SSW phasing in new course schedule on Thursdays in Spring 2017

UW Adopting “Block Scheduling” of courses

Dear SSW Students,

As many of you know, we struggle with being able to provide faculty and students with classrooms that meet your needs.  The problems of not enough classrooms and classrooms that aren’t large enough have been campus-wide problems for years and certainly affect us in the School of Social Work.   In light of these issues, the UW has made the decision, after 3 years of community engagement and consultation, to move to “block scheduling” beginning in the 2017-18 academic year.  This structure requires that courses are schedule in pre-defined “blocks” and will enable teaching times to become more standardized and increase efficiencies within classrooms across campus.

For the School of Social Work, we have advocated to run our courses as close as possible to the scheduling structure we’ve been using, but there will be some changes, beginning in Spring 2017.

We recognize that students have full loads while balancing school commitments, personal lives and other priorities. As we gear up for 2017 spring quarter, the School of Social Work will be piloting block scheduling on Thursdays for MSW classes and is aiming towards full integration of the block scheduling during the upcoming 2017-2018 academic year. MSW courses will continue to run once/week in 3 hour timeslots in the new block schedule.

In Spring quarter 2017, on Thursdays only, MSW courses will be offered in 3 different time slots (8:30-11:20am, 11:30-2:20pm and 2:30-5:20pm).  We are working to have required courses offered in the middle time slot (11:30am start time), with electives offered in the 8:30am and 2:30pm time slots.  Our hope is that by doing it this way, students won’t be negatively impacted by the early or later schedule of a required class. We hope that most students will be able to take either an early/midday or midday/later course combo, providing some flexibility for students who need it.  We will continue to offer additional electives (Day course or jointly offered with EDP) on Thursday evenings at 6pm and Saturdays to capture the varying interests of EDP and Day students.  The spring time schedule, which is still subject to some changes, but is close to final, should be published online by 1/23/17 at:   http://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/

We will also be notifying instructors that, with this new schedule, students will be more likely to bring snacks and food into classes, since they may not have time to eat before or between classes.

For the 2017-2018 academic school year, the Program Directors and the Student Services Staff will be meeting to further plan scheduling. We anticipate that scheduling for MSW Day classes will occur during the same three time slots between 8:30am-5:20pm as above, across all days of the week. PhD and BASW classes will be shifted towards aligning with the scheduling start times of the UW block schedule that will be implemented and more information will be sent to those programs as the implementation becomes more clear.

The block scheduling plan was announced campus-wide by Jerry Baldasty, Provost and Executive Vice President in November in an email.  For more information and additional context about how and why the UW adopted block scheduling, see:   http://engage.washington.edu/site/MessageViewer?em_id=200693.0&dlv_id=193040

The School of Social Work’s efforts to gradually transition towards block scheduling slightly ahead of the University’s timeline (effective campus-wide in 2017-18) is to ensure this process is as seamless as possible. As we work towards solidifying these plans, we will continue to inform students and faculty in advance in an effort to support your advance planning of your ongoing  academic, career and personal commitments.  Questions?  Please email Lin at linm@uw.edu.

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