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The PACT Training Module
Step One:
Most PACT modules begin with a dramatization that reflects the module's topic, replicates the audience's work setting, and highlights issues that will be addressed during the training.
Step Two:
The Facilitator introduces the module and develops rapport with the training audience. The Facilitator then guides discussions on the central issues reflected in the dramatization. The group explores the theoretical foundations of the topic as well as practical skills and strategies. The Facilitator encourages participants to discuss their current beliefs and skills relating to the topic, and to compare and contrast them to the concepts being introduced.
Step Three:
A Structured Improvisation™, PACT's exclusive and specially designed training exercise, is introduced and presented. PACT trainers portray members of the organization, customers, and participants enter the exercise as themselves in their professional capacities. This allows trainees to practice new skills in managing sensitive or volatile interactions within the safety and control of the classroom.
Every PACT Structured Improvisation reflects the participants' work setting and roles, highlights the module's issues and theories, and integrates specific training objectives. To prepare a Structured Improvisation, PACT trainers rehearse extensively prior to the workshop presentation. This allows them to re-create the reality and the emotional intensity of a sensitive interaction. More importantly, it allows them to guide the participants toward a set of pre-determined training objectives.
In this living laboratory, participants face the same requests, challenges and confrontations they meet every day in their work environment - only here PACT trainers design the exercise to match each participant's level of skill and awareness. In this way the participants come to understand the broader impact of their actions, and learn to modify or enhance them through the practice of new management techniques.
The PACT Facilitator actively monitors the exercise, controlling its duration and intensity, and serves as a resource to the participants. The Facilitator can stop the exercise to coach the participants, examine the intervention, and, if necessary, curtail participants' responses that threaten the safety or integrity of the exercise.
Step Four:
Following each Structured Improvisation, the PACT Training Team engages in an open discussion with the class and the participants. Participants are debriefed, their actions analyzed and alternative solutions discussed. PACT Trainers review theoretical considerations, issues and skills discussed earlier in the module, and also provide feedback to the participants about the actions and responses displayed during the exercise.
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