This page is for you, if you have ten to fifteen people (or more) interested in being trained now as CFG® coaches.
If you have five to nine people ready to start training, please visit the On-Site & Open Trainings page.
If you have fewer than five, visit the Open Trainings page.
What are your top three concerns?
To set an agenda that fully meets your needs, please consider what problems your school faces everyday:
- Inefficient and time-wasting meetings?
- A need for sharing and collaboration instead of stress and tension?
- A way to discuss “the elephants in the living room?”
- Questions of equity?
- Faculty satisfaction and retention?
- Or, as so many “supporters” are demanding, improving scores on standardized tests?
If you’re an individual educator reading this page, what aspects of your teaching practice are most challenging for you?
How can we help?
Together, we’ll discuss your most pressing needs and use them to personalize the agenda for your on-site or virtual site-specific training. You’ll work with a hand-selected NSRF-certified National Facilitator to meet your specific needs most effectively.
Every Critical Friends Group Coaches’ Training focuses on a handful of core NSRF protocols and activities. Participants learn and practice crucial tools for giving skillful, actionable feedback. An important part of this training is how to share information with others in ways that avoid the receiver feeling attacked or defensive. The tools learned in training, used within an ongoing CFG community, will create or reinforce feelings of belonging and welcome, thus improving collaboration between your staff members. In CFG meetings, whether conducted traditionally or virtually, your staff will improve their own work and that of their students. Using NSRF protocols and activities in the classrooms support the teaching of 21st Century Skills such as critical thinking, assessing, and organizing information. As new coaches, participants will also learn the subtle (but imperative!) facilitation tips for each protocol and become better facilitative leaders in many aspects of their work, not just within CFG meetings and when using NSRF protocols.
Keeping the costs as low as possible …
On-site trainings
Depending on exactly where you’re located and how many people will be trained at one time, a group of 15 can be trained at your school or district for about $825-$1,200 per participant. If you have fewer people, the rate per person rises because most of the costs are fixed per training, not per participant.
That fee covers the complete 33-hour training, the services of one hand-picked NSRF-certified National Facilitator, all the facilitator’s expenses, one Critical Friends Group Coaches’ Handbook for each participant, a printable certificate for each graduate of the training, and a year’s NSRF membership for each participant (with extra benefits for members and more for the newly certified coaches). One 15-pack of Collaborative Cue Cards per training cohort is also included, to be used within training and kept for later use within CFG meetings at your school.
You will provide a suitable space to hold the training, food for the participants, and supporting materials (chart paper, markers, sticky notes … you probably have everything we’ll need in your storeroom … plus a few printouts/copies of other materials needed during the training week).
Continuing Credit Units (CCUs) are not included in our estimate, but we can certify the number of hours of training received if you’re working through your own program for credit.
If you need to cancel a prearranged contract for an on-site training, know that you will be required to pay for all expenses incurred prior to the date of termination. If the contract is terminated six to two weeks before the date of services, there is a termination fee of 25% of the total amount contracted. Contracts must be paid in full if event is cancelled less than two weeks in advance.
Virtual Trainings
The fee for site-specific Virtual CFG Coaches’ Training in 2022 is $13,050 for 15 participants, which averages to $870 per person if you fill the cohort. Up to five more participants can be added at $870 each to total 20 participants, if desired.
If you have fewer people, the total cost does not change so the rate per person rises because most of the costs are fixed per training.
This fee covers the complete 26-hour training (plus 4-5 hours of homework), the services of a hand-picked pair of NSRF-certified National Facilitators, all training materials, a printable certificate for each graduate of the training, and a year’s NSRF membership for each participant (with extra benefits for members and more for the newly certified coaches). Participants receive PDF copies of all materials used in the training, as well as Google Doc templates for supplemental materials to improve engagement via screens.
Virtual trainings are conducted via Zoom and all materials are written with Zoom-specific technical instructions, although you may use the materials in other videoconferencing formats and exchange Google Docs and Google Forms for other applications more familiar to your site.
Continuing Credit Units (CCUs) are not included in our estimate, but we can certify the number of hours of training received if you’re working through your own program for credit.
If you should need to cancel a prearranged contract for an on-site training six to two weeks before the date of services, there is a termination fee of 25% of the total amount contracted. Contracts must be paid in full if event is cancelled less than two weeks in advance.
Which of your colleagues are ready to get started?
For on-site training, if you have ten to 15 people interested in becoming coaches (or multiples of ten or 15), that’s perfect. If you’re ready to train staff virtually, we can take up to 20 participants in each cohort. In every Coaches’ Training, we limit the ratio of facilitators to trainees to ensure everyone gets the personalized attention they need. We encourage schools to train at least one coach for every six to ten staff members they hope to involve in CFG communities, but schools often “scale up,” after starting with fewer coaches. NSRF trainings are never a “sit and get,” but 26-33 hours of active engagement in your real-world dilemmas and local work. Expect to have hands on, brains on, and empathy throughout the training! (On-site trainings are five full days, and virtual training is conducted via Zoom, in eight sessions ranging from 3- to 3.5 hours each, plus a few hours of homework.) Important: In order to be certified as a coach and receive coaches’ access to our website, participants must complete the entire training. This training is jam-packed with important content, each segment building upon the segment before. If participants miss more than an hour or so, they will not be able to make up that time with homework, and if someone floats in and out, they can rapidly become lost. Please advise your staff how important it is to commit to attending the full week’s agenda. For more information, check our FAQ.
What you will bring to training
NSRF Trainings are definitely NOT “sit and get” events, whether they’re conducted around the table or via screens. Through the training, participants should expect to engage in solving their own and others’ real-life problems. Before your training, we’ll send the organizer an email to forward to all participants telling them of a bit of homework: a text to read and bring to the first day, instructions for engaging with us in a virtual classroom, and more importantly, instructions to bring “a dilemma and a piece of work.”
The best way to fully understand the power and value of CFG work and NSRF protocols is to experience how they help you address your own challenges.
Everyone has dilemmas in their work, challenges they just haven’t been able to solve on their own. Plus, you also have some imperfect or confusing project, some assessment or plan or other document that you know needs some help. Bring those things with you, and within your training, the group will use NSRF protocols to show you specific next steps you can use to improve both the work and the problematic situation! By participating in and facilitating those protocols using other people’s real dilemmas and real work, you’ll experience the satisfaction of helping your colleagues solve their toughest problems.
Next steps
Before you contact us, we ask you to think of your answers to these questions:
- What are your goals for CFG work at your school, or why are you personally interested in CFG Coaches’ Training?
- About how many people will be ready to train?
- What dates would work best for you? On-site trainings are typically scheduled on five consecutive days over the summer. During the academic year, we often split the training into a three-day session with a two-day session, later. Virtual trainings begin with five 3-hour sessions, often scheduled on consecutive days or with only a few days between each, then typically there’s a gap of a week or two, followed by three final sessions, each of 3.5 hours. But virtual scheduling options can be set up differently depending on your needs.
Feel free to call us even if you don’t know all these answers yet. We’ll be happy to answer any questions you have for us, in return.
Let's connect!
Call us at 812-330-2702 and leave a message if we are out of the office. We’re open Monday-Friday, 9-5 Eastern Time, but can set appointments to speak with you outside our regular business hours as necessary. If you’d like to complete a webform so we might respond more quickly and have a shorter phone or Zoom conversation, please click the “Contact Us” button to get started.