A Look Back at 2019: Highlights and Top Content

As the calendar year comes to a close, it’s a great time to reflect on the last 12 months and our defining moments. Here’s a list of this year’s highlights, our most popular content, and our goals for 2020.

Highlights from 2019

Here at SSWN, we’ve had a lot of exciting developments in 2019. This year we published more content, grew our team, and made enhancements to the SSW Tools app and the SSWNetwork. We hope you’ve enjoyed these developments and found them useful to your school social work practice.

A Lot of New Content

Over 50 new blog posts were added in 2019 which now account for over 33% of the total number of posts on SSWN. This ramp up of new content is just getting started. We have a bunch of exciting stuff in the pipeline we’re eager to bring you in 2020.

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Our Team Grew

Sean Delaney has recently joined the SSWN team as managing editor of the SSWN blog. Sean has been instrumental to our publishing workflow and we couldn’t be more excited (and thankful) to have her on the team. We also added quite a few contributing authors in 2019, many who will make their debut in 2020.

? Want to contribute to the SSWN blog or be involved in another way? Contact us.

New Collaborations

We teamed up with Charles Barr and the Common Ground Education Podcast to provide you with more tools, resources and content to support your practice. Episodes of the podcast are now accessible on the SSWN blog.

? Access all podcast episodes right here.

Time Study Tool Improvements

We enhanced the reporting features of our time-study tool, SSW Tools, for more powerful analysis with segmentation and filtering of your data.

? Learn more about SSW Tools.

New Ways to Connect & Learn in the SSWNetwork

Membership in the SSWNetwork, our free online community, grew significantly in 2019. We now have almost 2,200 members with new members joining nearly everyday.

This year we introduced several ways for members to connect and learn from one another. These included weekly themes on hot issues (for example, focusing on restorative justice and disrupting the school to prison pipeline), live chats, and the launch of our first learning module “Goal Writing for School Social Workers”.

We plan to continue building on crucial issues facing school clinicians as we enter 2020 in our Topics section on SSWNetwork (pictured), with a specific focus on:

Climate Justice in Schools
Fighting Racial Inequity in K-12 Education
Gun Violence Prevention/School Safety
School Clinician Workload & Caseload
Self-Care for School Clinicians
Trauma-Informed School Practices

A sampling of the Topics on the SSWNetwork site.

? Join us in the SSWNetwork (it’s free).

Most Popular Posts Published This Year

Slow Down: What We Don’t Know (Yet) About Trauma-Informed Approaches in Schools

Michael Kelly discusses a systematic review he and his team did of the literature around trauma-informed approaches in schools and the lack of any rigorous evaluations of whole-school trauma-informed approaches and the implications for school clinicians going forward.

School Social Worker Megan Tracy shares the initial stages of developing and building support from key stakeholders for her Loyola SMHAPP project, “Using Data to Determine Criteria for School Social Work Services.”

School Social Worker BreeAnna Stegall shares the development and initial findings of her project to implement Calm Classroom and other mindfulness-based interventions school-wide.

Drawing on her extensive look into EBP for adolescents with depression and anxiety, School Social Worker Frances Leonard shares two research briefs featuring the EMPATHY and UTalk interventions.

School Social Worker Michael Flood shares the triumphs and challenges in implementing universal screening in his suburban Chicago middle school.

Oldies But Goodies

Here are the most visited posts of 2019 that were published prior to this year.

Curriculum for Teaching Emotional Self-Regulation

These free lesson plans were created for high school students and developed by the School Psychiatry Department at Massachusetts General Hospital. They were designed for a team teaching approach, involving English/Language Arts in collaboration with school mental health clinicians.

A list of resource for screening, assessment, and evaluation of practice. Some of the resources are measurements that are free to use and others are links to compendiums or directories of measurements.

School Social Worker Marjorie Colindres shares various group activities that she has found effective for students at different grade levels.

Marjorie Colindres shares strategies and interventions at the Tier 1 level to improve a classroom atmosphere.

Here’s a list of websites to find sound behavioral interventions and data collection tools.

Ream more

Progress Monitoring Social and Emotional Goals While Utilizing Technology

Another great article by Marjorie Colindres describing the tools she uses to provide accurate information and gather appropriate data from various stakeholders.

Ream more

What to Expect in 2020

As we said earlier, as excited as we are with what has been going on at SSWN and SSWNetwork, we truly feel like things are just getting started.

In 2020, we are going to expand our network of contributors with our growing Editorial Team and current and former Loyola SMHAPP students, and share key insights from expert practitioners and researchers from Midwest PBIS, the Campbell Collaboration, and the Oxford Symposium for School-based Family Counseling.

We welcome story ideas anytime at our site, or by reaching out to us Twitter: @SchoolSocWork or on Facebook: @SchoolSocialWork .

Our focus will be, as always, driven by what you tell us you need and what the most freely available and evidence-informed tools and strategies are that we can find to share with you. See you in 2020.