Transforming professional practice

What you will study

Scholarship involves a demonstration of your ability to enquire, design, analyse, debate, argue and recommend in ways that demonstrate rigorous thought and a good command of issues and information. You will need to demonstrate what you already know and do, and advance a vision for further improvements that benefit the beneficiaries of your social work improvement activities (e.g. people who use your service). To help you achieve this, you are led through five study blocks of work during the one-year module:

• Enquiry, conception and design
• Review of relevant evidence
• Analysing experience
• Reviewing progress
• Making the case to others.

Your enquiry will be based on an investigation of existing data and as a series of disciplined practice reflections and discussion, reviewing literature and discourse with colleagues interested in social work practice improvement (personal and collective experience). Your review will be drawn from your day-to-day practice and discussions with colleagues. This module will rely on your heightened skills of speculative reflection and debate associated with work that you conduct with others, rather than a delivering a research project. It will be necessary therefore to select an enquiry that relates closely to your day-to-day practice and to engage in reflection at a deeper level than you may currently be accustomed to. The study guide will instruct you in the relevant techniques to enable this. Working in this way, and combining what you learn from your review of evidence with current experience, you will be assisted to make a coherent case for improvement. Your enquiry may draw on your previous postgraduate work relating to practitioner research if this remains relevant to your current practice; or you may choose to study something different.

You will need to be well organised, focused and consultative in order to meet the assessment deadlines and complete your enquiries alongside other professional work. You will work on study blocks Review of relevant evidence and Analysing experience in parallel.

Your work for this module will be more self-directed than in any of the earlier modules you may have studied, but you'll continue to have access to a study group and a tutor to help shape your enquiries over the coming year. You'll work with your tutor to plan your enquiries and need to update them regularly on your current activity.

You will learn

On successful completion of this module you will be able to:

• systematically conduct enquiries in the literature, reflections on your own practice and local contexts, making appropriate records of your learning in ways that demonstrate scholarship
• disseminate your knowledge and skills in ways that are relevant to the development of practice now and in the future
• present clear observations, arguments and conclusions about your chosen aspect of practice, so that others could either replicate or build on your scholarship
• defend the advancement of practice within your enquiry, making the case to an appropriate authority.

You'll also gain a range of transferable skills that include the ability to:

• work collaboratively
• manage uncertainty
• translate concepts into practice
• demonstrate self-direction and originality in tackling and solving problems
• utilise information technology
• retrieve, interpret and utilise data (qualitative and quantitative), information and evidence.

Teaching and assessment

Support from your tutor

Although the study guide provides detailed guidance on the scholarly activity associated with this module and the online resources guide you on the different ways of formatting work for dissemination, you will work closely with your tutor to:

• identify and focus your chosen enquiry
• evaluate what the evidence review has taught you
• examine and refine reflective practice techniques
• make arguments based on supporting information
• formulate a case.

You'll have access to informative and engaging live online tutorials covering module related subjects and learning support, over a range of dates and times. We aim to record all online sessions to enable students the flexibility to access these at a convenient time.

Contact us if you want to know more about study with The Open University before you register.

Assessment

The assessment details can be found in the facts box above.

You must use the online eTMA system to submit your tutor-marked assignments. The end-of-module assessment must also be submitted online.

The tutor-marked assignments and the end-of-module assessment constitute an exhibition of your enquiries those that illustrate disciplined powers of reflection and analysis.