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Most states use the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) exam which candidates must pass to gain licensure as a social worker. Some states require licensure at the Bachelors level, Masters level, and Clinical level, while other states only require Clinical licensure. (For a state-by-state listing of licensing requirements, visit this informative website.) My students want to know how to prepare for the exam, and I have some suggestions. 1. Plan ahead. Most states allow graduating students to test up to a month before graduation, which allows you to graduate with licensure. Some jobs may require a license in hand prior to applying or interviewing. You may have to register for the exam as much as a month early, and you may have to travel hours to a test site. Therefore, start planning for a test date several months ahead of time. 2. Know your state's hurdles. Some states require finger printing ahead of time and an application to the state before you can be approved to take the test. Other states require you to test before applying to the state's licensure board. If you are graduating in one state and moving to another after graduation, know the rules in the state where you plan to move. You can transfer test scores but will have to apply to the board in the state where you plan to practice. 3. Develop test-taking skills. Multiple-choice tests are similar in many ways. They require carefully reading options and eliminating bad ones. If you have a methodological approach to analyzing your answers, you will do better. This document lists some strategies to use when you have to guess. The questions often ask for the "best" answer and offer several potentially correct answers- but only one answer can be "best." Look for context and rule-out clues, like "always" and "never." If you have to guess, answers with more detail are often better, and answers related to client safety or confidentiality are often answers to the "what should you do first" questions. 4. Use multiple learning tools. Lots of people like study guides. They have varying quality- you can read reviews on sites like Amazon. Many of the questions relate to developmental theory, and podcasts can help with that sort of information. Here are some podcasts to listen to, either directly at these sites or search for them on youtube. 1. The Social Work Podcast. You can find a list of all the podcasts and direct links here. 2. Social Work Exam Prep. These brief audio clips are direct and to the point. 5. Make it mobile. There are a few exam prep apps you can download on your smartphone. I like the free app called "Social Work Lite" which allows you to choose how many questions you want to practice at one setting. You can turn waiting rooms in to study time. Similarly, if you do have paper-based study materials, scan them and save as a pdf document so that you can open them on your smartphone and read on the go. 6. Look at the free sample questions and the content areas listed at the ASWB website. This will help prepare you for the style of questions and the areas that you are expected to know. ASWB offers a paid online exam and a small booklet with more sample questions. The online exam is a good way to prepare for what it's like to answer questions on a computer, but your mileage may vary- you may not need these paid resources if you are good at using the other free resources I've talked about on this page. 7. Use a buddy system. Plan study dates with another test-taker so that you can hold each other accountable to study time. Use what works together- flashcards, quizzes, reading out loud, or just quiet time together. 8. Consider a local or online test prep workshop. Often your local social work department or chapter of NASW will know who is offering classes locally. Online classes are available- look around the web for reviews before signing up. These can be costly, at about $300 for the class offered by the Extension office at University of Michigan. However, if this is going to grab your attention it may be worth it- it's cheaper than retaking the exam in most cases. 9. If you plan to take the clinical license exam after your supervision hours are complete, enlist your clinical supervisor in test prep. Let your supervisor know your anticipated test date, and about six months early make a concentrated effort to fit some exam study practice in to each of your supervision visits. This may be via discussing theory, clinical scenarios, pharmacology, etc. 10. Do the things that will ease your anxiety. Your first step to a calm test experience is adequate study preparation, so make a plan that is SMART. The week before you drive to your test site, make sure you know the route, have plenty of time, have adequate rest and a good snack, and know the requirements for the test center regarding proof of identity and what you can take with you. Consider some mindfulness or breathing techniques to help you relax. Remember: The test is difficult, but not impossible. Most people pass the first time, and you only need a score of about 75%. Study, think good thoughts, think about the kind of supports that work for you, and relax. Best test-taking wishes to you!
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Two helpful acronyms for social workers taking the LMSW (or LCSW) social work licensing exam.
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Learn to use Polyvagal Theory in an hour-ish :) Click the Polyvagal Resource Link below… Step 1: Watch this video on Polyvagal Theory In this video… | 42 comments on LinkedIn
How do you pass the LCSW exam? Concrete reply: correctly mark enough answers to satisfy your state licensing board. (Remember "concrete"? It's on the MSE.) Okay, but how do you go about doing that? How do you prepare to pass the social work licensing exam? There are countless paths to the goal. Some people prepare for a couple of days and trust their nurture-born test-taking skills. That can work out just fine. Others set a test date a couple of years in advance (yes, years!) and study ever last scrap of social work knowledge over the 700-plus days that follow. That can work out just fine too (if you don't mind all the hours lost to studying). For most, the middle road is the one chosen. It's Goldilocks' just-right porridge (if exam prep was breakfast mush). Somewhere between the hyper-confident two-day prep and the anxious, overlong mega-prep lies that middle path. Only you (and your initial practice test scores) know how much prep you need. What kind of test taker are you? How long has it been since you were in school? Does your work experience help with getting exam questions answered right? How much time do you have in an average week to set aside for studying? Have you already tried the exam and didn't reach that golden "PASS"? You get to make your own self-assessment. You get to set your own schedule. You get to choose how to spend your time. There's a lot of material that could show up on the exam. Try searching ASWB.org for the current clinical content outline--the current list of KSAs (knowledge, skills, and abilities being tested for on the licensing exam)). Yes, 170 is an awful lot of questions, but it's not enough to cover everything listed there. What's most likely to show up you can probably guess. Meat and potatoes social work. Basic assessment, basic diagnoses, basic interventions. Close call vignettes that test your familiarity with the principles contained in the NASW Code of Ethics. Duty to warn, scope of practice--that sort of thing. What the test basically aims to discern: Are you a competent social worker? Can you be trusted with client care? Will you do you best to respect and help your clients? For some of the exam, you need specific information (e.g., DSM criteria). But for a lot of the exam, you can go with your gut. You're a social worker. You know how to do the job. Now just apply it to the test. You'll be licensed soon! Good luck!
This is part two of a very occasional series of posts about my take on different psychological theories. Earlier this year I took a look at Urie Bronfenbrenner's ecological approach to life. Who knew this would be my most popular post? As of this evening, over 4,430 people have viewed that blog entry. I'm thankful that the post is so popular: my human met him once and found him to be a very kind man. Children love and want to be loved and they very much prefer the joy of accomplishment to the triumph of hateful failure. Do not mistake a child for his symptom. -- Erik Erikson Today we draw our attention to Erik Homberger Erikson. Please note, this is someone radically different from the conservative commentator Erick Erickson. The two would have very little in common in their world views. Erik was born on June 15, 1902 in Frankfort am Main, Germany. After graduating from high school, he moved to Florence Italy to study art. By 1927 he was teaching a a psychoanalytically informed school for children in Vienna that was started by Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud. Deeply influenced by this work, Erikson earned a certificate from the Maria Montessori School and later did psychoanalytic training at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute. After graduating from the psychoanalytic institute in 1933, Erikson and his wife fled the Nazis who had come to power in Germany. His long career included positions at Massachusetts General Hospital Judge Baker Guidance Center, Harvard Medical School, and University of California Berkeley. While in California Erikson studied children on a Sioux reservation for a year as well as children in the and Yurok tribe. Erikson left Berkeley when professors were asked to sign a loyalty oath. He returned to Massachusetts first working at the Austen Riggs Center for a decade and finally returning to Harvard. He remained a professor of human development at Harvard University until he retired in 1970. Erik Erikson's highest academic degree was a high school diploma. In 1973 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Erikson for the Jefferson Lecture, which is the US government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. His lecture was entitled "Dimensions of a New Identity." Enough background information. Onto the good stuff. This chart is the most commonly learned distillation of Erikson's work. Sorry his name is spelled wrong in the chart. It seems there is a lot of confusion about the proper spelling of his name. The spelling I'm using, Erik Erikson, is the correct way. So when you think about it, puppy development and human development isn't all that different. I'm not so sure dogs really ever get past adolescence. That's okay though, I think you all like us just the way we are. Here is Erikson's theory, as it applies to humans, in a nutshell: The infant's first social achievement, then, is his willingness to let the mother out of sight without undue anxiety or rage, because she has become an inner certainty as well as an outer predictability. -- Erik Erikson Early in life both babies and puppies face a crisis: trust versus mistrust. If the world is safe enough, and we are cared for well enough, we develop a sense of stability and security. If we work through this well we approach the world with a confident curiosity. If problems happen (abuse, neglect, deprivation) we learn the world is unsafe, we lose our curiosity, and become closed off and hidden. We learn to hope. Always moving forward, our next crisis is autonomy versus doubt. Ever spend time with a two year old that constantly says no? Play a game with a very young child who insists on controlling every dimension of the game? Early on, youngsters learn a delicate balance between autonomy and interdependence. How many parents, in a demand for discipline, demand complete obedience from their children at all times? Too much of a demand for a child to bend to the will of an adult can create deep feelings of shame, incompetence, and out of control behaviors. Striking a successful balance creates creatures who remain curious, have built in self control, and have a certain degree of autonomy. We learn will. Children must eventually train their own children, and any impoverishment of their impulse life, for the sake of avoiding friction, must be considered a possible liability affecting more than one lifetime. -- Erik Erikson Next up comes initiative versus guilt.Young ones busy themselves learning about the world around them. Square pegs fit in square holes. Round pegs fit in round holes. Sugar spilled on the floor makes mom crabby. We learn to count, speak, and ask for things with ease. We start to engage in activities. We want to play with that game. We want to walk in this direction. We start to take risks and learn how to keep ourselves safe (look both ways before we cross the street!). Good enough parents encourage and support children's efforts toward their own goal directed activities in realistic ways. When things go wrong and parents actively discourage children's independent activities (or belittle their activities), children can develop guilt about their needs, desires, and activities. We learn purpose. The next crisis we all face is industry versus inferiority. During these years, our primary years of school, we find our self confidence. Now having developed goal directed activity, our activity becomes productive. We create the things we need. Words come together to form sentences. Sentences come together to form paragraphs. Paragraphs come together to form stories. Good enough parents share a sense of excitement in what their children create. When things go wrong, and children are ridiculed or unable to meet adult expectations, children internalize a sense of inferiority We learn competence. Every adult, whether he is a follower or a leader, a member of a mass or of an elite, was once a child. He was once small. A sense of smallness forms a substratum in his mind, ineradicably. His triumphs will be measured against this smallness, his defeats will substantiate it. The questions as to who is bigger and who can do or not do this or that, and to whom—these questions fill the adult's inner life far beyond the necessities and the desirabilities which he understands and for which he plans. -- Erik Erikson As childhood rolls into adolescence, we face the crisis of identity versus role confusion. Having built confidence in our abilities, we start to look for our place in our world. We ask the question "Who am I and where am I going?" In this time of development we find ourselves at a crossroad of development where we consolidate the rapid development of childhood and walk across the bridge to adulthood. Given enough time and space to explore the different roles society has to offer us, a young person can freely experiment and explore many different kinds of identities. A good enough parent will let their adolescents stretch and reach into all sorts of different identities while also offering some loose protective boundaries. Restrictive and domineering parents can clip the experiences of an adolescent and prevent them from finding a sense of identity that can haunt them long into their adulthood. We learn our identity. As our adolescence grows into young adulthood, we grapple with issues of intimacy versus isolation. Having found our identities we no longer need to destroy things that threaten our sense of self. We ask of ourselves if we are loved and wanted, and whether we will share our life with someone or live alone. Done well we find ourselves forming long-term commitments to others through intimate and reciprocal relationships. Done poorly, we find ourselves isolated. We learn love. As young adulthood moves into middle adulthood, we face the crisis of generativity versus stagnation. We ask of ourselves, "Will produce something of real value?" We find our way to contribute to society developing a sense of generativity, productivity, and accomplishment. Through our work we provide something toward the betterment of society and future generations. Done poorly we feel stagnated, dissatisfied, and disconnected from a sense of purpose. We learn care. As adults grow into elders, we face the crisis of ego integrity versus despair. Our work gradually slows and our attention turns inward toward contemplating our accomplishments. Done well, we see ourselves has having created a successful life. Done poorly we review our lives and feel we haven't reached our goals and we despair. We learn wisdom. Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have the integrity enough not to fear death. -- Erik Erikson
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(Updated 2/13/24) 75+ free mental health worksheets, handouts, and forms for mental health professionals or self-help.
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The word theory can become quite confusing…in social work ‘theory’ is thrown around and can often become synonymous with model, approach, or practice. Defining and understanding …
