Meet Our Program Director: Dana Grossman Leeman

Dana Grossman Leeman, M.S.W., Ph.D., is an associate professor of practice and the program director for SocialWork@Simmons. After earning her M.S.W. at the Boston University School of Social Work, she worked mainly in mental health settings. She began teaching at Simmons School of Social Work in 1996 and earned her Ph.D. from Simmons in 2004.

Dana has worked as an inpatient social worker in a psychiatric unit and in a partial hospital program with patients suffering from co-occurring mental illness and substance abuse disorders.

Dana recently completed an interview with OnlineMSWPrograms. She discussed her career, the SocialWork@Simmons program, and the Simmons School of Social Work’s unique approach to online learning. Following are highlights from her interview.

For students who are just learning about the Simmons School of Social Work, can you briefly explain the program’s mission, values, and goals?

The mission of Simmons School of Social Work is to provide students with a single-concentration, clinical training program. We really specialize in helping students train to be professional clinical social workers. But we also do it with a view toward creating a professional identity, where the student is exposed to the importance of social justice, engaging in anti-oppressive and anti-racist work, and understanding the structural and systemic causes of oppression and how that impacts an individual or family within a community. Students come to understand the importance of person in environment and the impact of context. So I think, in some ways, our mission is to teach students to become effective clinicians who can provide comprehensive bio- and psychosocial assessments and who understand how to build relationships with clients and how to formulate intervention strategies that are embedded in evidence and best practices. It’s also to understand that part of their professional identity is as an activist practitioner.

I think that this will absolutely translate to everything we do online. The values of the online program are the same values as the on-campus program; there’s no difference. There’s no difference in the kind of student we’re looking to admit, and no difference in the caliber of the classes we’re teaching — many of the classes have been created and are being taught by our full-time faculty. So the student online is really going to get the same education, it’s just going to be delivered in a different platform, with certain technological tools that are actually not available to on-campus students at this point. What they may not be getting in terms of being in a classroom with people they can turn around and talk to and touch in the same way, they’ll be getting in opportunities to support their learning in ways that on-ground students won’t have access to. The values, the mission, and the goals of the on-campus and the online programs are the same.

With more universities starting to offer online MSW programs, why should students consider Simmons College?

First of all, I think that what’s important is that you’re getting Simmons College; it just happens to be online. We are the oldest clinical school in the country; we have a prestigious heritage of preparing extremely well-trained clinical social workers. You can take another online program, but you will not get the curriculum, nor will you get the quality of teaching that you’ll get at SocialWork@Simmons. Our full-time faculty are course designers, so you’re getting the same courses as the on-campus students. You’re also getting many of them as your live session instructors. In that sense, you’re really getting the best that the School of Social Work has to offer any student. You are no different from an on-campus student, you just happen to be taking your courses online.

Not all schools can say that. At many schools, courses are taught by adjuncts, and we’re looking to recruit only the finest, most seasoned, scholarly practitioners we can. Folks with extremely impressive credentials; people we know either through Simmons, or people we know through our colleagues. We are going to be extremely selective in who teaches our online students, because that is how we hire for the on-campus program as well, so the quality will remain the same.

Some online social work programs do not offer the live session, and the training is entirely asynchronous. We really believe that the live sessions are critical for developing relationships, for practicing skills, for feeling connected to the community, and for engaging with people and with the content in ways that will deepen understanding and enable students to put into practice what they’re learning. Other programs don’t have live sessions or don’t offer a 90-minute live session.

Also, the quality of the asynchronous materials is superior to anything available on the market. It’s professionally produced, creative, engaging, interactive, and stimulating. Other programs cannot boast the quality of the production values that we can.

To read Dana’s full interview, visit OnlineMSWPrograms.