Supporting Supervisors to Support Others: Enabling Social Work Through Emotionally Informed Practice

This paper discusses the design and delivery of a continuing professional development module for experienced social work practitioners with responsibilities for either the development, management or supervision of others – primarily early career social workers (those newly graduated with less than two years’ post qualification experience). The focus of the course was on enhancing the knowledge and skills relevant to developing the practice of others, whilst promoting their emotional wellbeing and emotional awareness, doing so by utilising key elements of emotionally informed practice and strengths-based feedback. Informed by literature spanning emotion and vulnerability in social work to strengths-based feedback and supervision, an emotionally informed approach gives enhanced attention to practitioner histories, emotional challenges and potential wellbeing needs. Within this paper the rationale underpinning the module design is discussed and examples of learning tasks are outlined. It also considers the experiences of those on the course, providing examples of transformative learning stemming from their perspectives on the ‘use of the self’ and ‘self’ within social work practice which, post completion, appeared more integrated. The course was developed and provided by a university in England.