Less than a decade ago it was not uncommon for child protection professionals to step into their new careers without any skill-based or experiential learning, with the exception of a few role-play sessions that lacked authenticity or “real-world” insight. Most pre-service trainings in child protection consisted of a steady diet of PowerPoints and handouts, focusing on procedural guidelines that could not sufficiently address and capture the essence of child protection in the field: communication and engagement. The volume of didactic content in child protection training continues to be a central component for understanding the policies and procedures, but the transfer of learning in simulation training greatly enhances the acquisition of skills needed for critical decision making in child protection.
When the University of Illinois Springfield (UIS) partnered with the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) in 2015, the goal was to move new child protection investigators out of the classroom and into the Residential Simulation Lab located on the UIS campus, providing a space where the trainees could practice their engagement skills, adding new scenarios each day that brought them into contact with “family members” involved in allegations of child maltreatment (Goulet et al. 2020).
The first group of DCFS trainees entered the new UIS Child Protection Training Academy (CPTA) in February of 2016. Prior to this group’s arrival on campus the CPTA team had spent several months developing a facilitator’s guide that outlined the core competencies for the 4-days of scenarios, established a contract with the SIU School of Medicine’s Standardized Patient program for providing actors skilled in feedback, and furnished the Residential Simulation Lab with essential items to create a realistic home environment in which the investigation could occur. The CPTA team recruited numerous criminal justice professionals to volunteer their expertise for the courtroom scenario – these volunteers included several prosecutors and defense attorneys as well as two former juvenile court judges who agreed to participate in order to improve the trainees’ ability to accurately testify in both criminal and juvenile proceedings.
Even more vital to the project was the critically important partnership with the University of Illinois Urbana – Champaign’s Children and Family Research Center’s evaluation team. The CPTA team, DCFS administrators and the evaluation team were committed to determining the level of efficacy of the new simulation training and contributing research articles to the field that demonstrated how the new model impacted not only the transfer of learning but the overarching goal of reducing workforce turnover.
The goal was to move new child protection investigators out of the classroom and into the Residential Simulation Lab located on the UIS campus, providing a space where the trainees could practice their engagement skills, adding new scenarios each day that brought them into contact with “family members” involved in allegations of child maltreatment.
Members of the UIS CPTA team were keenly aware of the need to prioritize training as a strategy for workforce retention, since several of the team’s facilitators as well as the CPTA’s director, had spent time in the field investigating child maltreatment. The fast-paced, changing landscape of child protection requires considerable nimbleness and confident decision-making, skills that cannot be acquired through classroom lectures. Only the opportunity to practice under conditions that replicate, as closely as possible, the challenging aspects of child protection investigations will allow professionals to gain the crucial skills to interact effectively, empathically and competently with families (DePanfilis, 2018, Chiu & Cross, 2020).
When the Children and Family Research team began collecting the existing research on simulation training in child welfare it was clear that they were going to have to develop a model for measuring the impact of simulation experiences on the transfer of learning. Their innovative approach focused on the trainee’s reflections on their level of confidence in response to each simulation scenario over the four days of training. Participants responded to inquiries about their experiences in the simulation labs and they also provided narrative responses that detailed their reactions to what took place during their interactions with the “family members,” the facilitators’ debriefing process, and the residential sim lab environment. The “Daily Experience of Simulation Training” (DEST) is a unique model that recognizes the role that confidence plays in the development of good practice in child protection (Chiu et al. 2021) The DEST has been used since 2019 and is one of the few, possibly only child protection simulation evaluation models in use.