For those supporting children and youth with mental health concerns, few challenges are as pressing, or as complex, as ensuring young people in out-of-home care receive truly therapeutic, trauma-informed support. It's work that requires deep compassion and finely tuned skills.
For Dr. Angelique Jenney, PhD, professor at the University of Calgary's Faculty of Social Work and the Woods Homes Research Chair in Children's Mental Health, the question has always been: How do we help practitioners develop those skills in the most effective, meaningful way possible?
In her project, Angelique Jenney is building digital tools, live simulation opportunities, skill-development models, and reflective practice guides. Photo Credit: Elyse Bouvier
The answer to Jenney's question became her research program that bridges the gap between academic theory and grassroots practice. It's work grounded in lived experience, practice wisdom, and a belief that the young people who depend on out-of-home care deserve the very best that helping professionals can offer.
Learning what "good practice" really looks like
Jenney's ongoing research in the area has been supported by two Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded studies that explored procedural competency the concrete skills practitioners use when supporting youth in mental health and child welfare settings.
The team used innovative simulation approaches (in both live and virtual formats) to observe how experienced workers handled complex relational moments for young people receiving mental health services. In this way practitioners demonstrated complex practice behaviours such as engagement, risk assessment and addressing safety issues to help demonstrate how those interactions themselves can shape a young person's sense of safety with service providers.
"What we learned is that experience alone doesn't lead to better practice," says Jenney. "The critical difference is a practitioner's capacity for relational and reflective practice as components of professional growth and development. Being able to connect with a young person while simultaneously reflecting on what's happening in the moment."
This insight became the foundation for a new model of training that goes well beyond traditional classroom learning.
Simulation as a tool for real reflection
Rather than placing the burden of this research on real young people, Jenney's team uses live, in-person simulation and virtual learning tools that feature standardized client scenarios with skilled youth actors trained by experienced clinicians. Practitioners were invited to participate in the research to help elevate practice wisdom into a developing practice model for future training.
These practitioners demonstrate their practice with a simulated client. They then sit with Jenney's team to watch the recordings and as they watch they talk through their decision making, detailing their emotions, the ruptures they noticed, the repairs they attempted, and what they might do differently.
It is deliberate practice in the purest sense: thoughtful, intentional, and grounded in humility.
"Every practitioner can name someone they aspire to be like, the skills they aspire to develop," Jenney says. "In the same way, every young person can tell you which workers made them feel safe, respected, and cared for.
"This project captures that wisdom and turns it into something less abstract and more practical for learning."
Reflective practice: a threshold skill
In social work and child and youth care, reflective and relational practice are known as threshold concepts. These concepts are the transformative ideas that fundamentally shift how practitioners understand their work. But Jenney's research goes further. She isn't only interested in helping people reflect after a session; she wants to cultivate reflection in the moment.
"That moment when a young person reacts differently than you expected; that's the heart of practice," she explains. "Can you notice your own reaction? Can you stay present? Can you manage those reactions to be more effective and connected? That's where everything we learn comes together."
By using these tools developed from practice wisdom, students can also learn to recognize their own instincts, such as wanting to avoid strong emotions, and instead develop the capacity to stay with discomfort long enough to understand what the young person truly needs; all within a safe, low-stakes learning environment where taking risks is encouraged in the name of deliberate practice and skill development.
Bridging the ivory tower with front-line expertise
Jenney's ongoing work is deeply informed by more than 20 years spent in clinical practice, supervision, and child and youth mental health leadership. When she first joined UCalgary, her goal was to bring the realities of front-line work into academic learning spaces, and to ensure research meaningfully contributed to improved care.
Almost a decade later, that vision is taking concrete form.
Jenney's program is identifying the best practices used by highly effective practitioners, developing training models rooted in real-world wisdom, and building simulation-based tools that help both students and seasoned workers continually grow.
And the impact reaches far beyond the classroom. It reaches the young people living in therapeutic campus-based settings, the children and youth who deserve to encounter clinicians who are skilled, reflective, emotionally present and committed to their healing.
A vision worth supporting
As Jenney's original Woods Homes Research Chair reaches the end of its first term, her work offers a powerful case for investment. The tools she is building, including innovative, virtual, digital learning tools, live simulation opportunities, skill-development models, and reflective practice guides all hold the potential to transform social work's and related disciplines' approach to educating front-line workers.
"Young people living in campus-based care deserve the best care we can give them," she says. "Everybody who pursues this work wants to offer good care. One of the most important components of good care for young people is stability and consistency in their caregivers.
"This field is characterized by high turnover rates because the work is complex and challenging and we want to offer the best opportunities for training, supporting, and guiding the people doing this work most importantly, so they will keep doing it. Because their work matters, and the relationships they have with young people are the very essence of the intervention itself."
Jenney's research is not just academic. It is deeply practical, deeply human, and poised to shift the quality of care for some of the most vulnerable young people in Alberta and across Canada.
The University of Calgary Faculty of Social Work is Canada's largest school of social work providing undergraduate and graduate programs from its campuses in Calgary, Edmonton and Lethbridge. The faculty is internationally recognized as perennial leader in social work research.
Dr. Angelique Jenney, PhD, was named the Wood's Homes Research Chair in Children's Mental Health on May 16, 2017. The Chair is unique to Canada as it was the first community-based Chair in Children's Mental Health. Jenney divides her time between UCalgary and Wood's Homes. Jenney has more than 35 years' experience working with children and families and, prior to joining UCalgary, was the director of Family Violence Services for the Child Development Institute, an internationally recognized child and family agency in Toronto.
The Wood's Homes Chair is currently looking for philanthropic support to continue Jenney's impactful work for the next decade. Email for more information.
