An Hour of Being Able to Breathe: Coaches for Students in Child Welfare Placements

Background: Coaching in child welfare is a broadly defined practice that generally involves structured interaction between learners and experienced coaches (Cox et al., 2010). Despite widely varying conceptualization and implementation, researchers have found that coaching can be an effective supplemental support for workers in child welfare settings (Allen et al., 2020; Das et al., 2021). Whereas coaching for frontline workers is spreading, it has rarely been implemented with social work students in child welfare field placements. This study aims to inform the evaluation of an innovative coaching initiative in one university-based social work program. The exploratory study addressed the question: How do student learners and coaches experience the coaching program?

Methods: Following a pragmatic qualitative approach (Saldana, 2009), seven focus groups were conducted via Zoom involving 25 participants. Five of the groups involved social work students (or recent graduates) and two involved coaches. All students and coaches involved in the coaching initiative (n = 43) were invited to participate, and the response rate was 58%. The groups were facilitated by a faculty member and Ph.D. student from the host university. Open-ended questions addressed expectations, challenges, successes, and other aspects of coaching. The groups lasted from 43 to 85 minutes. They were recorded and transcribed. The transcripts were coded by a faculty member and a Ph.D. student following a multi-step method involving in-vivo codes, axial codes, formation of categories and comparisons, and identification of themes.

Results: The results suggest that coaching was a valuable experience for both students and coaches. Students described feeling affirmation from coaches, which, in turn, helped them to feel more positive about child welfare work. In addition to invoking positive feelings, coaching sessions enabled discussion of topics that are not commonly addressed in supervision, such as life goals or the organizational environment in child welfare offices. Students appreciated the opportunity to meet with an experienced person who was not a supervisor. One student noted, “It’s kind of like a no judgement zone.” Students felt that coaching fostered their interest in remaining in child welfare. Coaches described feeling energized by the experience and enjoying “not getting mired in the details of supervision.” Both coaches and students emphasized the freedom they felt to be more open and vulnerable than in typical work-based interactions.

Discussion: Many ongoing efforts seek to enhance child welfare training and promote retention of quality workers. This study suggests that coaching may be a valuable tool to enhance training. Expanding on the “human relations approach” to organizations (Hasenfeld & Garrow, 1993), findings suggest that trainee well-being and job satisfaction might be enhanced through regular, targeted interactions external to the organization. Thus, coaching is not only an effective tool to promote the implementation of evidence-based practices or the retention of existing workers (Das et al., 2021), it may also be a tool to solidify students’ interest in child welfare, inspire social work students to seek child welfare positions, and help novices to become happier, more effective child welfare workers.