Your invitation to Collaborative Practice trainers to comment makes
the point that "people who go to trainings assume that that prepared
them to do collaborative cases." To me, that poses another topic of
equal import: clear communication by the trainers of what is being
offered and, perhaps even more important, a commitment by the person
seeking training to understand what the trainer is being offered. I
am going to continue comments on that assertion in a separate post.
If a trainer or training team asserts that a training conforms to the
IACP Minimum Standards for a Collaborative Basic Training, then they
are representing that a training contains the the minimum material
necessary for a person to open a Collaborative Practice file.
"Period. Paragraph. Start a new sentence."
I believe that it is incumbent upon both trainers and participants to
be clear as to what a particular program / workshop / seminar /
training includes. There are many sorts of programs offered. There
are marketing workshops; there are skills seminars / trainings that
concentrate in particular areas; there are team skills building
trainings; there are programs offering training in the fundamentals
of interest-based negotiation or of various schools of mediation.
On that theme, it appears from posts here and in web entries, that
collaborative practitioners often believe that they have received
training adequate for preparing them to open collaborative cases when
they have only attended a state or IACP forum that has given them
exposure to various specialized and relatively narrow topics. It is
incredibly important that, before one holds herself or himself out as
ready to do a collaborative case, that person has had a basic
training. [This circles around to the recent debate about working a
"collaborative" case, with disqualification agreement, with an
untrained professional. Without saying more, I learned the hard way:
Don't Do It!]
Anyway, enough of my ranting. What do others think?
George Richardson
At 11:48 AM -0400 10/3/07, John Crouch wrote:
The IACP Standards call for 15 hours of additional training, in
addition to the 12 hours of basic collaborative training and 30
hours of mediation or similar training. The additional training can
be advanced mediation, communication skills, interest-based
negotiation, or more collaborative training (including the rest of
your basic training if it was 16 or 24 hours???).
Does anyone think that the 15 hrs. additional training, should be a
prerequisite to doing collaborative cases? And if it isn't, what are
the IACP Standards really for? Their own definition of what they are
for is basically circular: "The IACP sets the following basic
requirements for a professional to hold herself/himself out as a
Practitioner who satisfies IACP Standards for Collaborative Practice
in family related disputes."
I would especially like to know what the CP trainers out there
think, since people who go to trainings assume that that prepared
them to do collaborative cases.
--
John Crouch
Arlington, Virginia
