Teaching Note—Pick Your Platform: Social Media Advocacy Skill Building

Abstract

Skilled, ethical use of social media can advance social justice, impact policy, engage and educate the community, and elevate social workers. To assure that MSW students develop these skills, we created an assignment that required students to use a professional social media profile to advocate for a cause or policy based on findings from a needs and strengths assessment conducted as a group project. We used class discussion, readings, and online tutorials to support students’ learning. We conducted a pretest–posttest evaluation and found a statistically significant increase in competency and knowledge of written and unwritten rules of each platform. Our recommendations for implementing the assignment include encouraging students to develop a professional presence on the platform earlier and requiring tutorials.