Julie’s Ideas Blog 22: Multi-Party Contracting Part 2

In Part 1 of this blog I showed how contracts range from bilateral to quite complex multi-party versions. Somewhere in the middle of that process is of course Fanita English’s (1975) three-cornered contract.
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In this Part I show you the complexity involved when coaching a teacher – which also illustrates why teaching can be so stressful, especially as we could add in more stakeholders – the government, the teacher’s professional association, the Parent-Teacher Committee, the media.  The more triangles, the more pressures on the person at the centre – and the harder it becomes to ensure the psychological distances (Micholt, 1992) are balanced.

Multi-party contracting – educational content (Hay 2007, p.117 – diagram corrected)

An even more complex version existed when I was a volunteer psychotherapist within prisons. You can click on the diagram below to see a larger version of it, and you can go to the IDTA Newsletter December 2012 for an explanation of the content.

Multi-party contracting (Hay 2012, p.11)

References

English, Fanita (1975) The Three Cornered Contract Transactional Analysis Journal 5:4 383-384

Hay, Julie (1993) What is Special Fields TA? The Script XXIII:8 Nov

Hay, Julie (1995/1999) Transformational Mentoring Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill, republished Watford: Sherwood Publishing

Hay, Julie (2007) Reflective Practice and Supervision for Coaches Milton Keynes: Open University Press

Hay, Julie (2012) Multi-Party Contracting: A Prison Environment Example IDTA News 7:4 10-14

Micholt, Nelly (1992) Psychological Distance and Group Intervention Transactional Analysis Journal 22:4 228-233 
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© 2018 Julie Hay​
 
​Julie is a fan of open access publishing so feel free to reproduce any of these blogs as long as you still attribute it to her.
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If you’re interested in learning more TA, Julie runs regular workshops and webinars –  we currently have an offer of a free place on one of our webinars. You can use these toward your CPD and as credit hours in pursuing professional TA qualification