Workshop

Throughout our work, complex undercurrents of power, privilege and entitlement flow with changing force. Obvious and subtle influences abound stemming from our clients’--and our own--racial identities, genders, backgrounds and personalities. Even when we want to “get it right,” are our reactions influenced—perhaps unconsciously—by our own gender, race, or personality? We will explore the complicated intersection of deeply emotional factors that challenge our efforts to ensure that every client and teammate feels welcome and “normal” throughout our Collaborative work.

From Core Principles to Creative Innovations--Building on Past Experiences to Create and Sustain the Collaborative Practice of the Future.
During the past three decades Collaborative Practice has grown from core ideas created by a handful of pioneers to a worldwide movement bursting with the possibility of great innovations. This workshop will focus on taking the very best ideas of the past 30 years and creating a ladder to developing and sustaining an innovative Collaborative practice.  

Collaborative Practice depends on effective professional teamwork. Challenges are inevitable. The Ethical Standards provide common expectations to reduce missteps, inaccurate assumptions, and acting at cross purposes. This interactive workshop focuses on the Standards as a guide for team process and practice regardless of discipline, or whether the professionals are experienced, familiar with one another, or challenged working together.

Collaborative Practice is like "improv". We have a general idea about what might happen in the collaborative meeting room but no matter how carefully we prepare, we don't get a dress rehearsal or a script. We are at our best when we can say "yes" to what is coming toward us and respond in an authentic, meaningful and productive way.

Like a symphony or ballet, collaborative practice seeks an artful timbre, pace and space—whether within the process as a whole, the full team meeting, or the immediate moment. Too often well-meaning professionals cacophonously crowd and hurry, when a client-centered process needs alternatively a press and a pause.

“What do I want my practice to look like?”  One way we can get an idea of that is by exploring what we believe we “can’t” do. Whether the limitation comes from within or without, being aware of it and naming it as a limitation suggests that it exists to push back against something we want to do. We’ll walk through some of the common and unique “limitations,” get a clearer picture of the things we want in, for and from our practices and, move beyond the limitations.

The Separation Proclamation is an intervention that reduces acrimony during and after divorce. It helps the person who chose the divorce to share their thinking so the other can start to understand. This intervention, developed in The Netherlands in the 1980s, is ubiquitous there. It helps clients achieve an acceptance of the divorce so they can focus on the future and transition into a new co-parenting relationship.

Explore instances in collaborative cases where implicit bias may impact the professionals’ ability to effectively guide clients. Using a fishbowl role play and small group discussion and exercises we will address how to recognize when implicit gender biases of the professionals (and your own biases) are affecting a case and what to do abut it.

The presenters will lead an open discussion on the best options for proceeding when one professional is acting in a non-collaborative manner, when another professional arrives to a meeting unprepared, when the clients start splitting the team members, and other examples of unexpected roadblocks arising in Collaborative cases.

The metaphor of Collaborative Practice as a container will be presented using an Italian handcrafted model “house” along with a video. Using visual facilitation the attendees will be asked to brainstorm other visions and ideas for the Collaborative Container