Author: Hannah Baxter

Melissa Donovan joined CEED in 2022 as TARSS training specialist. In this Q & A, she discusses the importance of high-quality training for the early childhood workforce and shares what she most looks forward to in her current role.

What was the career path that led you to CEED?

MD: I began my career in the banking industry, but when I couldn’t find quality care for my youngest son, I became a family child care provider. I’ve always loved kids, and my mom ran a family child care business, so I grew up with it. I operated my child care business out of my home for 16 years. I closed the business to focus on getting my master’s degree in early childhood education from Liberty University. Following that, I worked in child care centers, most recently as director of the Mary T. Wellcome Child Development Center.

I had a lot of fun both as a family child care provider and working in child care centers. I absolutely loved being with children and working with staff. I even had the opportunity to mentor several individuals who started their own family child care businesses. But I always wanted to keep stepping forward and furthering my career path, so when the opportunity to work at CEED arose, I jumped at it.

What is new for you in your role as TARSS training specialist? 

The first thing that comes to mind is that after 20 years working with children on a day-to-day basis, I’m now on the administrative side. Fortunately, I’m still able to find ways to be around babies and kids by volunteering in the nursery at my church and babysitting my grandson! 

What I am most excited about in my new role with TARSS is the opportunity to support the trainers who are preparing child care providers to bring up the next generation of scholars, whether they are doing that in classrooms or in home-based settings. My job includes designing and scheduling courses for trainers, sharing recommended training practices, and responding to trainers’ questions or concerns. I’m looking forward to working with a variety of individuals and organizations to create and provide access to quality training.

What are some of the things you are most looking forward to in your new role? 

For a long time, my ultimate goal has been to support and advocate for those who work with our littlest learners. I’ve been a trainer for about six years, and I love to teach and mentor other professionals. I really enjoy working on our professional development offerings, for example, facilitating Training of Trainers events and supporting participants both on the technical side and as learners. In particular, I’m enjoying being a part of planning the upcoming Trainer Academy and envisioning next year’s Trainer and RBPD Specialist Symposium. 

Becoming a part of the University of Minnesota community is also really special. As a professional in the field, I’ve always liked to keep informed about the latest research on early childhood and the valuable work that happens at the U. For example, I’ve been a big fan of podcasts from the Center for Advanced Studies in Child Welfare (CASCW), including the Early Childhood Development and Child Welfare podcast that CASCW and CEED collaborated to produce. 

Also, while it’s not strictly a part of my position as training specialist, I consider myself to be a lifelong learner, so I recently decided to train to become a CLASS® observer. A lot of what I’m learning in the process of becoming certified as an observer really resonates with my experience as an educator and center director. The CLASS® has a lot to offer in terms of creating great classrooms and supporting quality relationships between children and their caregivers. 

What don’t people understand about early childhood education, the ECE workforce, or training for the ECE workforce?

People underestimate the importance of quality programming in early education for our littlest learners. Early childhood educators are vital to the workforce as they give caregivers the opportunity to work. One misconception I’ve noticed is that people think early childhood educators are babysitters. They are so much more! These are hard-working professionals who want to ensure that children receive a solid foundation for lifelong learning. It is not easy being an early childhood educator. It means long hours, low pay, and great rewards.  

Why is training important for early childhood educators? Why is it important to “train the trainers”?

Early childhood educators are the individuals who are responsible for the earliest education experiences of our next generation of scholars. For those students to receive a quality education, early childhood educators should have a heart for learning also. Continuously learning better, more effective ways to have an impact on a child’s life is important. Ensuring those who are  training early childhood educators have the proper qualifications and skills helps to make sure the subject is being taught well and the information given to educators is the most up-to-date.

What are some of your interests and activities outside of work?

I’m a Twins fan with season tickets, so going to games is always fun. I also love going on walks with my dog, Stubby. He is about five years old and is a wirehaired dachshund-Boston mix. My son used to work at a pet store, and someone just dropped Stubby off there one day, so we took him in. 

Spending time with family is also really important to me. We have a blended family with five children; we have one grandchild and another on the way. I love to travel, and my sister and I have tentative plans to go on a trip to Israel or Italy with our daughters for my 50th birthday.

A groundbreaking new book by CEED’s Christopher Watson, PhD, Alyssa Meuwissen, PhD, and colleagues, is the first guide to using the Reflective Interaction Observation Scale (RIOS™) as a framework to plan and shape reflective supervision sessions. Entitled RIOS™Guide for Reflective Supervision and Consultation in the Infant and Early Childhood Field, the book is out now from Zero to Three.

The origin of the RIOS™

The RIOS™ was initially developed as a research tool. Its purpose is to help researchers identify and measure the “active ingredients” in a reflective supervision session. Researchers who study reflective supervision may watch video recordings of reflective supervision sessions to determine how and why this practice works. The RIOS™ organizes the processes involved in reflective supervision into a framework. Within the framework, these processes fall into two categories: Essential Elements and Collaborative Tasks. Using the RIOS™, researchers can catalog and assign numerical values to the Essential Elements and Collaborative Tasks that they observe in recorded reflective supervision sessions. This process, called “coding,” is one of the ways in which social scientists collect quantitative data about practices like reflective supervision.

Watson, who retired as director of CEED’s Reflective Practice Center in 2021, led the development of the RIOS™. In 2010, he joined a group of researchers and practitioners from the Alliance for the Advancement of Infant Mental Health who came together to gather data about reflective supervision. Over the course of the following eight years, Watson headed up the effort to turn that raw information into a useful tool.

“A smaller group of us met once a month online to try to further distill the data that we had started with, operationalize it, and fill it out,” he says.

Watson and his colleagues were fascinated to find that the RIOS™ quickly proved useful not just to researchers, but to practitioners of reflective supervision and others in the field.

“People immediately grabbed onto it as a way to explain reflective supervision when training both supervisors and supervisees,” Watson recalls. “And supervisors began using it both prior to a reflective supervision session, to remind them of what they wanted to address in the session, as well as following a session, to review what occurred and to determine what they wanted to pursue in future sessions. It became a natural outgrowth.”

With this use of the RIOS™ in mind, Watson and his coauthors included a one-page “Self Check” form in the RIOS™ Guide, which enables reflective supervisors to quickly document the content and process of the session and to record notes for the next session.

“‘Guide’ is the perfect word for it”

Work continued on developing the RIOS™ for research purposes, and Watson and colleagues created a RIOS™ Manual to train researchers in the use of the tool for coding. However, nothing similar existed for those who had adopted the RIOS for use in the field until now. Watson recalls that careful thought was put into choosing a title for the new book.

“Reflective supervision is not a manualized process; it’s the antithesis of that,” he says. “A manual is prescriptive. It trains people to do the same things. The RIOS™Guide is the opposite of that approach.”

“’Guide’ is the perfect word for it,” agrees Deborah Ottman, CEED’s professional development coordinator. Along with Meredith Reese, research assistant at CEED, Ottman was instrumental in preparing the RIOS™Guide for publication. “It’s a roadmap that offers you a million different paths to the same destination: the child. And you can choose different paths on different days.”

For those who are providing or preparing to provide reflective supervision, CEED offers two online classes on the RIOS™: RIOS™ 1: Using the RIOS™ Framework for Reflective Supervision and RIOS™ 2: Advanced Reflective Supervision. We also offer 10 self-study modules exploring different aspects of reflective supervision.

Researchers at the Reflective Practice Center have published a new report, “What Does Reflective Supervision/Consultation Look Like in Practice: Examining Variation in Implementation,” based on findings from a nationwide landscape survey. They conducted the survey in partnership with the Alliance for the Advancement of Infant Mental Health in 2018. They wanted to find out how reflective supervision is being implemented in different workplaces and what recipients of reflective supervision think of it. Read their earlier report on training for reflective supervisors.

Reflective supervision, also known as reflective supervision/consultation (RSC), is a type of relationship-based professional development. The practice originated in the field of infant and early childhood mental health and has been adopted by related fields because of its ability to help reduce burnout and increase effectiveness among people in helping professions, such as social workers, educators, and health care workers.

The researchers set out to learn how reflective supervision is being implemented in the field. For example, the researchers wanted to find out whether individual or group reflective supervision was more common. The most common format, reported by 49% of respondents, was a combination of the two. Forty percent (40%) said they had group meetings only, and 10% said they had individual meetings only. 

The researchers also wondered if people in the field were receiving the minimum recommended “dose” of reflective supervision: an hour every month. A minority of survey respondents (21% of participants in individual RSC and just 7% of group participants) reported receiving reflective supervision less than one hour per month.

Frequency of RSC	Individual	Group
Weekly	25.6%	10.0%
Biweekly	21.1%	31.7%
Monthly	30.8%	51.7%
Less than monthly	20.5%	6.7%
Length of RSC
Less than one hour	10.3%	3.3%
One hour	53.8%	15.0%
One and a half hours	23.1%	41.7%
Two hours	12.8%	40.0%

The survey also yielded evidence that recipients of reflective supervision found it to be valuable. One common theme that emerged from respondents’ written comments was a sense that reflective supervision helped them process emotions that arose in their work.

“I find myself really valuing reflective supervision to process all the trauma, triggers, and other challenging aspects of the job,” reported one respondent. Another wrote, “Without it, I would have to find easier work.”

Others mentioned that they gained a better sense of how their work mattered, including getting “affirmation of my value.” And many respondents mentioned that reflective supervision, whether in groups or one-on-one, was a helpful way to get new ideas to try out with their client families. Some stated that reflective supervision made them more effective in their work with families and even helped them in their relationships with coworkers.

Because the sample size was limited (n = 67), lead researcher Alyssa Meuwissen, PhD, cautions that this paper should not be read as a definitive statement about the implementation and reception of reflective practice nationwide. Rather, it is an important first step in outlining possible avenues of inquiry for future studies, such as: 

• How variation in frequency affects the efficacy of reflective supervision
• How group and individual reflective supervision differ
• How common online reflective supervision is and whether it is equally effective

“This preliminary study helped us get a sense of who is getting reflective supervision and what they think of it,” says Meuwissen. “It also taught us a lot about the gaps that remain in our knowledge. We can use the information from this survey to start to fill in those gaps with future studies.”

Download the report.

The Children’s Theatre Company, a Twin Cities-based arts organization, offers a program for preschool classrooms called Creative Play. Teaching Artists (TAs) work with young children from birth to 5 years old using trauma-informed practices. Each session with the TAs lasts around 20 to 30 minutes and involves imaginative play, mindfulness activities, and physical movement. These exercises encourage and empower children to name and explore emotions, make decisions, and share ideas.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Creative Play was delivered in a virtual format for the first time in the spring of 2021. The Children’s Theatre Company has an ongoing research partnership with CEED, and they engaged with our staff to evaluate the effectiveness of the new format. Research Associate Alyssa Meuwissen, PhD, and Research Assistant Meredith Reese observed virtual workshops, interviewed TAs, and surveyed preschool staff about their perception of the program’s effectiveness.

Preschool staff did feel that children remained at least moderately engaged in the three main components of Creative Play: emotional literacy, mindfulness activities, and imaginative play. However, Meuwissen and Reese heard from classroom staff that when children lost focus during virtual Creative Play sessions, it was harder for TAs to re-engage them. Rather, classroom staff intervened to redirect the children’s attention.

Meuwissen brought undergraduate student Rachel Deng onto the project to analyze the first round of data that had been collected. Deng also co-developed a research poster which she presented with Meuwissen and Reese at CEHD Research Day on March 24, 2022. Deng is a senior at UMN majoring in theater arts and early childhood education.

“This project has been a really great opportunity for me because of my joint interest in two very distinct major fields,” says Deng. She added that working on this research project gave her a glimpse of how she might integrate her two areas of interest in further research or even in her career.

“Part of my passion includes using dance and theater arts as therapeutic methods for children and youth,” Deng says.

Meuwissen and Reese will collect more data on the effectiveness of Creative Play in its virtual format when the program recommences in the fall. Stay tuned for an update on their findings!

We’re excited to welcome Mary McEathron, PhD, as research associate and lead evaluator of the Trainer and RBPD Specialist Support (TARSS) program. McEathron received her doctorate in evaluation studies at the University of Minnesota and has more than 20 years of experience conducting evaluations and research projects. Before joining CEED, her experience included leading Rainbow Research, a nonprofit community-based research and evaluation organization, as executive director; she was also director of the Evaluation Group at the Institute on Community Integration.

What was the educational or career path that led you to focus on evaluation?

MM: My path to evaluation was very indirect, which is something that I’ve heard from a lot of people in this field. In my case, I studied biology and creative writing for my undergraduate and master’s degrees, after which I worked in nonprofits and program management locally and internationally for a number of years. During that time, program evaluation started to become a more common practice, so I had some familiarity with the basics.

The real pivot point in my career, though, came when my husband and I moved back to the Twin Cities in 2001. When we first arrived here, I worked in a temp job at the University of Minnesota. The unit I was working for needed to do focus groups. I happened to see a flyer for a 3-day workshop offered by the Minnesota Evaluation Studies Institute (MESI) that included a course on focus groups. I said to my manager, “How about I go to this workshop and learn about focus groups?” I got the go-ahead, and at the workshop I met a lot of local leaders in the field and learned that UMN had a degree program in evaluation studies. At the end of the first day of the workshop, my husband asked me, “How did it go?” I told him it looked like I would be going back to grad school!

How would you define evaluation for a layperson?

That’s a great question. When I tell people that I’m an evaluator, they sometimes ask, “What do you evaluate?” When I say I evaluate programs, many people ask, “Why?” People who have worked in grant-funded programs tend to know about evaluation simply because they are required to do it, but unless you have that experience, it may not be at all clear what it means or why it’s important.

What I usually say to people who aren’t familiar with this type of work is that evaluation is applied social science research. An evaluator works with a client or project staff and figures out how to answer questions about their program or project. These can be questions like, “What is working? What is not working? How do we know?” Evaluation pulls from the same set of quantitative and qualitative tools as research. It’s a little hard to generalize about the specific activities involved in evaluation, because there are literally hundreds of approaches.

The bottom line is that programs and organizations want to learn about what they are doing. They want to know what is working and what is not working and why. Sometimes, because evaluation is required by funders, the focus is on accountability. Accountability is important, but my favorite thing is to work with people who are curious. They want to make discoveries about their programs using evaluation tools. I love to help people get in touch with that curiosity—even when they start out thinking that evaluation just means checking a required box on a grant report.

Talk about your role at CEED.

The major focus of my role is evaluating the TARSS program. I’ll also help with other evaluation projects at CEED and provide technical assistance to the whole team for their qualitative research and evaluation programs. Part of why it’s so wonderful to join CEED is that curiosity piece that I mentioned earlier. This team has a great feel for the best uses of evaluation. They approach their work with a desire for knowledge and understanding. So I’m thrilled to join forces with my colleagues and add even more momentum to their work.

What will evaluating the TARSS program look like?

Right now, we are reviewing and implementing our evaluation process. What I can say at this point is that the work of TARSS is to support the full community of early childhood trainers and coaches in Minnesota. That means making sure that the feedback loop through which we gain knowledge about the program is working. What I mean by that is we need to create a cycle of knowledge sharing that includes all our stakeholders: TARSS staff, DHS staff, the practitioners in the field, and the educators whom they serve. We obtain data using different methods—focus groups, one-on-one interviews, surveys, training evaluations, etc.—and then we analyze that data and share it with the early childhood professional development field to help create change and improve programs.

Whatever data-gathering methods we use, it’s important to honor the time and effort it takes for stakeholders to provide us with feedback. We’ll ask people in the field what they need with an emphasis on inclusion so that all voices have the opportunity to be heard. The best decisions are made through that cycle of knowledge sharing.

What are some of your interests outside of work?

I love long walks and hikes in the woods, writing, and cooking dinner with my husband. I’m also really looking forward to farmers markets opening up soon.

Kristin Irrer, MS, IMH-E®, has more than 20 years’ experience supporting children, their families, and those who care for them. A provider of reflective supervision, she is deeply invested in expanding access to reflective supervision and embedding this practice within infant and early childhood systems, including access for professionals in administrative roles. Irrer teaches our online courses Understanding Early Social-Emotional Development Using an Infant Mental Health Lens (UESED), Part 1 and Part 2, as well as RIOS™ 1: Using the RIOS™ Framework for Reflective Supervision. She is also the author of our self-study module Why You Matter: Professional Use of Self. We sat down with Irrer to learn more about the process of reformatting UESED into a two-part series. She also talked about what she hopes participants will gain from the course.

Who do you see as the main audience for the UESED courses?

KI: Typically participants work in the infant and early childhood field, but one exciting thing about this course is that the information has really broad application. People who work in any role that supports young children will find this course relevant to their work, whether they are educators, social workers, early interventionists, or administrators, for example. Some participants have an associate’s or bachelor’s degree; others have a master’s degree. Many participants are looking to refresh and reconnect with what they know about their field; others want to learn more about the most up-to-date science. If participants want to take their learning further, these courses can also be applied toward the Supporting Early Social and Emotional Development credential. The credits gained through this coursework can also be applied to obtain or renew Infant or Early Childhood Mental Health Endorsement through the Alliance for the Advancement of Infant Mental Health.

UESED has been reformatted into two 5-week sessions, as opposed to a single, 13-week session. Why break the course into two parts?

We felt the 13-week commitment was a barrier to some students, so we retooled the course to be more accessible. We put a lot of thought into restructuring the coursework to better fit the needs of our busy students. The five-week courses are intended to help students digest the content in a more manageable timeframe. Additionally, we reframed the content to include more self-reflection. You will find more reflective prompts in the course, such as, “This week, casually observe someone in your environment who is interacting with a child aged 3 or under.” We encourage participants to start a journal and write down their thoughts, but they aren’t required to share them. Slowing down and deepening our understanding is an important theme of this class. We hope the two-part series will feel supportive to the very busy participants who are balancing many roles and expectations.

What does it mean to look at social-emotional development through an infant mental health lens?

Infant mental health by definition refers to how well a child develops socially and emotionally in the early years. So when we talk about social-emotional development from an infant mental health perspective, it’s wrapped up in the context of a relationship with an attachment figure and embedded in the culture and community in which the child develops. We are not exclusively looking at the child, we are noticing the whole dyadic system. Relationships are the cornerstone for all young children’s learning. When we are using an infant mental health lens with our work, this concept becomes the centering point for understanding social-emotional development.

You mentioned that a relationship with an attachment figure is key to infant mental health. What is attachment?

Attachment is our emotional bond that connects us to our important people. Infants bring something to this developing system just as adults do: it’s a two-way street. It’s the interactions between an infant and an important adult, over time, that allow the child-and-caregiver dyad to form emotional bonds and a felt sense of connectedness.

The foundation for attachment starts when a baby is born: when the baby displays hunger cues, does someone respond? How do they respond? When the baby fusses, does someone come and figure out what they need? Through these everyday interactions, over time, the baby is learning: “If I cry, does someone comfort me?” In the infant and early childhood field, we sometimes call this interactive behavior of the caregiver and child “serve-and-return.” Through these back and forth interactions, babies learn whether their needs will be met and whether an adult will show up–even if they don’t get the baby’s needs right every time. This attachment relationship becomes our roadmap of how to be in the world with others. Our primary attachments are alive in all of us, even as adults.

What does it mean to say a child is “securely” or “insecurely attached”?

Securely attached infants learn to trust that adults will respond to them and take care of their needs.They experience adults who are sensitive and are attuned to their bids for interaction. Adults can behave in ways that allow the child to feel more secure or a little more anxious or insecure in the relationship. If a person develops an insecure style of attachment, it can take one of three forms: avoidant, ambivalent, or disorganized. Children who we would consider to be in the “insecure” categories of attachment relationships experience adults who are less consistent, nurturing, or responsive to their needs. Children then adapt their own behaviors to get their needs met. Most of us in the field can’t “diagnose” attachment styles, but we most certainly can notice parent or caregiver and child behaviors that give us good information about the attachment relationship.

What would be some symptoms of disorganized attachment?

Disorganized attachment refers to a situation where rather than being a source of comfort, the adult in the attachment relationship is a source of alarm. The adult’s behavior is too unpredictable or scary for the child to grow to trust them. This way of being leaves the child in a constant state of fear. Typically trauma is embedded in disorganized attachment styles.

Attachment relationships influence how children treat others and how they expect others to treat them. Outside the context of their family, children who experience a disorganized primary relationship might display extreme behaviors that look like escalation, disorganization, fear, or anger. These children may be unable to go to an adult for help, because their expectation is that adults cannot be trusted and may harm instead of help.

A major theme in the UESED courses is the idea that we adults bring our whole selves–including our trauma and our relationship history–to our interactions and relationships with children. This is true of parents and caregivers and it’s also true of those of us who work with children. This is an important piece that we tend to overlook when we are solely focused on a child’s development, and it allows us to think more deeply about social-emotional foundations and developmental milestones. We can remind ourselves, “Adults are part of this developing emotional system, too.”

Can an attachment figure be someone other than the child’s parent or primary caregiver?

Yes! We call these secondary attachment figures. I think it’s especially important to talk about them in the context of the stress, upheaval, and trauma that COVID-19 has caused in many families’ lives. Who else is important in our children’s lives, besides their parents or primary caregiver? Along with primary attachments, these other significant relationships hold important potential to buffer stress for children. This also speaks to the fact that we need to do a better job at supporting child care providers and others who work with young children, because their emotional selves show up in those important secondary attachment relationships.

You mentioned that the information in this course is applicable even for people who don’t work directly with children.

Absolutely. It is important that supervisors, policymakers, and administrators continually consider children’s perspectives and emotional experiences. Again, adopting that lens means taking into account the fact that social-emotional development is something that happens in the context of a relationship. This is tricky, because a relationship is difficult to see, target, talk about, or put a number on. But take a moment to wonder: what if supervisors and administrators, even though they’re sitting at desks instead of standing in a classroom, bring this lens into their work? They have the capacity to make decisions with the knowledge that anything they do affects relational outcomes for kids, from filling in forms to determining funding. What a powerful lens to hold for babies and families!

This is the crux of what I hope people get out of the class: the notion that social-emotional development is dependent upon relationships. Armed with this understanding, you can more deliberately be a foundation for social-emotional growth and development, no matter your role in the field. Prioritizing early attachments that play a crucial, lifelong role in our overall development is essential for healthy outcomes for babies.

Is social-emotional development different during pandemic times?

A lot of us have questions about how all of this is affecting kids emotionally. Learning about brain development is a big piece of this class. And I like to reassure people that brains are still developing during the pandemic!

We know that at baseline children will continually work to make sense of their experiences in the world, usually through play. This is especially true in times of uncertainty, change, and stress. I’ll give you an example. My four-year-old was playing tag with neighbors’ children. They were playing “COVID tag.” I asked him, “How does that go?” He said, “Well, if you get tagged, you have COVID, and you sit down. The only thing that can rescue you is the vaccine. You have to get tagged by the vaccine to get up and play again.” This was such a great illustration of my son and his friends using social games as a framework for making sense of the confusing times we are experiencing. Kids have wonderful abilities to sort through their significant emotional experiences and make sense of them.

I think one message of this course is that you don’t have to necessarily “fix” social-emotional development, even under stressful circumstances like a pandemic. By just showing up and being with children, noticing them, you are supporting children’s development. This is true of adults, too, by the way. This is really the magic of what relationships give us. One of the biggest predictors of our capacity to be resilient is our primary attachment styles. In other words, the responsiveness that adults show to our emotional needs influences our level of resilience. Kids don’t need us to fix everything; they need us to witness and be with them in it. This simple act boosts their social-emotional development.

We’re excited to share a Q & A with Tanika Eaves, PhD, LCSW, IMH-E®, assistant professor in the social work program at Fairfield University. Eaves is the author of our brand-new self-study module: A Trail Guide for Your Journey: Receiving Reflective Supervision. Here, she shares her thoughts on balancing the theory and practice of reflective supervision, on embracing the emotions that arise when working with young children, and on valuing the journey—rather than the destination.

Who do you see as the audience of this module? Who do you think would benefit from enrolling in this module?

TE: A Trail Guide for Your Journey is intended for infant and early childhood professionals who are new to reflective supervision and may be at the beginning of their journey in terms of experiencing a reflective supervisory relationship. The module would be beneficial for practitioners who are beginning to learn about reflective supervision and for supervisors who are beginning training in reflective supervision.

What reflections or realizations did you have while building the content for this module?

As a college instructor, I was accustomed to developing a semester’s worth of content for online courses. Creating a module intended to last a maximum of three hours challenged me to focus on the essentials and pare down module content.

I also felt the need to make content and material as engaging and digestible as possible for the intended audiences. Although it’s important for participants to understand the theory underlying reflective supervision, it’s equally important to illustrate its practical value. It was a refreshing shift for me as a reflective supervisor to use video, meditation, and multi-modal strategies to connect theory with practice. I also found myself being especially attentive to emotional content and the common stressors of infant and early childhood work. I wanted to normalize feelings that perhaps as practitioners we may unconsciously suppress.

What drew you to your field of study and the kind of work that you do?

I have always been interested in human behavior and development. I studied psychology as an undergraduate with an interest in neuroscience. After spending a semester volunteering for Head Start as part of a service learning course in child psychology, I became intrigued with early childhood development and influencing factors. 

My first job after college as an infant/toddler teacher in a corporate child care center. Two years later, I began my master’s in social work at Rutgers University and was determined to integrate early childhood development with social work. While at Rutgers, I completed an interdisciplinary certificate program as an infant-child specialist with the educational psychology department to complement my MSW. My work as a social worker has always been specialized to serve the needs of infants, toddlers, young children, and families as a therapist; as a broker of services and resources; and as an advocate for changes in policies, practices, and service delivery systems that reflect the challenges facing families transitioning into parenthood in the 21st century. 

In my second career as a faculty member and emerging researcher, I still work on behalf of young children and families. I strive to produce scholarship that both elevates the experiences of practitioners working with this population and challenges service delivery systems to enact positive change and advance equity and social justice for all young children and families.

What are the top three takeaways that you hope students come away with from this module?

• Developing reflective practice is a journey and a process with no final destination;
• The reflective supervisory relationship can ground our practice work and make us better practitioners; and
• Accepting and embracing emotional complexity and the continuum of feelings associated with working with young children and families is essential. This must be supported in the workplace as well as in the supervisory relationship.

Are there any additional thoughts you would like to share?

It was an incredible privilege to develop this module and a great reminder that I am still learning and moving along in my own journey. I hope that participants in this module feel permission to “not know,” be curious, and make mistakes along their journey.

Research Associate Alyssa Meuwissen, PhD, is part of a team that won a multiyear grant from the Sauer Foundation. Meuwissen will lead a study to evaluate the impact of a reflective consultation-plus-training model of professional development on child welfare workers. She is working closely with Kristin Johnson, LGSW, IMH-E® Infant Family Specialist, of KayJay Consulting, LLC, and Jessica Hoeper, LISW, IMH-E® Infant Family Specialist, of Ray of Hope, LLC, to design and implement the project.

Reflective supervision, also known as reflective consultation, is a mode of relationship-based professional development. It is widely used in the field of infant and early childhood mental health, where research has shown it can help prevent burnout and improve workers’ effectiveness. Child welfare workers are also at great risk of experiencing secondary trauma and burnout. The Center for Advanced Studies in Child Welfare conducted a 2016 Child Welfare Workforce Stabilization Survey of child welfare professionals in Minnesota and found that 83% of respondents had experienced secondary traumatic stress. The survey also revealed that 53% of respondents had actively sought employment outside of their current position within the previous year, and 22% intended to do so within the following year. In addition to being costly for agencies, high workforce turnover affects outcomes for families and children.

Meuwissen’s new study will explore how child welfare professionals—and as a result, the people with whom they work—can best reap the benefits of reflective supervision. This work builds on a previous study done by Meuwissen and her colleague Mary Harrison, PhD, LICSW, IMH-E®. While a few child welfare agencies in Minnesota have implemented reflective consultation (several of them working with Teya Dahle, MSW, LICSW, IMH-E®, who is also consulting on this project), the practice has not become widespread.

Reflective supervision consists of regular meetings between a trained supervisor or outside consultant and a supervisee or group of supervisees. Conversations in these sessions focus on supervisees’ emotions and perspectives. They explore supervisees’ relationships with the people whom they serve and with colleagues. These conversations also take into account the viewpoints and relationships of the adults and children with whom supervisees work. Reflective supervision sessions emphasize building on strengths and managing challenges. The sessions are a safe place for frontline workers to process the distressing emotions that arise in their work.

For this study, the project team will work with the staff of a county social service agency in Minnesota. Johnson and Hoeper will provide reflective consultation to both the agency’s supervisors and its child protection workers. Training on topics related to mindfulness, coping, and stress will also be integrated into the reflective consultation model.

“There are really two parts to implementing the reflective supervision program at this agency,” explains Meuwissen. “The first part is to build a culture of awareness and support of reflective supervision. To do so, we’ll provide evidence-based training about the effectiveness of reflective supervision.”

In this way, people at all levels of the agency will understand the value of reflective consultation, increasing organization-wide support for this model of professional development.

“Second, our experienced consultants will meet regularly with both agency supervisors and child protection workers,” Meuwissen says. “Supervisors will receive reflective consultation for one hour a month. Child welfare workers will attend monthly sessions that begin with 15–30 minutes of training and skill-building activities. They’ll learn strategies such as mindfulness and diaphragmatic breathing that will help them to identify and manage the emotions associated with their work. Following these activities, workers will break into small groups for an hour of group reflective consultation.”

Reflective consultants Johnson and Hoeper will make adjustments to training and reflective supervision sessions based on feedback from participants. Participants will have multiple opportunities to share their thoughts both in person and anonymously through surveys.

“We’ll gather data every step of the way,” says Meuwissen. “The data will help us in two ways. First, we’ll be able to make informed adjustments to optimize our program while it’s happening. Second, we’ll discover whether this is a feasible and effective program model for a child welfare agency.”

At the close of the program, which will span about a year and a half, Meuwissen and her colleagues will conduct interviews with each participant to understand their overall perceptions of the program. Finally, Meuwissen will present the study’s findings and recommendations to participants and collect further feedback from them. She will incorporate this feedback into the study’s conclusions, which she will publish as a report as well as disseminate as a podcast.

“We want to know from participants: did this experience reduce their secondary traumatic stress and burnout?” says Meuwissen. “Did it increase their empathy, perspective-taking, and reflectiveness when they worked with clients?”

Meuwissen hopes that this study will demonstrate the benefits of reflective supervision for child protection workers®benefits that also flow to those with whom they work.

“Our goal with this project is to support child welfare workers so that they can better support children and families,” she says.