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Welcome to Lasting Love

The Lasting Love Skills Building Course is designed to help couples improve their chances of having a healthy, happy, enduring marriage built on mutual respect and love.

Marriage and relationship education classes are designed to give people skills they need to build strong, permanent marriages, or to strengthen existing non-marital relationships.

Facilitator Manual

Participator Manual

Skills to a Better Relationship

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Information for Facilitators Print E-mail
Each section contains three parts:
  1. Preparation Guide: This section includes information for the class leader/s to be read before the session. It will also include a list of any materials or props needed for the session. The leader/s will be prepared with his/her own anecdotes and stories to be used during the session. A section for Leaders Notes has been designated on the left side of each page to facilitate preparation.
  2. Exercises: This section is the heart of skills-building. It includes suggested leader scripts, directions for setting up the exercises, and directions to the participants.
  3. Homework: This section includes specific exercises for participates to do on their own and is the most important part of the class. Participants will benefit most if they take what they learn in class and put it into practice at home. Each participant will be asked to keep a short journal with notes on how they practiced the skills they learned in class in their own homes and relationships.

Establishing the schedule

Ideally, the class should be taught over four weeks in two-hour sessions. Classes should be co-ed, except for the session on fidelity and sexuality, which should be split into two separate groups of men- and women-only, with a leader of the same sex leading the session.

The sessions should be taught one-week apart to give the participants time to work on exercises between sessions. Every session should begin with a re-cap of the previous session, including a short discussion of the homework assignment.

Location

The class should be taught in a room that makes it easy for participants to take part in the skills-building exercises described in this workbook. Classes can be taught in schools, community colleges, recreation centers, churches, hotels, or almost any location that offers a room large enough to accommodate 20-30 participants.

The Leader should be able to see all participants easily and they must be able to see her/him. Participants should be seated along rows of tables so that they may write down exercise, or at student desks. Water pitchers with plastic cups and/or hard candy should be available at each table, as well as pens or pencils and workbooks for each participant. The leader will need a white board, flip chart, and markers.

Leader Preparation

The success of the program rests on the Leader. He or she must be committed to the goals and values of the program and must come to each session well prepared and motivated. This preparation does not require long years of academic study. But it does require each leader spending time before the sessions thinking about what he or she wants to accomplish in the session.

Leaders should think about how best to motivate the participants into making good use of the exercises in class and being committed to following through with the exercises at home.

Your own enthusiasm and willingness to share your own experiences—either personal or those you’ve come across among friends, family and co-workers—will greatly enhance the program.

Here are some general tips for preparing for and leading each class:
  • Prepare the personal stories you plan to use in advance. Adding your own stories will make the program more interesting. But keep them simple and to the point of the exercise you are trying to teach.
  • Remember that this class works best if you are not lecturing to an audience but working to get participants to be involved directly. Come prepared with questions that will motivate your participants to want to talk. Some suggested dialogues are included here, but you may want to add your own dialogues as time goes on and you get more experience.
  • Don’t let one or two people dominate. Every session will have some outgoing people who easily take the floor and others who are too shy to speak up at first. The outgoing types can be a great help to kick off the first session, but make sure that everyone is encouraged to participate and don’t let any one person take up so much time that others can’t participate.
  • Whenever the script calls for a show of hands to a particular response or for participants to offer their own responses, the leader should write down the responses on the flip chart or whiteboard, s/he has brought to class. If not all the responses in the script have been offered, write those down as well and ask the class to respond.
  • Remember to encourage participants to take their own notes in the workbooks provided.
  • Make sure that before the session ends, you summarize what skills the class has worked on in the session and give out the homework assignments or repeat those you’ve already discussed.

Also give a brief preview of what the class will be working on in the next session. Repetition of key points is essential. We need to remind participants several times to do the exercises at home. It is important to repeat the central ideas and themes at the end of each session and to start each new session by quickly reviewing the previous week’s lessons and assignments.

 
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