SOCW 6500 Week 7 Engagement Skills Critique Example

Closed Questions Everywhere and Feelings Almost Never Reflected: An Engagement Skills Critique of a Constructed Exchange With a Young Father Describing Strain With a Former Partner Over Shared Parenting, Built on a Tally of Reply Types and Three Rewritten Turns

Student Name

Walden University

SOCW 6500: Field Education I

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Closed Questions Everywhere and Feelings Almost Never Reflected: An Engagement Skills Critique of a Constructed Exchange With a Young Father Describing Strain With a Former Partner Over Shared Parenting, Built on a Tally of Reply Types and Three Rewritten Turns

The Exchange

The exchange is constructed from a session with a composite client, a 24-year-old father who shares custody of his three-year-old daughter with her mother. He came to the family support program after a series of arguments with his former partner at handoffs, one of which ended with a neighbor calling the police. In the fifteen-minute segment I recorded, he described the most recent handoff, his worry that his daughter is upset by the arguments and his frustration that his former partner changes plans at short notice. The segment contained 21 of my replies.

The Tally

The numbers tell a story I did not expect. I had thought of myself as a reflective listener. In this segment, closed questions outnumbered every other kind of reply, and I reflected his feelings only once. Ivey et al. (2018) describe closed questions as useful for gathering specific facts but likely to limit what a client says when used often, while reflections of feeling help clients name and explore emotions. My tally suggests I was gathering facts about the handoff when he was trying to tell me how it felt.

Social work's accreditation standards frame engagement as a core competency, one in which practitioners use empathy, reflection and interpersonal skill to engage clients (Council on Social Work Education, 2022). The tally is a measure of how far this segment fell short of that competency, and of where to improve.

Table 1

Worker Replies by Type in a Fifteen-Minute Segment

Replies were coded after the session from notes and recall; shares are rounded.

Three Replies Rewritten

Original reply 1: "Did she text you ahead of time that she'd be late?" He had just said, "I stood in that parking lot for forty minutes, and my daughter was crying in the car when they finally showed up." My closed question asked for a fact and skipped both his frustration and his distress about his daughter. He answered, "No," and the conversation stayed on logistics.

Rewritten: "Forty minutes waiting, and then seeing her crying. That sounds like it was hard to watch." This reflects his feeling and the part of the event that mattered most to him, and it leaves him room to say more about his daughter.

Original reply 2: "Have you thought about using a parenting app to keep track of the schedule?" This was advice offered early, in my fourth minute. It assumed the problem was organization, when he had not yet finished describing what the conflict was like.

Rewritten: "What do you think is going on between the two of you when plans change like that?" This open question invites his understanding of the conflict before any solution is offered. Hepworth et al. (2017) caution that premature advice-giving can lead clients to feel unheard and can reduce their own problem-solving.

Original reply 3: "So you're worried about your daughter?" He had said, "I don't want her growing up thinking this is how people talk to each other." My reply turned a statement into a closed question and reduced a specific fear to a general one.

Rewritten: "You don't want her to learn that this is how people treat each other." This reflection of meaning stays close to his words and shows that I heard the specific fear, which is about what she will learn from watching her parents.

What the Rewrites Change

In each original reply, I took the conversation somewhere: toward facts, toward a solution or toward a simpler version of his worry. In each rewrite, the client stays in charge of where the conversation goes. The pattern behind my closed questions seems to be the same one behind my quick reassurance in earlier weeks: discomfort with strong emotion, managed by turning to something concrete.

Practice Plan

For the next four sessions, I will tally my replies again after each recorded segment, aiming for at least as many reflections of feeling as closed questions. In seminar role plays, I will ask a peer to signal each time I ask a closed question so I can notice the habit in real time. I will review the tally with my field instructor at midterm.

References

Council on Social Work Education. (2022). 2022 educational policy and accreditation standards for baccalaureate and master's social work programs. https://www.cswe.org/accreditation/policies-process/2022epas/

Hepworth, D. H., Rooney, R. H., Rooney, G. D., & Strom-Gottfried, K. (2017). Direct social work practice: Theory and skills (10th ed.). Cengage Learning.

Ivey, A. E., Ivey, M. B., & Zalaquett, C. P. (2018). Intentional interviewing and counseling: Facilitating client development in a multicultural society (9th ed.). Cengage Learning.