Supporting the Professional Practice of School Mental Health Staff through Online Learning: A Qualitative Study

Abstract

School-based mental health services address the rising rates of emotional distress among youth and promote student success. Barriers to effective school mental health services arise due to challenges implementing coordinated and evidence-based practices among school staff. Popular strategies for remediating these challenges, such as one-time professional development experiences or individual coaching, often fail to be effective and/or sustainable. The present study investigates a set of professional development activities designed to alleviate these challenges by combining sequential online learning modules with live, group-based telementoring sessions. At the end of the first year of training activities, we conducted focus groups with 14 participants from the larger training cohort of participating school mental health professionals. Using qualitative methods, we mapped participants’ responses against an augmented framework for effective training criteria to gauge practitioners’ reactions to training activities and to determine how training activities facilitated staff learning and behavior change as well as student results. Consistent with our theory of change, participants emphasized more proximal outcomes (i.e., reaction and learning) than distal outcomes (i.e., behavior changes and student outcomes). Participants most often described positive reactions, learning, and behavior change with respect to equitable service provision and interdisciplinary teaming. Overall, results suggest that group-based telementoring may be a low-cost, high-impact strategy for facilitating learning and behavior change among school mental health providers when paired with a more traditional professional development approach (i.e., online modules).