March has been an eventful month for me and for court management education in general. The Institute for Court Management is embarking on a bold initiative to educate a wider audience of court managers by partnering with several states and making ICM curriculum available for local trainers to deliver a set of courses that, combined, will certify a larger number of participants in the Court Management Program (CMP).

So why is this move so bold? For starters, it is a sort of “franchising” of the ICM product, which is a set of curricula developed over time in a wide variety of disciplines such as caseflow management, court performance standards/CourTools, human resource management, managing information technology and budget/financing. This curricula is refined and delivered by a core set of faculty conversant in the subject material and accomplished as adult educators.

The need to educate more court managers is obvious. The primary risk involved in rolling this curricula out to a wider set of trainers is the potential loss of quality control and a resulting diminishment of the value of the education and the CMP certification itself. In order to address this concern, ICM has planned a series of new faculty development seminars, the first of which took place in Williamsburg in January. Still, how many new local educators can be reliably trained in such a short period of time?

Enter one of the consortium state partners in Ohio where CMP certified programs have been ongoing for several years in partnership with ICM. Ohio also has a close relationship with the Ohio Channel for broadcast of Supreme and Appellate Court arguments … this relationship has now been extended to include the videotaping of selected CMP courses with added video footage describing the teaching methods for use as a train-the-trainer tool. I consider myself fortunate to serve as senior faculty for ICM and I consider myself doubly fortunate to have participated in the videotaping last month of the first two CMP courses for the consortium states.

Mary Sammon and I taught the caseflow management course in early March and David Slayton and I taught the court performance standards/CourTools in late March. It is such a joy to see professionals performing at the top of their craft, and to do so up close and personal as I have in Ohio is a rare treat. Hats off to Milt Nuzum, Margaret Allen, Kristopher Steele and the whole Ohio Judicial Education crew for stepping up to the plate in such a big way. Kudos, too, to Leisel Bonneau and her Ohio Channel film crew for such creative competence. And my gratitude and admiration to Mary Sammon, Ray Foster and the whole ICM team for their courage and willingness to take this challenge head on. Slayton, as usual, did a sterling job as my co-faculty for the second course.

There is still much left to do, including editing of raw footage and the videotaping of several future CMP sessions. The end result will be a solid training tool that will substantially improve the chances of successful rollout of the ICM curriculum to its consortium states.

Court managers of the future will point to this time as a turning point that produced a highly qualified and professional court management workforce for our nation’s courts. I’m pleased to be a small part of that history.

Photo credit = Institute for Court Management

This entry was posted on Friday, April 3rd, 2009 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Caseflow, Court Management, Court Performance, Human Resources, Technology, The Future.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.