"Freeze": Using Interactive Theater to Transform Professional Development in Health, Social, and Human Services

Background: Interactive theater techniques have been a useful tool for educating professionals and students in a variety of fields (Burgoyne et al, 2008; Skye et al., 2014) to build their capacity in the workforce. Previous studies with medical providers and students showed that participation in interactive theater workshops helped participants understand patient experiences, improved provider-family communication, learned best practices in sharing bad news with patients, and explored how healthcare decision-making can cause inadvertent patient trauma (Cernasev et al., 2020; Pastor et al., 2016; Skye et al, 2014; Shvastave, et al., 2022; Walker & Wilson, 2014). However, interactive theater aimed at enhancing job-related skills is not routinely used in human services’ professional development training. Specifically, our research questions asked: (1) Does participation in interactive theater workshops increase professionals’ knowledge of work-related issues? (2) Are participants able to construct alternative responses to work-related challenges and issues after participating in an interactive theater workshop?

Method: This study used data from three interactive theater workshops of health, human, and social service providers (n = 185) in a Midwestern state in 2024 and 2025. An award-winning playwright was recruited to write multiple scripts based on a previous research study with child welfare professionals and families and youth lived experts (Wright et al., 2022) and focus group sessions were held with medical providers and patients to gain insight into their experiences. Resulting scripts included six one-act scenes, and select scenes were performed at the workshops. Participants engaged in role-playing alternative interactions to improve the outcomes of the scene, participated in small group discussions, and completed surveys at the end of the workshop. Given the potential for response shift bias (Brook et al, 2016), retrospective pre-tests and post-tests were examined with paired t-tests. Researchers conducted inductive thematic analysis on qualitative data.

Results: Seventy-three participants completed surveys. T-tests results across all workshop topic domains indicated that participants nowledge and a better understanding of client experiences (significance test reported as range across domains; t (46) = 3.22 – 11.32, ps < .001, Cohen’s d = 1.67-2.04). In open-ended comments, participants reported the role-playing exercise allowed them to identify alternative responses to common work-related interactions and issues.

Implications/Conclusions: The research results suggest that interactive theater is a useful professional developmental practice that may build the capacity of child welfare professionals and medical practitioners to increase their knowledge, better understand client experiences and well-being, and identify alternative responses to challenging client interactions and work-related decision making. Thus, the authors propose that interactive theater, and arts-based methodologies more broadly, transcends traditional competency based “how-to” or compliance-based professional development toward a more human-centered approach. Importantly, these highly interactive, innovative, and creative approaches may more effectively help professionals contextualize the complexities of client experiences and thereby reduce biases in interactions. Future research is needed to replicate these results across other social and human services fields (e.g., juvenile correctional fields). Additionally, intervention and implementation research can provide the necessary evidence to understand how interactive theater professional development approaches change participant work-related behaviors.