Section 8: Continuing Education/Professional Development

 

Once you have a Caring Clown Program in place, there are a number of things you can do, as the leader, to help keep the clowns interested and involved.  Offering professional development seminars and providing information about continuing education opportunities are two examples.

Monthly professional development seminars could focus on specific areas of interest to your clowns.  Guest speakers or guest groups, such as clowns from another Caring Clown Program, can be invited to share ideas with your group.  One seminar could be devoted to swapping give-away ideas.  Another could be a creative review session of hospital rules and procedures, or any new rules that have popped up since the training session.  One or more seminars could focus on the different types of patients one might encounter, or how to handle particularly difficult situations.  For example, if your clowns are allowed to ‘play’ with patients in the burn unit, they need to be prepared for what they will see.  The appearance and amount of pain some burn patients experience is very difficult for some clowns to handle.  A professional development seminar on how to focus on eye contact and remain positive without any unconscious facial expressions of horror could be helpful for new clowns.

Another advantage to offering the clowns in your Caring Clown Program professional seminars is that this time can also be used as a time to reflect on experiences and exchange ideas, kind of like a support group.  Providing some time during each session for your clowns to talk about their experiences and to receive feedback from other clowns will help them in their future experiences.  Sometimes a clown will experience a loss when a patient/resident dies and will need the support of the other clowns to enable him or her to put that smile back on his or her face in order to go out and interact with more patients/residents. 

As mentioned earlier, when discussing apprenticeships, it is important to have a hospital or nursing home staff member identified whom clowns can approach if they experience something which they think the professional staff needs to be aware of.  One such situation is counterproductive family dynamics, another much less complex example would be a child telling the clown that he or she is afraid of the dark.  Although the clown could draw a picture of the sun or the moon for the child to think about at night, telling a staff member about this fear might lead to a night light being given to the clown to bring back during his or her next visit.

Continuing education opportunities, clown camps and conventions can often be found within local clown alleys or in clown magazines such as The Hospital Clown Newsletter, Laughmakers or in the Clowns of America periodical, Calliope.