Training by Role-Playing Posted on March 1, 2006 Joe Price (bio) describes how his team trained their group facilitators by role-playing each session.

The training wasn't just 'here's how you do it'. We did it through role-playing. Patti and then her primary clinician J. P. Davis came down, and they actually role-played sessions for us, so we'd role-play every session in the training.

We role-played every session, and the way we tried to do was they would role-play for us; we would then role-play it with our facilitators, with them as group members. Then the third piece, is once we felt like they had a good idea about the model and the principles, we then got college students, gave them roles as foster parents with the kids that were in their home, brought them together; they had to run those sessions, the group facilitators. We videotaped them and then ran it like a clinical setting. So they had the modeling of what was going to be done. They had the opportunity to practice it with feedback, and then they had practice in kind of a semi-group setting with foster parents, not real foster parents, with feedback again.

So they were basically getting parent management training. They were getting the role-playing; they were getting the instruction, and they were getting the feedback all along. Then on a weekly basis, they were getting supervised.

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