Students are divided into practicum groups of no more than 3 students called triads. In the usual model, these three students will each take on different roles throughout the practicum event to learn various aspects of the process: Facilitator, Journeyer, and Observer. When a student is in the facilitator role, they will will lead prep sessions of the client participants and carry those clients through an admin session and integration the next day under the supervision of a licensed practicum supervisor. When journeying, the students will act just like a real client, posing questions and talking about safety planning. And when they are observing, the student will be able to note how other people take on the tasks of facilitating and journeying. This way, each student can practice the whole facilitation process from start to finish to get feedback from more experience providers and to learn best practices. Practicum traids will be required to answer specific questions about their experience as part of a practicum journaling project that will be submitted with final paperwork for completion of the practicum course.

Practicum events are scheduled based on interest and need . Some practicum events around organized around the calendar of an ongoing didactic training cohort, and sometimes the practicum events are a mix of people from various training programs. In order to help mixes of people gel and find cohesion, we encourage training triads to interact remotely (or in-person if they are near to one another) before the start of practicum and then the first day of the practicum event is focused on building the container for the event. That way groups working together on journeying, facilitating, and observing have some time to get to know one another and build the rapport we know is essential to successful facilitation.

The in-person event itself is usually a five day intensive (though sometimes as a pair of weekends depending on space availability). APL has created a series of in-person activities to train you and give you the opportunity to practice real-world faciliation skills like client intakes and preparation, de-escalation skills practice and situational challenges, and critical analysis of sessions to highlight best practicies and train the ability to recognize deficiencies in practice.

It’s important to note that not every student is well-suited to journeying in this kind of training context, so some triads will work with a lay-person client as well as students or one member of the group may journey more than once. Thus, APL practicums guarantee that students will be able to practice all the skills of facilitation with another student journeyer or with a real clients, guaranteeing that every student gets the training and skills they need to deliver high quality facilitation in their own practice.