Teaching Social Policy to increasingly young students, generally politically immature, is one of the challenges that Social Work educators face after the Bologna process and the shortening of the study plans. It is often difficult for students to understand the connection between Social Policy and Social Work and to relate perspectives on Social Work with the frameworks set by existing social policies. Moreover, professors experience difficulties in teaching Social Work students to be politically active social workers, in terms of what we might conceptualize as “policy practice” competencies (Weiss-Gal, 2013). Work with students for the development of strategies to influence adoption, implementation, improvement and change social policies, aligning them with Social Work values, in general, and social justice and human rights, in particular, is, we argue, one of the most critical dimensions of Social Policy teaching to social work students and an almost absent dimension in social policy curricula in social work education (Zubrzycki & McArthur, 2004 and Weiss-Gal, 2015). This presentation revise some experiences of teaching policy practice and aims at presenting the experience of the development of a Policy Practice Lab with undergraduate students based on the reflexive work of professors from Portugal.

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