note that reference lists do not count in the word limitSupport for the development of your assessment
Available assessment guidance and development:
An assignment support session prior to submission will focus on supporting you in developing the key knowledge and skills you need to produce an effective assignment Learning outcomes and threshold criteria
Unit learning outcomes and assessment criteria covered by this assessment Demonstrate the one-to-one working skills required to work with individual clients within a role play scenario and reflect on and assess your role play performance and one-to-one working skills identifying ways to improve future practice.
Threshold criteria to achieve a pass in the assessment Demonstrate the one-to-one working skills of effective communication (active listening, feedback and empathy, good techniques of questioning, etc.) required to work with individual clients within a role play scenario.
Identify the values, skills and ethics underpinning work with vulnerable groups and the importance of boundaries within practice and conflict that can arise between personal values and professional ethics.Key initial* reading and resources:
Duck, S. and McMahan, D.T. (2011) The Basics of Communication, A Relational Perspective, 2nd ed., London: Sage Publications.
Hargie, O. (2017) Skilled Interpersonal Communication: Research, Theory and Practice, 6th ed., Oxon: Routledge.
Koprowska, J. (2014) Communication and Interpersonal Skills in Social Work, 4th ed., Exeter: Learning Matters (also available as an e-book).
Thompson, N. (2015) People Skills, 4th ed., London: Macmillan.Specific assessment guidance on presentation, content or structure:
For assessment two, you are required to take part in a role-play scenario in order to demonstrate your one-to-one working skills. Alongside this exercise you will write a reflective essay on the skills required when working one-to-one within the human services.
The role-play exercise will cover the practice of one-to-one working with a client requiring health or social care services. Students will be randomly paired up to take part in this exercise, as you will also not be able to choose what clients/service users you come into contact with in your future work.
You must agree in your pair what role-play activity you are going to choose. It must be a simple example of an issue that a service user might come to talk to a practitioner about. This is to allow you to research areas of specific interest whilst drawing on the lectures as a resource.
Seminar time will be set aside for you to work together on your role-play, but you will also need to do work outside of the seminar times. Further guidance on the role-play and assignment task will be given in seminars.
In reality your role-play will take a maximum of 8 to 10 minutes. In this time, you will complete 2 mini role-plays. In one you will play the role of the professional/practitioner/service provider and your partner the role of the patient/client/service user. In the second you will play the role of the patient/client/service user and your partner will play the role of the professional/practitioner/service provider. This is so that you both gain experience of being a service provider but also experience what it is like to be a service user. You have to audio record your role play and submit this as evidence. Your reflective assignment will not be marked if you both did not submit the audio file.The written part of the assignment is an explanation and analysis of the role-play that you completed. The reflective essay is an individual activity; therefore, both of you should write and submit one.It must consist of:
1) An introduction – setting out that you are writing about, the scenario where you were the professional, and what role you played.
2) An explanation of the scenario that you and your partner agreed upon (setting the scene). This will involve defining the nature and responsibilities of your professional role which, together with your discussion of the scenario, should be brief (no more than 50-100 words). This assignment is not to simply be a description of what was said and done in the role play.
3) An analysis and reflection of the one-to-one working skills that took place in your role-play. This will be an interplay of how practitioner and client engaged and responded to each other, so you have to focus on both role players. Here you need to draw on academic sources/references linking skills to theory (particularly to reflective cycles of learning, such as Gibbs or Kolbs).
4) Information and analysis of what the ethics and values were that came into play in your scenario. Mention the difference between personal values and professional ethics and how you, the professional worker, dealt with this. Again, you should support your discussion here with academic sources/references.
5) State the strengths and the weaknesses of the interplay/meeting/interview. Say what did not go well and what would you do differently if you did it again.
6) Conclusion this should be a summary, demonstrating where your assignment met the aims and objectives in your introduction.
7) References in this essay you are required to use SIX academic references. These should come from texts in the units reading list or recommended reading from the reference lists provided at the end of the lecture slides.
You will be expected to draw on parts of at least six academic/peer-reviewed sources (that is academic books or academic journals) to support your discussion to pass. Of this minimum of six sources, only one can be an Internet source and the six do not include lecture notes. The six is a minimum; students are encouraged to carry out wider reading.How to get started start on your role play:
1 Get in touch with your partner once you have one.
2 Decide on your scenario, professional roles and service user.
3 This will involve researching your role (as a professional and as a service user; eg. a home nurse/social worker meeting a client (an elderly with dementia, a child victim of parental abuse, a woman/man victim of domestic violence, etc.) for the first time).
4 Gain some background information on your scenario.
5 Take time to work with your partner arrange regular meetings and find a mutually acceptable means of communication.
6 Dont forget you can book rooms in the library for meetings.
7 Audio record your role play (be extra careful with background noise when you proceed with the recording; find a quiet place to do this activity)
8 Once you have recorded your role play, listen to it and move on to write your individual reflective essay.No more than 5% of the assignment should be in the form of quotations.
You must use the Harvard referencing system to identify the source of all the information used in your assignment. You must reference systematically throughout the work itself and include a reference of the sources cited in your work. Please pay particular attention to secondary referencing in the referencing guidelines. You will find a copy of the latest referencing guidelines on the units BREO site. Also read the section headed Plagiarism and Bad Academic Practice on BREO.
Your work must be word processed, double spaced and page numbered. You must also include a word count.
You will be given time in your workshops to work on assignment 2 role-plays. However, you must make sure that you meet up outside of sessions as well if needed.
You are reminded that plagiarism of any type will be penalised and result in a fail.
