Facilitation Skills for Child Family Team Meetings – Riverside

Level: Advanced Practice – Lineworker

Credits: 6

Intended Audience: This course is intended for line workers to build their skills in facilitating Child Family Team Meetings. In this one day facilitation training, trainees will learn the strategies and skills for helping groups solve problems and build agreement to enhance the safety of children and families. This training will include the use of demonstration and skill practice for immediate use.

Description of Course: This is an experiential training for facilitators of Child Family Team Meetings in child welfare agencies. The purpose of Family Team Meetings of any
type is to build agreements between the Department, families, providers and other essential team members. It is largely the responsibility of meeting facilitators to bring a very disparate group of people into CFTMs and build critical agreements and decisions.

Intended Objectives:

• Value your role as change agents in the CFTM facilitated process.
• Enhance your confidence in dealing with challenging group situations.
• Learn how to leverage diverse opinions and styles.
• Practice use of specific tools for building understanding and agreement.
• Apply solution focused inquiry techniques to CFTMs.
• Demonstrate basic facilitation skills.
• Demonstrate balanced attention to relationship, process and outcomes within facilitation.
• Demonstrate respectful engagement of participants in CFTMs through challenging conversations.

Topics Include:

• Building shared agreements
• Communication guidelines to support conversations
• Dialogue structure
• Safety goals and plan for next steps
• Purpose, desired outcomes, and context of meeting
• Network/Stakeholders
• Individualized care/safety plans