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• ISCT Porch Gatherings 2025

  • Start
    February 21, 2025
  •  
  • End
    November 28, 2025
  •  
  • Schedule
    10 sessions
  • Location
    zoom

  Register

  ISCT Porch Gathering
  

  What: A virtual space to regularly gather, connect, and converse.

  Who: Transformative practitioners who identify as members of the Black/African diasporic experience.
  

  When: The 4^th Friday of each month from 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. via Zoom

  5/23, 6/27, 7/25, 8/22, 9/26, 10/24, 11/28 (last session)

  Hosts: Barbara Cockerman & Jerry Mings

  How to Participate: Register here, and receive reminders with the zoom link a few days before each of the scheduled sessions.
  

  Topics and Discussions: Informal and shaped by participants’ needs.

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• Fall 2025 Basic Transformative Dialogue Training: Who Needs to Talk to Whom about What and How?

  • Start
    September 01, 2025
  •  
    11:00 AM
  • End
    December 31, 2025
  •  
    11:00 AM
  • Location
    online

  Register

  Basic Transformative Dialogue Training:

  Who Needs to Talk to Whom about What and How?

  Dates/Times: This training is fully asynchronous. Upon registration you will receive access to a Google Classroom with all reading, videos, and coursework.  You will have the option to set up a call with one of the trainers if you'd like to ask questions or talk about any of the material.  The materials will be available to you until December 31, 2025
  

  Commitment:  18 hour course (8 hours of video and approximately 10 independent reading and reflection hours)

  Cost:  Early bird $395USD by September 15, 2025

  Regular price - $475USD 

  
  

  Course Overview: This training provides participants with the basic understanding and skills to support people in communities and organizations in having meaningful and constructive conversations across differences; conversations that help change the quality of their interactions whether or not they agree at the end of the process.   

  Participants will:

  • Learn how the transformative understanding of conflict applies to group and community conflict
  • Gain a relational understanding of identity, race, ethnicity, culture and power, and learn how transformative facilitators respond to these differences
  • Understand how transformative dialogue is consistent with trauma-informed practice
  • Learn to organize a participant-driven dialogue process through one-on-one and small group meetings and conversations with community members
  • Learn the goals, roles and core skills of a transformative facilitator
  • Learn techniques for facilitating open conversations and options for structuring interactions transformatively that allow even very large groups to share ideas and make decisions

  Who the course is for:

  This training is a significant revision of earlier trainings in transformative dialogue, so even if you have taken an earlier training there is much to learn here. New elements include expanded premises on identity and people in groups, incorporation of trauma-informed practice into the training, and centering discussions of race, culture and power in the training. Whether you are interested in organizing and facilitating conversations in your local community, or in your workplace or organization you belong to, or you are working in an area of ethnopolitical conflict, this training will be an excellent starting point for this work.

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• Cafe: Staying Transformative in a Facilitative World

  • When
    September 05, 2025
  •  
    12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
  • Location
    On line

  Register

  Join us for our September Member Cafe - Staying Transformative in a Facilitative World

  
  

  • Are you surrounded by mediators who don’t understand the transformative approach?
  • Do your co-mediators get too directive?
  • Do you face pressure from courts or programs to push for settlement?

  Let’s get together and talk about how we’ve managed these challenges!

  
  

  Hosted by Dan Simon

  
  

  
  

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• Coached Mediation Practice Group: The Co-Mediation Model, with Hannah Diamond

  • Start
    September 12, 2025
  •  
  • End
    September 26, 2025
  •  
  • Schedule
    3 sessions
  • Location
    online
  • Spaces left
    7

  Register

  Coached Mediation Practice Group: The Co-Mediation Model, with Hannah Diamond
  

  A great opportunity to practice your mediation skills in small group setting with a coach. These sessions will focus on mediating with a co-mediator using various role play scenarios. 

  Three sessions allows for time to play the roles of both a mediator and a party in the mediation.  Group is limited to six participants.

  1.September 12, 2025, 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM

  2.September 19, 2025, 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM

  3.September 26, 2025, 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM
  

  Zoom link sent upon registration. 

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• Inside Out Practice Group, with Robin Brzobohaty and Martina Cirbusová

  • When
    October 10, 2025
  •  
    9:00 AM - 12:00 PM
  • Location
    online

  Register

  Inside Out Practice Group, with Robin Brzobohaty and Martina Cirbusová
  

  Would you like to practice your mediation skills but prefer to have an experience where you will analyze how mediation works rather than be the one who is under the pressure of being analyzed?

  We do have a special practice session for you!

  During this three hour session you will have the opportunity to see how mediators work and analyze their work - ask questions about their intentions, discuss their  interventions, and have an opportunity to understand how they read the weaknesses and self-absorption of parties and why they offer specific interventions to the parties. You will have a chance to pause the mediation any time you will need, come back to specific situations, and analyze them in more detail.

  *If you attended this workshop in the past, know that there will be a new video analyzed this time!

  October 10, from 9 am -12 pm Eastern

  prerequisite: basic transformative mediation training

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• Check-In’s: The Art of Asking Non-Directive Questions, with Robin Brzobohaty and Martina Cirbusová

  • When
    October 21, 2025
  •  
    11:00 AM - 2:00 PM
  • Location
    online

  Register

  Check-In’s: The Art of Asking Non-Directive Questions, with Robin Brzobohaty and Martina Cirbusová

  Asking questions is a powerful tool through which parties can regain the reins of the conversation and restore their agency. As transformative practitioners, we ask questions in the form of the check-in intervention. The challenge, however, is how not to misuse questions to dominate the conversation or be one step ahead of the parties, leading them toward predefined objectives. This workshop will offer a deep analysis of this essential tool of the transformative practitioner in terms of proper delivery and possible positive and negative consequences of asking questions on the self-determination of the participants. Thus, the workshop will focus on the skill of asking questions in a way that maintains the fulfillment of all the premises of the transformative approach.

  In a 3 hour workshop participants will learn:

  • What type of intervention a check in is

  • What is the difference between content and process questions

  • How does asking both types of questions influence the conversation and self-determination

  • How to ask questions in tune with the premises of transformative practice 

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• Advanced Transformative Mediation: Deepening Practice Through the Five Strategies

  • Start
    November 19, 2025
  •  
  • End
    February 11, 2026
  •  
  • Schedule
    10 sessions
  • Location
    online
  • Spaces left
    12

  Advanced Transformative Mediation: Deepening Practice Through the Five Strategies

  Course Facilitators: Olivier Chambert-Loir, Christian Hartwig, and Basia Solarz. 

  Dates/Times: Weekly meetings November 19 - December 10, 2025 and January 7 - February 11, 2026  11:30 am- 2pm Eastern Time USA
  

  Commitment: 39 hour course (22.5 classroom hours plus 6.5 independent intersession hours)

  Cost:  Early bird $499USD by October 10, 2025.   

  Regular price - $625USD 

  Member  $499USD

  Course Overview: In the Basic Transformative Mediation training, you explored transformative theory, principles, and foundational premises  and were introduced to the interventions that are used in transformative mediation. However, effective transformative mediation is more than simply using interventions. Advanced transformative practitioners understand when and why they use these interventions and how the overall impact of their work helps to transform the quality of people's conflict interaction.

  In this two-part course, you will learn about the Five Strategies of Transformative Mediation, first developed by Dorothy Della Noce, that further clarify and deepen the practitioner's understanding about how “purpose drives practice.” 

  Because the process for being certified as a transformative mediator includes self-evaluation and an evaluator assessment based on these five strategies, this course serves as an excellent preparation for anyone who is considering applying for certification as well as for anyone who is simply interested in advancing their transformative practice. 

  Prerequisite: Completion of Basic Transformative Mediation training and at least 10 hours experience as a mediator whether from coached practice groups or actual mediations.

  Course Details:

  Advanced Mediation (Part 1) Orienting Ourselves to the Fives Strategies of Transformative Mediation.   

  Part 1 introduces you to a new way of seeing and understanding transformative mediation practice using the lens of Della Noce's Five Strategies. The five strategies represent the desired objectives and outcomes of mediation altogether and help the practitioner to fulfill the "promise of mediation." In effect, they are a job description for the transformative mediator. They are:

  Strategy #1: Supporting the parties’ view of mediation as a constructive conversation.

  Strategy #2: Supporting the parties’ sense of their own agency

  Strategy #3: Supporting the parties’ orientation to each other 

  Strategy #4: Supporting the parties’ conflict talk 

  Strategy #5: Supporting the parties’ decision-making process

  With the support of a facilitator, you will learn to distinguish between means, moves and strategies and will be encouraged to analyze mediation based on  moves rather than interventions alone. With the support of the Move Analysis Form and through group discussion, you will learn to recognize moves consistent with each strategy in a recorded mediation.  

  In the final session, we will prepare for part 2 by organizing into coached mediation practice groups and sharing your development goals as transformative mediators.

  Part 1 Total time: 14 hours - 10 course hours + 4 hours inter-session work 

  Advanced Mediation (Part 2) Coached Mediation Practice

  You will meet in groups of four with a facilitator for four sessions of coached mediation practice. Each session will allow two participants to mediate for 30 minutes and receive 30 minutes of debrief and feedback based on their development goals. Each participant will mediate two times over the course of the four practice sessions. Recordings will be made of each session so that you can review your work as a mediator and possibly use one of your recorded mediations to apply for certification. 

  Following the four practice sessions, you will have an individual writing session in place of a group session. This will give you time to write a self-evaluation based on one of the course recordings of you  work as a mediator that incorporates your understanding of the five strategies. We will then meet for a concluding session. 

  Total Time: 15 hours (12.5 course hours + 2.5 writing hours)

  Enrolment maximum: To ensure each participant has two opportunities to mediate and receive facilitator feedback, this course is  limited to 12 participants.

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