Fall 2025 SOWK 486w Week 06 - Communication Skills Day 02 - Lab Day

Fall 2025 SOWK 486w Week 06 - Communication Skills Day 02 - Lab Day

title: Fall 2025 SOWK 486w Week 06 - Communication Skills Day 02 - Lab Day date: 2025-09-28 17:08:28 location: Heritage University tags:

• Heritage University
• BASW Program
• SOWK 486w presentation_video: > “” description: >

The focus of week six for SOWK 486 is continuing our growth and engagement with communication skills. Last week we went deeper on empathy and authenticity. We also started some focus on empathic responding. I share an article Stepien and Baernstein (2006), that provides an overview of how we can teach empathy to clients. Week six is described as a lab day, because the intention is focusing on activities to help develop skills. The activities we will be doing this week include:

• Check in about learning so far
• Teaching empathy to clients
• Following skills and practice implementing them
• Sharing following skills

Learning Objectives this week

• Reflect on personal experiences with empathic communication
• Develop strategies for teaching empathy to clients in diverse practice settings
• Apply verbal following skills in a dynamic practice exercise
• Deepen your connection with the skills associated with following skills

Plan for Week Six

Agenda

• Check in about learning so far
• Teaching empathy to clients
• Following skills and practice implementing them
• Sharing following skills

Learning Objectives this week

• Reflect on personal experiences with empathic communication
• Develop strategies for teaching empathy to clients in diverse practice settings
• Apply verbal following skills in a dynamic practice exercise
• Deepen your connection with the skills associated with following skills

What We Have Been Learning: Checking In.

I wanted to spend a little bit of time checking in with people and how things are going. for this program/class.

[Whole Group Activity] Review restorative circles and norms

• Respect the talking piece: everyone listens, everyone has a turn
• Speak from the heart: your truth, your perspectives, your expriences
• Listen from the heart: Let go of stories that make it hard to hear each other
• Trust that you know what to say: no need to rehearse
• Say just enough: without feeling rushed, be concise and considerate of the time of others

[Whole Group Activity] Circle Group Activity - First Semester Check In

• What are some things that you feel like you can take away from this class so far?
• What are ways that you are implementing or incorporating things you have been learning in any of your classes into your life?
• What do you need to be a better social worker as you progress through your education?

Observation Your Conversations Last Week Week

I want to check in about how your personal experiment went last week.

Prompts from last week:

• As you interact with others and observe others’ interactions during the week, notice how frequently infrequently people send empathic messages. Also, observe the types of messages that are sent and how these messages influence the course of conversations.
• As you interact with your spouse, parents, children, friends, and fellow students, practice listening carefully and responding with empathic messages when appropriate. Be alert to how empathic messages influence interactions and to the feeling tones that these responses create.

[Small Group Activity] Personal Life Empathy Experiment Partner Share

Share with a partner about the engaging in this activity.

[Whole Group Activity] Personal Life Empathy Experiment Group Share

Have a couple of people share their experience with the whole group.

Practice with Empathic Communication (1 of 2) Example 1

[Small Group Activity] Crafting Response Partner Share

Single woman, age 80 [to social worker concerning her request to move to an independent living complex provided for ambulatory older persons]:

Goodness, the more I think of moving, the more scared I get. I have neighbors here who look after me, and I won’t know a soul there. I’m afraid I’ll be all alone.

[Small Group Activity] Crafting Response Whole Group Share

Have a couple people share.

Practice with Empathic Communication (1 of 2) Example 2

[Small Group Activity] Crafting Response Partner Share

Male, age 16 [in weekly visit to social work probation officer]:

I don’t see the sense in having to come here every (expletive) week. I haven’t been in any trouble now since I went to court a month ago. You should know by now you can trust me.”

[Small Group Activity] Crafting Response Whole Group Share

Have a couple people share.

Teaching Empathy (1 of 2) Didactic

We oftentimes think about empathy as being able to put ourselves into someone else’s shoes. Still, we must also consider how we can teach our clients to put themselves into somebody’s shoes.

Example of fellow learning student doing family sessions with me at the CRC and always drawing red shoes as an example with clients.

An important task for the social worker involves teaching clients to respond emphatically. Concerning this role, social workers should consider taking the following actions:

• Teach clients the paradigm for empathic responding.
• Introduce clients to the list of affective words and phrases and to the Leads for Empathic Responses list.
• Intervene in sessions when clients ignore or fail to validate messages.
• Give positive feedback when clients listen to each other.

Teaching Empathy (1 of 2) Practice Implementation - What Would You Teach?

[Small Group Activity] Work in teams of three or four to design a planned intervention for teaching empathy. What population would you work with, how would you teach them empathy, what would some of the sessions look like? You will have about 15 minutes to come up with ideas, and then you will share back with the group.

Following Skills Tools (1 of 5) - Start

I want to briefly review what chapter six explains as following skills. They include:

• Furthering responses
• Reflection responses
• Closed-ended responses
• Open-ended responses
• Providing & maintaining focus
• Summarizing
• Seeking concreteness

Furthering responses

One way we draw out our conversation is with simple furthering responses.

• Minimal prompts signal the social worker’s attentiveness and encourage the client to continue verbalizing.
  • Nonverbal minimal prompts consist of nodding the head, using facial expressions, or employing gestures that convey receptivity, interest, and commitment to understanding. They implicitly convey the message, “I am with you; please continue.”
  • Verbal minimal prompts consist of brief messages that convey interest and encourage or request expanded verbalizations along the lines of the client’s previous expressions.
• Accent responses involve repeating, in a questioning tone of voice or with emphasis, a word or a short phrase. Suppose a client says, “I’ve really had it with the way my supervisor at work is treating me.” The social worker might reply, “Had it?”

(Hepworth et al., 2023)

Reflection responses (1 of 3) Types

Reflection is at the core of what social workers do. There are two basic types of of reflection:

1. Reflection of Content: emphasize the cognitive aspects of client messages, such as situations, ideas, objects, or persons.
2. Reflection of Affect: focus attention on the affective part of the communication. In reflections of affect, social workers relate with responses that accurately capture clients’ affect and help them reflect on and sort through their feelings

(Hepworth et al., 2023)

Reflection responses (2 of 3) Example of somebody Sharing Intense Feelings

In the LaGravenese (2007) the Freedom Writers this character shares an intense story from his journal. We are going to watch this short video clip and then talk about reflective responding as an activity. I want to use this clip as a way of considering responding

[Whole Class Activity] Watch the video clip Clip can be found at Freedom Writers (4/9) Movie CLIP - I Am Home (2007) HD

We will often have clients that just share really difficult things such as this. Often there is no best response… and our best response might vary depending. It might be as simple as “thank you for sharing…”

Reflection responses (3 of 3) Strategies

One way of responding to a difficult story, such as the freedom writer clip we watch is through reflective responding. Lets talk about what each of these are:

In thinking about the video clip, we might choose to reflect on the content that was shared, or the affect. There are three general strategies we can think about how we might reflect back to the client. These include:

Simple reflections, which identify the emotions expressed by the client, are carried over from nondirective, client-centered counseling

Showing up at school that first day sounds like you were very anxious.

Complex reflections go beyond what the client has directly stated or implied, adding substantial meaning or emphasis to convey a more complex picture

Showing up at school that first day it sounds like you were very anxious, but that you had a lot of determination to go regardless.

Reframing: is another form of adding content. Here, the social worker puts the client’s response in a different light beyond what the client had considered (Moyers et al., 2003)

When you connected people in your support system, it sounds like it helped you feel more comfortable.

(Hepworth et al., 2023)

Closed-ended responses

Closed-ended questions define a topic and restrict the client’s response to a few words or a simple yes or no answer.

(Hepworth et al., 2023)

Open-ended responses

Open-ended questions and statements invite expanded expression and leave the client free to express what seems most relevant and important.

(Hepworth et al., 2023)

Providing and maintaining focus

The functions of focusing skills include

1. Selecting topics for exploration
2. Exploring topics in depth
3. Managing obstacles to focusing

(Hepworth et al., 2023)

Summarizing

We can also further engage our clients using any of the four four distinct facets of summarizing:

1. Highlighting key aspects of discussions of specific problems, strengths, and resources before changing the focus of the discussion
2. Making connections between relevant aspects of lengthy client messages
3. Reviewing major focal points of a session and tasks that clients plan to work on before the next session
4. Recapitulating the highlights of a previous session and reviewing clients’ progress on tasks during the week for the purpose of providing focus and continuity between sessions

(Hepworth et al., 2023)

Seeking concreteness (1 of 2)

Seeking concreteness is an important aspect of drawing out information from a client. We can use it to obtain concreteness in a number of areas:

• Checking out Perceptions: Understanding how they view the world
• Clarifying the Meaning of Vague or Unfamiliar Terms: Clients often times use vague terms. What does this actually mean?
• Exploring the Basis of Conclusions Drawn by Clients: Why do they think things are this way
• Assisting Clients in Personalizing Their Statements: Helping understand what it means for them…
  • Focus on self
  • Focus on others
  • Focus on group or relationships
  • Focus on content

(Hepworth et al., 2023)

Seeking concreteness (2 of 2)

• Eliciting Specific Feelings: How do they feel more specifically.
• Focusing on the Here and Now: moving out of the past.
• Eliciting Details Related to Clients’ Experiences: What they’ve done
• Eliciting Details Related to Interactional Behavior: How their interactions has been

(Hepworth et al., 2023)

Following Skills - Wrap Up

These are all of the following skills that we might use to draw out and keep conversations going with our clients.

Dynamic Practice with Following Skills (1 of 5) Set-Up

We are going to do some dynamic practice with verbal following skills.

You will be in groups of 2 or three. one person will be the social worker, one the client, and if you have three an observer.

I’m going to supply you with some scenarios. For each one, you will have about a total of about seven minutes. That means about a minute or so prep. Consider:

Before: Brainstorm what potential information would you want to know about for this scenario or what are some common experiences for people in this situation

During I have a form, the initial session checklist for the observer to keep track of what they saw.

After: You will debrief

• How did it feel as the interviewer to use the techniques?
• How did it feel as the interviewee?
• What did the observer notice? Share feedback from form

Dynamic Practice with Following Skills (2 of 5) Demonstration

[Whole Group Activity] Volunteer demonstrate with instructor in front of the class.

Scenario: You are a BASW student and have been referred to meet with your field practicum placement adviser to help determine what practicum placement you will be going into next year.

Dynamic Practice with Following Skills (3 of 5) - Scenario 1

[Small Group Activity] Engage in dynamic practice activity.

Make sure to consider the beginning, middle, and end activities.

Scenario: You are a freshman college student. You went to a student health clinic because you were having difficulty sleeping and were experiencing anxiety. They have referred you to the counseling clinic for an assessment. You are anxious about this referral, wondering if it means that you are going crazy. You are homesick and miss the people back home. You sometimes wonder if you are ready for this. You have begun to drink with people in the dorm; it makes you feel less lonely.

Dynamic Practice with Following Skills (4 of 5) - Scenario 2

[Small Group Activity] Engage in dynamic practice activity.

Make sure to consider the beginning, middle, and end activities.

Scenario: You were referred to domestic violence services by a friend who is concerned about the behaviors that your significant other has been engaging in and is hoping that you will seek further help. You feel conflicted, acknowledging that there is some violence, but feel that marriage is sacred, that you should be loyal, and that things will just work out.

Dynamic Practice with Following Skills (5 of 5) - Scenario 3

[Small Group Activity] Engage in dynamic practice activity.

Make sure to consider the beginning, middle, and end activities.

Scenario: You have been homeless for the last few months after a relationship ended. You have been couch surfing and staying with various friends. You are seeing a therapist and they referred you to case manager to help find options around housing and to practice working on some coping skills.

Following Skills: Teaching Skills

One way of the most effective ways to learn about a topic, is to teach it. You are going to get a short opportunity to teach your classmates interviewing techniques.

• Having six different groups you will each be assigned one of the six interviewing techniques
• Spend 15-20 minutes deciding how you can teach the two skills to your classmates
• Teach the two skills to your classmates, teaching exercises should be 3-7 minutes in length.

The various interviewing techniques are as follows:

• Furthering responses
• Reflection responses
• Closed-ended questions & open-ended questions
• Providing and maintaining focus
• Seeking concreteness
• Summarizing