First Module at POCA Tech
small business, leadership development, safety culture and point location!
This weekend we welcomed Cohort 11 to POCA Tech. After some last minute rearranging and deferrals, we ended up with sixteen new students, all of whom are great! Sixteen people feels like a lot more than ten or eleven, which is what our cohort sizes were before our move, so there’s definitely a learning curve for the teachers. For example, when I took the photo above, I was sure they were all there, but actually we were missing one person. I need practice counting past eleven. Also, everything takes a little longer with more people.
It’s amazing to me, though, what a difference the new space makes in having our operations go more smoothly. In community acupuncture, we like to say that the clinic space itself should do a lot of the work. It never occurred to me that might be true of our classroom as well — but wow, it’s noticeable.
Just in case anybody’s curious about what the first module at POCA Tech is like, here’s an outline of our schedule:
Friday: Introduction Day & Orientation, including AT 4 Techniques Year One: How to Needle, Part 1
Yes, students learn to needle oranges on day one. Why wait? Seriously, I can’t think of a single good reason for acupuncture students to put off learning how to use acupuncture needles. (Though I can think of some bad reasons…maybe that’s another post.)
Saturday: LA 1 Intro to Leadership Practicum and Intro to Sociocracy at POCA Tech (for more about leadership and why we’re so into it, see this post)
Sunday: LA 2 Trauma Informed Communication Part 1 and AT 11 Point Location: Hands
Monday LA 2 Trauma Informed Communication: Touch And How To Do It (Consent Lab) and Intro to Safety Culture
Tuesday AT 11 Point Location: Hands; also Module Review
On Saturday morning, I started class by saying that the first module is largely devoted to the themes of small business, leadership development, and safety culture, which we return to over and over throughout the program. It took us ten years to realize we needed to focus on these topics for the school to be sustainable. Now that we know, we never shut up about them.
Speaking of safety culture, one of the resources for our Monday class is a zine that POCA Tech students made last year about responding to adverse events in acupuncture. It’s intended for practitioners, students, clinic staff and volunteers. If you have a community acupuncture clinic, or you’re thinking about starting one, please check it out. It’s got some really good examples of trauma informed communication.
I think the creation of this zine is a great demonstration of students practicing leadership skills while they’re in school. It wasn’t an assignment, it was something the students volunteered to do. A lot of behind-the-scenes work went into researching and producing it, and I’m so happy we have it for Cohort 11.
Okay, I need to go back to preparing for class — it’s a busy weekend! Stay tuned for more dispatches from POCA Tech’s second decade of training community acupuncturists.