SSW Professor Wins Metcalf Cup and Prize

Metcalf Cup and Prize winner Janice Furlong says she keeps her focus squarely on her students—and their clients. Photo by Mike Spencer

“There are many pathways that lead to academia, and mine is a bit less conventional,” says Janice Furlong, a School of Social Work clinical associate professor of clinical practice and human behavior.

“I don’t have a PhD, and I’ve never had any particular interest in getting one, to be honest,” Furlong says. “So my days look very different from a lot of my colleagues’ days. But what it means is I’ve had the enormous privilege—and I really credit my dean and my department chair for making space for me to do it this way—of being very singularly focused on my students and their clients and how to improve my teaching.”

That focus helped earn Furlong the University’s highest teaching award, the Metcalf Cup and Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

“A lot of us aspire to be her,” says Shabnam Deriani (SSW’15). “We have a saying, ‘What would Janice Furlong do?’”

The Metcalf Cup and Prize citation has this to say: “Exemplary educator, accomplished clinician, and generous mentor to countless students and faculty over the years, Professor Furlong is that rare teacher whose unrelenting devotion to excellence inspires not only the best from her students but the advancement of her field and the art, itself, of instruction.”

“She is the teacher’s teacher,” says Mark Gianino (SSW’83), an SSW clinical associate professor. “She’s somebody who, more than teaches people, provides an environment that transforms students into self-reflective young clinicians.”

Furlong’s teaching career began in 1986, when she was asked to organize seminars for interns at the community mental health organization where she worked; she eventually became director of training. She joined SSW “sort of slowly and incrementally,” she says, starting as a part-time adjunct assistant professor in 1998 and becoming a full-time clinical associate professor in 2009. Her most often taught courses include Adult Psychopathology: A Social Work Perspective, Brief and Time-Effective Treatment, and Clinical Assessment and Intervention. She coordinates a certificate program in Clinical Social Work and Behavioral Medicine. Since 2009, she has also taught clinical practice courses and supervision seminars in the School of Medicine’s Division of Graduate Medical Sciences.

Students and colleagues at SSW consistently rate her classroom work so highly that in 2007 she was asked to develop a doctoral student seminar on teaching. Since then, she has received SSW’s Teaching Excellence Award, its top prize for instruction, three times.

“I’ve always tried to teach to a lot of different learning styles,” Furlong says. “I love language, I love words, but I also know that just isn’t the way some people operate in this world. Some people need an experience that’s emotionally evocative. Some people need to role-play something before the concept clicks. I think at first I did too much talking.”

Students and colleagues say Furlong creates a safe space for learning, encouraging exploration while students know “she will not let them fall,” as Gianino puts it.

Furlong says her teaching benefits from her knowing where her students are coming from, mainly because she’s been there. One well-known article about students’ learning process, she says, describes the initial “stage of acute self-consciousness, in which you’re so aware of yourself that it’s hard even to listen to a client because you’re so caught up in, what am I going to do next? What am I going to say next? How am I not going to make a fool of myself? And students think there’s something wrong with them when they’re in that stage. And no. That’s how it goes.”

She’s a practitioner at heart, Furlong says, and she continues to see patients in a group private practice, specializing in mental health and substance abuse issues for adults and families. “I refuse to give it up,” she says. “It’s way too interesting and it’s important. It keeps me humble. It keeps me engaged.”

“She’s amazing,” says Deriani. “She is the epitome of everything a professor should be. She’ll tell you great things you’ve done and things you can work on, how you can do it better.”

Deriani recalls a class in adult psychopathology taught by Furlong, focusing on The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. “Professor Furlong pretty much told us, it’s there as a guiding tool, it’s not black-and-white that if clients meet that criteria then they fit into that box,” Deriani says. “She says you take everything into consideration, you take biology into consideration, their social aspects, their culture. You take everything into consideration, because diagnoses and labels last with the client forever.”

Laura Morris (SSW’15) was particularly struck by the way Furlong responded to the events surrounding the shooting of a young black man by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., with an unusual classroom exercise late last semester.

“She gave everybody a piece of paper and had us all write whatever we wanted about Ferguson,” says Morris. “Then she pasted them all around the classroom, completely anonymous, and we walked around as a class, completely silent, and read all of them. I felt grateful for that, because it really widened my perspective in understanding the different ways people deal with things: that just because somebody’s being a little quiet or not going to protests doesn’t mean they’re not affected in different ways.”

Furlong says what pleased her most about the Metcalf process were the visits by award committee members to her class.

“To have people come here and see my students in action, that really made me happy,” she says, “because I think this is a low-profile part of the University at large, and because I think the mission of this school is so important and because I think our students are delivering—every day, every week, every year—extraordinary services in the city of Boston. And the more people within BU who know who our are students are and how smart they are and what they’re doing, the better.”

The Metcalf Cup and Prize and the Metcalf Awards for Excellence in Teaching, created in 1973 and presented at Commencement, are funded by a gift from the late Arthur G. B. Metcalf (SED’35, Hon.’74), a BU Board of Trustees chair emeritus and former professor. The Metcalf Cup and Prize winner receives $10,000 and the Metcalf Award winners receive $5,000 each. A University committee selects winners based on statements of nominees’ teaching philosophy, supporting letters from colleagues and students, and classroom observation.

Binyomin Abrams, a College of Arts & Sciences senior lecturer in chemistry, and Pamela Templer, a College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of biology, are the recipients of this year’s Metcalf Awards.

More information about Commencement can be found here.