What Is This Going to Feel Like? Posted on March 1, 2006 Joe Price (bio) details the importance of role-playing in preparing group facilitators.

We did try to role-play with the group facilitators each of the sessions so that before they went into a session they had seen it role-played; they had seen how it works, and they weren't doing it cold turkey the first time.

When we did our training then because then in the second phase I and my two group facilitators trained the second group. We used the same model of doing that, so we would talk about the program: "Here's the manual; here are the materials." Role-play each of the sessions, and one of the requirements before they even went into the groups is we role-played the first six sessions. Then as they went along we role-played. We stayed ahead of them in the role-plays, and we'd get people from our center to come in and be foster parents, and we'd go through getting college students as well to be able to do that.

So we role-played every session before they got to that session, and I think that really helped because it helped them see how the material could be applied by somebody else, and it also helped them to see how that might feel in a group setting.

What we had was our previously trained group facilitators would come in as foster parents. Now they had had several groups under their belts, so they came in as some of their toughest foster parents into the group where they'd say, "OK, today we're going to talk about timeouts," and they'd explain it. The foster parent goes, "I think that's a load of crap. There is no way I'm going to use that. Timeout is not going to work." Well, how did you deal with that? By the time they got to the group, they had had some preparation in terms of what that felt like, and I think that's important, that sense of "What is this going to feel like, and how am I going to adjust to it?"

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