The EBP Learning Community provides a supportive structure to help us openly reflect on and strengthen our practice as therapists who value science and compassion. We are a community whose clients have multiple, complicated, severe problems. Together we learn and use the best of any cognitive behavioral or other evidence-based therapies.  

How It Works: Connect, Learn, Contribute

• Become a member of the learning community.
• View, at your convenience, presentations and podcasts to learn or review key evidence-based practice concepts and strategies.
• Practice concepts and strategies with exercises easily integrated into work in your team and with clients.
• Share questions, ideas and resources with other members and the community facilitator, Kelly Koerner, Ph.D.

 
Become a Member
 
Enrollment for new members is now open to join for the 2010-2011 period.  The membership fee is $250 from March '10-February '11.  Before you register, please review the consent form to make sure the group will meet your needs. If you'd like more information, please email Kelly, the community facilitator, or if you already know you'd like to join, register here. Please note: Registration is first come, first served and closes February 28, 2010. 


What Learning Topics will be covered in the 2010-2011 EBP Learning Community?

We follow four themes.

1. Fundamentals

We study therapy strategies, protocols and other evidence-based practices that are relevant across client problems.  We invite great speakers and use bite-sized mini-lessons with ideas for deliberate practice, and study together in book clubs. Each person decides whether to skim a topic or to instead study and practice it based on their own learning needs.

This year we'll start by working with Psychotherapy Relationships that Work, Learning Cognitive Behavior Therapy: An Illustrated Guide, and Principles of Empirically Supported Techniques to review and refresh our skills. Then later in the year we'll learn protocols for PTSD, GAD, perfectionism, and insomnia as a way to over-learn the basic strategies within principle-driven case formulation.  We will have a yearlong series on Assessment and Treatment of Non-Suicidal Self-injury and Suicidal Behavior.  Howard Sudak,  Research Coordinator for the Evidence-Based Practices Project for Suicide Prevention at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention will kick off the series. 
 
2. Psychotherapy Progress Tracking

Therapists who get feedback on their clients' progress get better outcomes.  Many of us want to monitor outcomes at an individual or program level, but barriers and hassles have us blocked.  Last year we built the PracticeGround Assessment Wiki for a library of free downloadable measures to start to tackle this.

This year, to help us with progress monitoring, many courses will explicitly teach how to integrate client measures as we learn the treatment strategy or protocol. For example, in Jonathan Kanter's course on behavioral activation, we'll learn to use the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale (DASS) and the Behavior Activation for Depression Scale-Short Form in our clinical practice.  We'll also launch a neat collaborative research project that teaches therapists how to use psychotherapy progress monitoring in routine settings.

3. Consultation, Supervision & Clinical Decision Making

We'll continue using Milne & Reiser's Supervision: Adherence & Guidance Evaluation (SAGE) manual and rating forms from their evidence-based model for supervision and consultation. A group of us will collaborate with Mike Worrall and Alan Fruzzetti to learn to code DBT therapy sessions and give adherence feedback to colleagues.  Kelly Koerner will share her work on enhancing team consultation. James Herbert will help us reckon with the fallibility of clinical judgment and what we want to do about it. 

4. Plain ol' Interesting Topics. 

We follow our interests and invite great speakers on the topics we need. So far we're excited to welcome: Laura Brown on Cultural Competence; Jason Luoma on Stigma and Substance Abuse; and Benjamin Schoendorff on Integrating ACT, FAP and use of the new Matrix Model. We also plan to host a quarterly online meeting for folks who work with adolescents in residential settings to share best practices to manage intentional self-injury.

What topics are already available in the community?

As part of your membership you have free access to all materials from past years. Here's a partial list of community resources to give you the flavor:

• Developing Clinical Expertise thru Deliberate Practice and Feedback by Cannon Thomas
• Functional Analytic Psychotherapy and FAP Treatment Planning by Mavis Tsai
• An Acceptance-Based Behavior Therapy for Generalized Anxiety Disorder by Liz Roemer
• Values Work in ACT:  Dignifying Treatment of Disordered Eating by Emily Sandoz & Kelly Wilson
• Handling Treatment Failure Successfully by Jackie Persons
• Combining Medication & CBT by Donna Sudak
• Exposure Procedures by Amy Wagner and Stacy Shaw Welch
• Using the Unconscious by Jacqueline A-tjak
• Clinical Supervision by Robert Reiser
• Resilient Caregiving by Sue McCurry
• MetaCognitive Therapy by Dean Watkins
• Treatment of Shame Series: by Liz Simpson, Shelly Frank, & Shireen Rizvi
• Basic DBT topics  by Kelly Koerner and Alan Fruzzetti (e.g., "The First Four Sessions of Individual DBT"; "Case Formulation and Treatment Planning for Stage 1"; "Treating Therapy Interfering Behavior"; "Dialectics"; "Validation"; "The Jazz of Skills Training in Individual DBT"; "Phone Coaching"). 
• Great talks on behavior therapy fundamentals like exposure procedures and clinical behavioral analysis from Michael Dougher, Alan Fruzzetti, Stacy Shaw-Welch, Amy Wagner and Kelly Wilson. 

FAQs

"Is any special equipment required?" No. If you have a high-speed internet connection that lets you easily download files and an email account, you're all set.

"How experienced/knowledgeable should I be?" You should be providing individual psychotherapy and interested in evidence-based practice. Beyond that, this format allows folks to pace their own learning: study to fill-in gaps or skim to refresh your memory; share expertise and jump into conversations of interest.
 
If you have any questions or need further information, don't hesitate to contact Kelly Koerner.