Co-counselling-based Peer Supervision
CPD in Co-counselling-based Peer Supervision
The Mindful Mentoring Course concentrates on equipping you with the skills to engage in reciprocal peer support by taking the CCI affiliated Co-counselling fundamentals course. This is built on by adding the Appreciative Co-coaching process to your repertoire which in turn can be complemented by four other forms of supportive intervention using 6 category intervention analysis and which will be very familiar to the kinds of help teachers already provide learners themselves.
What is Co-counselling-based Peer Supervision
Our approach to peer supervision in education is baed on co-counselling. Co-counselling is a grassroots method of personal change based on reciprocal peer counselling using simple methods. Time is shared equally and the essential requirement of the person taking their turn in the role of counsellor is to do their best to listen and give their full attention to the other person. It is not a discussion; the aim is to support the person in the client role to work through their own issues in a mainly self-directed way.
Co-counselling is thus ‘reciprocal peer counselling’. It is reciprocal because participants take turns to be a ‘client’ and a ‘counsellor’. It is peer because all co-counsellors have the same status. It is counselling because you talk through or work on things you want to change in your work and life with the attention and help of a counsellor.
It operates within a network of people who have satisfactorily completed the basic core training course. Each person chooses for themselves how much they want to do as an equal partner either in pairs or in groups. An important feature of co-counselling is that it is free – you exchange your time and skills.
Course Content
The basic training is a 40-hour core training course in the fundamentals of co-counselling. No two courses will be exactly the same, but they are similar enough to allow you to work with any other trained co-counsellor anywhere in the world and not just the Mindful Mentoring Network. Typically the training breaks down into at least 20 hours direct teaching, 10 hours asynchronous study and 10 hours to practise between taught sessions. This includes one hour of Action Learning each month in a small peer support group.
The course is online creating a safe, supportive and inclusive interactive environment. The course is practical with plenty of activities and exercises in sessions which are then practised with trainees in your own time before the next session.
The training group is required to adopt a set of ground rules including strict confidentiality, supportively listening to other people, not expressing opinions about them, speaking for ourselves, commitment to the course and taking responsibility for your own learning.
Learning to be the Client: learning co-counselling is mainly about learning how to be the client. In the process, you learn counselling skills and techniques that you use to work on your own material. In Co-Counselling International the client is always in charge. Our counselling skill is rooted in our experience as client. As a client, you learn to work mindfully with your feelings rather than discussing or suppressing them. You learn how to re-evaluate patterns of unhelpful behaviour patterns, often starting by dealing with current issues rather than digging for deep material.
Learning to be the Counsellor: As a counsellor the basic skill is the ability to give clear, caring and non-judgemental ‘free attention’. The training also introduces you to a tool kit of observational skills, suggestions and interventions that can be used by your client. Interventions are used mainly as reminders or encouragement to help the client to work in the ways that they know. Co-counselling does not use techniques such as feedback, interpretation or questioning.
Course Book
The essential reading required to support Co-counselling Fundamentals is
Learning Outcomes
After successfully completing the basic training course you are eligible to continue using co-counselling with other members of the Mindful Support Network, arranging sessions with anyone available for ongoing peer support
You will also be eligible to take part in the wider CCI network and receive a list of co-counselling contacts in your own area and throughout the UK. You will also have access to CCI’s international network of co-counsellors and to co-counselling workshops throughout this and other countries
You may also opt to join or help form a local or workplace group; you have the skills to share as and when you choose.
Delivery
Training is delivered by Mindful Mentoring Network co-counselling trainers online in the evenings.
CCI Co-counselling fundamentals training is also delivered by other providers here and you can then join the Mindful Mentoring Network as a CCI trained co-counsellor.
Prior Learning
If you have already done the Co-counselling fundamentals course with CCI in the last 5 years then you do not need to take this module. However it may be desirable to take it as a refresher in order to update your skills and co-co practice within the Mindful Mentoring Network.
Our Level 2 training in the mindful mentoring peer supervision process takes the form of self-study and seminars with action learning and co-counselling with other course participants.
Course Content
We base the training on either of two books, depending on accessibility (please check with us in advance which one is adopted for your cohort).
One option is Flourishing Together: Guide to
The other option is Appreciative Coaching by Orem, Binkert and Clancy.
You will learn an approach to coaching that is rooted in Appreciative Inquiry which when combined with co-counselling becomes appreciative co-coaching.
At its core the Appreciative Inquiry Coaching method shows individuals how to tap into (or rediscover) their own sense of peak wellbeing they have experienced in the past in order to make changes in the present and create generative futures.
Rather than assuming a deficit-mindset focusing on people as problematic, appreciative co-coaching guides clients through four main stages—
1 Discovery (reflecting and celebrating
2 Dream (envisioning potential)
3 Design (adapting creative ways forward)
4 and Destiny/Delivery (becoming the change you want to see)—that inspire them to an appreciative and empowering view of themselves and their future.
As a way of structuring the reciprocal peer supervision process you take it in turns to guide one another through the four stages. The client always decides in advance what their affirmative topic is that they want to focus on, even if it is a challenging aspect of life or work that presents real problems; and the coach/counsellor supports them through the process of finding positive solutions.
Our Level 3 training takes the form of self-study, seminars and action learning whilst applying learning to co-counselling-based supervision with other course participants.
Course Content
The short CPD course extends peer supervision into coaching, counselling and mentoring within and beyond the network and is based on Helping the Client: a Creative Practical Guide by John Heron (founder of Co-counselling International). In particular we focus on the following selective content:
Client Categories and States
Prescriptive Interventions
Informative Interventions
Confronting Interventions
Cathartic Interventions
Catalytic Interventions
Supportive Interventions
Co-Counselling
The book will considerably expand your repertoire as a client when opting for an intensive contract in determining more differentiated forms of help when working with an experienced coco partner. It will also build your skills in supporting colleagues more formally in the workplace.
Further Reading
Network members who want to engage even more deeply with the psychology supporting our signature approach would benefit from reading Feeling and Personhood: Psychology in Another Key by John Heron. Heron was one of the fathers of humanistic and transpersonal psychology in the UK, alongside John Rowan. In this book he presents a radical new theory of the person in which feeling, differentiated from emotion, becomes the distinctive feature of personhood. The book explores the applications of Heron’s ideas to living and learning and includes numerous experiential exercises. Central to Heron’s analysis are interrelationships between four basic psychological modes – affective, imaginal, conceptual and practical. In particular, feeling is seen as the ground and potential from which all other aspects of the psyche emerge – emotion, intuition, imaging of all kinds, reason, discrimination, intention and action. The author also shows the fundamental relation of his ideas to theory and practice in transpersonal psychology and philosophy, and examines the implications of his theory for understanding and enhancing both formal and life learning.
CCI : Co-counselling International
Embedding co-counselling skills in a self-generating culture of peer support
A Definition of Co-counselling International
CCI is a planet-wide association of individuals and local networks committed to affirm a core discipline of co-counselling while encouraging, on an international and co-operative basis, the advancement of sound theory, effective practice, network development and planetary transformation.
Local networks of co-counsellors within CCI are independent, self-governing peer organizations, exploring ways of being effective social structures while avoiding all forms of authoritarian control.
Any person and network is a member of CCI if :
• they understand and apply the principles of co-counselling given below
• they have had at least 40 hours training from a member of CCI
• they grasp, in theory and practice, the ideas of pattern, discharge and re-evaluation
The principles of co-counselling
1. Co-counselling is usually practised in pairs with one person working, the client, one person facilitating, the counsellor, then they reverse these roles. In every session each person spends the same time in the role of both client and counsellor. A session is usually on the same occasion, although sometimes people may take turns as client and counsellor on different occasions.
2. When co-counsellors work in groups of three or more, members take an equal time as client, each client either choosing one other person as counsellor, or working in a self-directing way with the silent, supportive attention of the group. For certain purposes, the client may request co-operative interventions by two or more counsellors.
3. The client is in charge of their session in at least seven ways:
- trusting and following the living process of liberation emerging within
- choosing at the start of the session one of three contracts given below
- choosing within a free attention or normal contract what to work on and how
- being free to change the contract during their session
- having a right to accept or disregard interventions made by the counsellor
- being responsible for keeping a balance of attention
- being responsible for working in a way that does not harm themselves, the counsellor, other people, or the environment.
4. The client’s work is their own deep process. It may include, but is not restricted to:
- discharge and re-evaluation on personal distress and cultural oppression
- creative thinking at the frontiers of personal belief
- visualizing future personal and cultural states for goal-setting and action-planning
- extending consciousness into transpersonal states
CCI takes the view that the first of these is a secure foundation for the other three.
5. The role of the counsellor is to:
- give full, supportive attention to the client at all times
- intervene in accordance with the contract chosen by the client
- inform the client about time at the end of the session and whenever the client requests
- end the session immediately if the client becomes irresponsibly harmful to themselves, the counsellor, other people, or the environment
6. The counsellor’s intervention is a behaviour that facilitates the client’s work. It may be verbal, and/or nonverbal through eye contact, facial expression, gesture, posture or touch.
7. A verbal intervention is a practical suggestion about what the client may say or do as a way of enhancing their working process within the session. It is not a stated interpretation or analysis and does not give advice. It is not driven by counsellor distress and is not harmful or invasive. It liberates client autonomy and self-esteem.
8. The main use of nonverbal interventions is to give sustained, supportive and distress-free attention: being present for the client in a way that affirms and enables full emergence. This use is the foundation of all three contracts given below. Nonverbal interventions can also be used to elaborate verbal interventions; or to work on their own in conveying a practical suggestion; or, in the case of touch, to release discharge through appropriate kinds of pressure, applied movement or massage.
9. The contract which the client chooses at the start of the session is an agreement about time, and primarily about the range and type of intervention the counsellor will make. The three kinds of contract are:
- Free attention. The counsellor makes no verbal interventions and only uses nonverbal interventions to give sustained, supportive attention. The client is entirely self-directing in managing their own working process.
- Normal. The counsellor is alert to what the client misses and makes some interventions of either kind to facilitate and enhance what the client is working on. There is a co-operative balance between client self-direction and counsellor suggestions.
- Intensive. The counsellor makes as many interventions as seem necessary to enable the client to deepen and sustain their process, hold a direction, interrupt a pattern and liberate discharge. This may include leading a client in working areas being omitted or avoided. The counsellor may take a sensitive, finely-tuned and sustained directive role.
10. Counsellors have a right to interrupt a client’s session if they are too heavily restimulated by what the client is working on and so cannot sustain effective attention. If, when they explain this to the client, the client continues to work in the same way, then they have a right to withdraw completely from the session.
11. Whatever a client works on in a session is confidential. The counsellor, or others giving attention in a group, do not refer to it in any way in any context, unless the client has given them explicit, specific permission to do so. It is, however, to be taken into account, where relevant, by the counsellor in future sessions with the same client.
© John Heron 1996. This Definition may be copied, but only in full and unedited.
Co-Counselling International (UK)
For more information about the work of John Heron who pioneered Co-counselling in the UK