For Social Workers

This Site

My hope is that Adoption at the Movies helps foster, adoptive, and prospective fost/adopt families enter into important conversations about adoption-related issues. Please feel free to share the movie reviews and book recommendations with your clients and colleagues. I'd love to know how you use these reviews! I also wanted to dedicate a section of the site to social workers. The work you're doing with families is invaluable. Ethical, sensitive social workers can make a huge difference in the way adoption is experienced by adopting parents, birth parents, and adoptees. You've got such an important job, and you're impacting more people than you know.

This page provides links to a few resources that I've found helpful in my work as a fost/adopt social worker, and a bit on how I got my LCSW, with links to resources that helped me do it. 

Resources

The Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption has lots of excellent free resources related to adoption and foster care, including This Free Book to help families decide whether adoption is right for them.

A wonderful resource for social workers who write home studies is Consortium for Children who invented the SAFE template used throughout California.

An organization which works towards acting out Christianity through effective social work practice is the NACSW.

Getting Licensed

Pursuing your license can be pretty daunting, and it's definitely a journey. I'm licensed in two states. Many states have reciprocity, which means if you're licensed in one, you can be licensed in another pretty easily. The standard exam is one put out by the Association of Social Work Boards. I studied for it by using their online practice exam and found it to be sufficient.

California is an exception to the rule. If you're in California, you won't take the ASWB exam, but you will need to take two exams specially designed by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences -- one is the standard exam, and the other is called a vignette exam. Both exams are computerized, multiple-choice tests. For the first exam, I studied with printed materials from Berkeley Training Associates, and for the second exam, I just used the online tests from Gerry Grossman. I found Grossman's online tests to be easy-to-use, super-helpful, and a pretty analogous experience to the actual test. 

Part of getting your license is making sure you have all of your pre-license courses done. After you get licensed, you still need continuing education. In California, all of your hours can be online, so long as they're from an authorized provider. The one I've used is CE4Less, and I've been satisfied with the value (I use the $79/year for unlimited courses option), and I've also been able to take brief introductions into topics that interest me, even if they're not directly related to the work that I'm usually doing.