EMI provides training to become a mediator

Erickson Mediation Institute offers a 44-hour Divorce & Family Mediation Training. The training is October 20-24, 2008 in Bloomington, Minnesota. This Midwest training is for people from Minnesota, Iowa, North and South Dakota and Wisconsin.

The mediation training is approved by the Association for Conflict Resolution and qualifies participants to apply for the Minnesota Supreme Court Rule 114 roster of mediators. Wiley & Sons published EMI’s Divorce Mediation Training Manual in 2001.

Client-centered model
We teach a client-centered model of mediation. This model is used extensively throughout the mediation field by professional mediators who facilitate a process of resolving conflict and decision-making based on clients’ creativity and their own sense of fairness. It has evolved over the last thirty years dating back to the first divorce and community mediators who began in the early 1970s and has become a highly successful method of mediation with great client satisfaction.

Steve Erickson and Marilyn McKnight draw on their thirty years of mediation experience to bring you the most up-to-date thinking and strategies to use in the mediation room. Case examples are pertinent to today’s issues in divorce. The training course is practical in nature, teaching mediator skills and interventions necessary to assist clients in reaching successful resolution of their disputes.

Hands-on training
Each training day includes lecture, interactive exercises, role-playing and question and answer periods. Role-plays are both “fish bowl” in which trainers demonstrate mediation, and small group in which participants apply what they are learning in role-play cases based on actual cases mediated by EMI.

Dealing with domestic violence
Since domestic violence is so prevalent in families, this course incorporates a “Mediating in the Shadow of Domestic Violence” course for a total of 6 hours of domestic violence mediation training as required by Rule 114, covering the special issues present when mediating divorces where there has been domestic violence. The 44-hour training meets the Minnesota Supreme Court’s requirement of 6 hours of domestic violence mediation training, qualifying participants to be on the Rule 114 Roster.

Past participants have consistently indicated their continued use of their EMI training manual as the main tool they refer to when mediating their cases. Most of the lecture notes are contained in the manual, along with detailed material about new skills, new thinking, new interventions, strategies to avoid impasse, and forms necessary to begin a mediation practice.

The typical training day
The course begins at 8:00 A.M. and ends at 6:00 P.M. Monday – Friday. Each day includes a half-hour lunch break and 15 minute mid-morning and mid-afternoon breaks. Participants are required to be present throughout the course in order to compile the hours necessary to qualify for the Minnesota Rule 114 Roster of mediators and to complete any continuing education requirements that may be applied for upon request.

EMI offers certified training sessions to serve greater MN cities including, Saint Paul, Minneapolis, Bloomington, Richfield, Minnetonka, Apple Valley, Saint Louis Park, Edina, Burnsville, Plymouth, Hopkins, Eagan, Lakeville, Farmington, and Anoka.