Developing Family Therapy Skills on a Shoe String Budget: A Peer Supervision and Training Approach

Abstract

Family therapy skills are an essential tool when working with young children and their families, yet accessing family therapy training and supervision in workplace settings has become more difficult. Skills enhancement may be obtained through formal training in accredited courses, a costly undertaking, in which clinicians most often carry the entire cost for the training. In this paper, we propose that specific family therapy skills relevant to working with families of young children can be developed within a peer group format. The peer training described in this paper is extremely cost effective, easy to set up, specifically tailored to our unique training needs and the characteristics of the population of families we are working with. Further, the training allows us to develop fresh and creative ways of skills acquisition, our own ‘curriculum’, with flexible use of training techniques, depending on our particular needs at a given time. We conclude with some of the disadvantages of the model and propose ideas for future development.

“What Contributes to Family Therapist Trainees’ Health?” An Investigation into the Context of Professional and Workplace Health and Well-Being

“…This training includes a focus on SFT and its developments, supervision in family therapy practices, the development of critical self-reflection, practical therapeutic work, and self-study (Ludewig 2003). In Australian contexts, formal training in SFT is a costly undertaking (Stiefel et al 2013). Therefore, as suggested for Australian FTTs, skills are usually acquired in formal training, as well as in informal peer group training and collegial consultancy during which specific skills are acquired (Celano et al 2010;Stiefel et al 2013).…”