Learning Emerges in Context: Findings From a Child Welfare Fidelity Study

A state public child welfare agency in the Midwest changed their practice model from a top-down forensic interviewing approach to a community partnership model built on trust-based relationships with families and partners. To achieve better outcomes for children, workers were trained in the core values of empathy, professionalism, genuineness and respect and taught skills of engaging, teaming, assessing, planning and intervening with families.

A two year evaluation was conducted on the reform. The study had 4 goals: (1) Measuring worker fidelity to the new practice model, (2) Identifying supports and barriers to fidelity, (3) Identifying stakeholder perceptions of the agency, and (4) Comparing outcomes across regions.

Methods: To measure worker fidelity (goal 1), researchers observed 44 team meetings and conducted follow up interviews with workers, service providers and family members. The final sample included a diverse population from each respondent categories across 11 counties included in the study. Interviews lasted up to 2 hours.

Analysis regarding fidelity began with a structured form but included both deductive and inductive analysis. Inductive analysis was supported by Atlas-ti. Over time DCS staff joined the IU researchers in the fidelity review sessions, changing the research focus from a purely qualitative study to an action research design.

Results: In a week long training, workers were introduced to the practices of client engagement and teaming using the strengths perspective. Classroom training was followed by field observations of team meetings and two supervised teaming experiences before the workers were “released” to conduct their own team meetings. Although this training format was congruent with best training practices, researchers found that workers needed more support to effectively transfer their new knowledge into skills. Newly trained workers relied on printed agendas and followed each step of the team meeting in a structured, technical manner. That is, they followed the protocol but missed the intent. This was particularly evident in the formation of the teams which often included an imbalance of professionals to informal supports and in the workers' application of the strengths perspective which was reduced to a list of strengths on flip chart paper. Team membership was often insufficient to build an informal system of support around the family (the intent) and the strengths were rarely used in a functional manner by transferring identified strengths into effective interventions.

Training alone was found to be insufficient for changing practice. Additional agency supports were needed beyond training and staff buy-in. These included manageable caseloads, good field supervision, hands-on experience, and personal success with the model.

Conclusions and Implications: Implications for practice included a closer look at supervisory buy-in, training, and skills and developing supervisory capacity. Classroom training alone or combined with weak supervision in the field was found to be insufficient for effective transfer of learning. These findings also have an impact for social work education as new accreditation standards embrace field as the signature pedagogy. The findings from this study highlight the importance of strong supervision and engaged field liaisons to support transfer of learning from classroom to the field.