Macro Practice Skills

Designed to help future social workers cultivate the skills critical for successful practice, Macro Practice Skills: A Step-by-Step Guide helps readers develop strategic competencies that can be applied at micro, mezzo, and macro system levels. Though the development of key skills, readers learn how to understand clients within a specific social context, increasing their ability and effectiveness to intervene and assist across and within diverse client populations.

The book begins with an overview of the generalist social work practice model that serves as a framework for the text. Later chapters are dedicated to the introduction and development of key skill sets. Readers learn how to facilitate relationship development with clients, identify factors that contribute to a client's specific situation, develop a plan for action, implement, monitor, and evaluate the plan, and formally end the professional relationship, making appropriate referrals or transition plans. The closing chapter demonstrates how to apply the generalist model from start to finish.

Macro Practice Skills is well suited for courses in social work and can also be used by social workers in the field to reinforce competencies and refresh personal practice.

Jan M. Ivery holds a Ph.D. from Virginia Commonwealth University and M.S.W. from the University of Pittsburgh. She is an associate professor of social work at Georgia State University. Her teaching and research has focused on organizational and community capacity for improved service delivery through community collaboration. Dr. Ivery has published peer-reviewed articles on organizational ecology, social capital, and naturally occurring retirement communities in journals such as the Administration of Social Work (now Human Service Organizations: Management, Leadership, & Governance, Journal of Gerontological Social Work, and Human Behavior and the Social Environment.