Teaching Note-The Hidden Key: Opening the Door to Self-Disclosure in Social Work Education

Although self-disclosure is of great importance in the profession, there is scarce writing and discussion on this topic in social work education, and specifically on developing new pedagogical methods of implementing it in the classroom. Within the framework of a Working With Individuals in Their Environment course, we have developed pedagogical methods to help students to engage in self-disclosure as part of the process of developing their professional identity. we present four illustrations of self-disclosure pedagogies that we developed: "from opening the suitcases to closing them"; the educator as a model of self-disclosure; self- disclosure through active learning; and how to apply self-disclosure in practice. These four different pedagogies serve different goals related to developing students' professional identity.