Tips for Providing Skill Coaching to Reinforce Workshop Content in Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education Programs
SIMR Practice Brief, OPRE Report #2023-049
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Associated Project
Strengthening the Implementation of Marriage and Relationship Programs
Prepared for:
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation
Clients
Key Findings
This brief shares six tips for Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education (HMRE) programs interested in offering short skill coaching sessions to couples. Skill coaching is a promising approach that involves helping participants use or apply a skill learned in a group-based HMRE workshop. Through skill coaching, facilitators support participants as they try out the skill, with the goal of solidifying the skills taught during the workshop and empowering participants to use the skills in their own lives. The six tips include strategies for identifying the topics that skill coaching sessions will cover, planning for skill coaching sessions, and practical advice for working with couples during skill coaching sessions.
The coaching tips in this brief are drawn from work conducted with Montefiore Medical Center in the Strengthening the Implementation of Marriage and Relationship Programs (SIMR) study. Montefiore is an HMRE grant recipient funded by the Office of Family Assistance (OFA) and based in the Bronx borough of New York City. Montefiore participated in rapid cycle learning to improve their approaches to delivering virtual HMRE services, including their virtual delivery of skill coaching. The SIMR project has two related goals: (1) to improve the service delivery of grant recipients in the study and (2) to develop lessons from the broader HMRE field about promising practices for addressing common implementation challenges, including challenges related to recruitment, retention, and content engagement.
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