Abstract
There have been great strides in attending to skill-based training and transfer of learning over the past 15 years in the field of child welfare. We know that classroom training builds a foundation that must be reinforced in the field in order to be practiced in day-to-day work with clients. When skills are reinforced through additional practice exercises, coaching, mentoring, and specific feedback on key practice behaviors, both client outcomes and organizational outcomes can be affected and improved. We know that training must go hand in hand with supervision to be effective and that these two areas of the organization must be in concert. Further research is needed to better understand how to engage the practice sector of child welfare agencies in embracing this important role of supervisors and senior frontline workers. In addition, more research is needed on what aspects of classroom training and its reinforcement lead to the changes in behavior that are necessary to impact child and family outcomes. Extending this work to refine our understanding of the transfer process will help to make certain that all families entering the child welfare system throughout the country will find a skilled workforce that is equipped to meet their needs and help them ensure that their children are safe, in permanent homes, and successful in life.
In order to deliver appropriate services to clients, however, simply possessing knowledge and skills is insufficient; a child welfare worker must also be able to translate a sense of knowing and doing into distinct situations. It is the application of knowledge and skills that becomes so critical. Furthermore, bringing skills from the classroom and from training into practice does not signify that the worker’s learning has reached a place of ultimate meaning. Instead, it represents an unending series of efforts to gain and regain understanding, predicated on multiple shifts in context. Child welfare workers must actively engage as translators in a transfer of knowledge and skills; they must critically reflect on how knowing and doing interrelate, while ultimately recognizing that meaning cannot be transferred whole from one situation to another, but must be shaped by the uniqueness of context. The translation of child welfare knowledge and skills is both responsive and generative and involves reaffirmation and adaptation that simultaneously honors both what is learned in a classroom setting and the ways in which that learning is applied in practice. A transfer of learning is all about building bridges that transport us between knowing and doing, making us translators in the most conscious and deliberate of ways as we engage each new client and each new situation.
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Barbee, A.P., Martin, M.L. (2013). Skill-Based Training and Transfer of Learning. In: Cahalane, H. (eds) Contemporary Issues in Child Welfare Practice. Contemporary Social Work Practice. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8627-5_8
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