5 Steps to Achieve COAMFTE Accreditation

A practical guide to accreditation and reaccreditation success.

5 Steps to Achieve COAMFTE Accreditation

COAMFTE Accreditation

A practical guide to COAMFTE’s accreditation and reaccreditation success.

COAMFTE accreditation is no walk in the park! Their rigorous standards and review processes are designed to ensure that students are receiving the highest quality graduate-level education in Marriage and Family Therapy. COAMFTE accreditation is a stamp of approval that demonstrates your program’s prowess to prospective students, state licensing boards, and governing bodies at your institution and beyond. 

Securing COAMFTE accreditation is a comprehensive process that won’t be done overnight, but by keeping the following steps in mind, you will be able to organize everything you need to meet COAMFTE’s requirements! 

 STEP 1

Establish Foundational Elements for Program Review

To prepare your program for COAMFTE accreditation, your program will need strong foundations through the development of an outcome-based education framework, environmental support, qualified program leadership, and a comprehensive curriculum. 

Here’s where your program’s unique offerings shine! You’ll need to: 

  • Create a publicly available mission statement that is consistent with the objectives of your institution. 
  • Implement program goals that align with the mission statement and promote the COAMFTE Developmental Competency Components. 
  • Develop student learning outcomes (SLOs) that set clearly defined targets for measuring specific student competencies and achievement of program goals. 
  • Devise an overall assessment plan for collecting, reviewing, and acting on the achievement data collected through the assessment of the SLOs. 
  • Follow a plan for assessing environmental supports to ensure that you promote an inclusive and diverse learning environment, including: 
    • Following published policies for receiving, reviewing, and responding to complaints and grievances, and student concerns. 
    • Monitoring environmental supports including fiscal and physical resources, technological resources, instructional and clinical resources, academic resources, and student support services.

COAMFTE requires that the program leader, faculty and clinical supervisors are all set up to succeed and to support students appropriately through minimum qualification standards, faculty-to-student ratios, and comprehensive evaluation processes of supervisor and faculty effectiveness. 

Learn more about program leadership qualifications and effectiveness in COAMFTE Standards Version 12.5, Standard II. 

Your curriculum will also be reviewed to ensure that program courses align with COAMFTE Developmental Competency Components and student learning outcomes, in a logical sequence. 

Provide documentation that outlines the processes and procedures for designing, approving, implementing, reviewing, and changing the curriculum, along with examples. 

Review all curriculum requirements in the COAMFTE Standards Version 12.5, Standard III.

 STEP 2

Centralize Data Collection

While Step 1 covered many of the administrative elements of your program’s preparation for COAMFTE accreditation, the bulk of the effort required year-over-year comes down to data collection. COAMFTE’s review of your program’s efficacy examines the systems and processes in place for: 

  • Evaluating student competency
  • Promoting and managing student clinical practice
  • Reviewing student learning outcomes across your program to review and improve environmental supports and communicate results with communities of interest

Collecting all of the above data in one centralized system from the outset makes reviewing and sharing outcomes and submitting the data COAMFTE needs to see easy.

Fortunately, Tevera was designed with exactly these tasks in mind!

In order to meet CACREP requirements for professional practice, you will need to: 

  • Collect necessary documentation:
    • Individual Professional Counseling Liability Insurance
    • Supervision Agreement between faculty supervisors, site supervisors, and students
      • In the supervision agreement, specify that: 
        • Supervision includes audio-video and/or live supervision of students’ interactions with clients.
        • Students have the opportunity to become familiar with a variety of professional activities and resources.
        • Students must lead or co-lead a counseling or psychoeducational group.
        • Students receive 1 hour per week of individual or triadic supervision with a site supervisor, program faculty member, or a student supervisor who is under the supervision of a counselor education program faculty member. 
  • Verify supervisor qualifications.
  • Provide orientation, consultation, and professional development opportunities to site supervisors.
  • Provide a framework for formative and summative evaluations of the student’s counseling performance by their site supervisor.
  • Track student progress toward 100 hours of supervised counseling practicum experience, of which 40 hours are in direct service with actual clients. 
  • Track student progress toward 600 hours of supervised counseling internship experience, of which 240 hours are in direct service with actual clients, in a setting relevant to their specialty area. 

The above can easily be facilitated, tracked, and verified using Tevera’s field experience solution!

Learn more here.

 STEP 3

Evaluate Student Competency and Progression

COAMFTE requires your program to execute your outcome-based education framework to track individual student progression through the program and to review program effectiveness at a high level. 

Any assessment data should be collected via a rubric, in which the criteria for the basis of outcome-based assessment are clearly defined and demonstrable by the student. 

Each measure should have an established benchmark, defining the minimum acceptable score that a student could receive to be deemed meeting the competency. 

Gathering all assessment data in one system is easier than ever with Tevera! Program faculty and clinical supervisors alike will be able to evaluate student performance and any assessment rubrics can be aligned with your program’s own SLOs. 

Learn more about using Tevera for assessment here.

 STEP 4

Facilitate Clinical Partnerships and Practice

The student clinical practice experience is an integral part of their education in Marriage and Family Therapy, which will equip them with the professional dispositions and competencies to become successful practitioners post-graduation. To ensure that students across the country are gaining similar clinical experience, COAMFTE requires that you:

  • Facilitate formal agreements that outline the responsibilities of the institution, practice sites, and students. 
  • Verify that students accrue 300 direct clinical contact hours while in their clinical practice (100 of which are relational). 
  • Put policies and procedures into place to support teletherapy practice for direct clinical contact hours where applicable. 
  • Ensure that students receive at least 100 hours of MFT relational/systemic supervision from a program clinical supervisor on a regular, consistent basis, with at least 50 of those hours utilizing observable data. 
  • Provide a framework for clinical competency evaluations by program clinical supervisors. 

Each of the above can easily be facilitated, tracked, and verified using Tevera’s field experience solution! Learn more here

In order to meet CACREP requirements for professional practice, you will need to: 

  • Collect necessary documentation:
    • Individual Professional Counseling Liability Insurance
    • Supervision Agreement between faculty supervisors, site supervisors, and students
      • In the supervision agreement, specify that: 
        • Supervision includes audio-video and/or live supervision of students’ interactions with clients.
        • Students have the opportunity to become familiar with a variety of professional activities and resources.
        • Students must lead or co-lead a counseling or psychoeducational group.
        • Students receive 1 hour per week of individual or triadic supervision with a site supervisor, program faculty member, or a student supervisor who is under the supervision of a counselor education program faculty member. 
  • Verify supervisor qualifications.
  • Provide orientation, consultation, and professional development opportunities to site supervisors.
  • Provide a framework for formative and summative evaluations of the student’s counseling performance by their site supervisor.
  • Track student progress toward 100 hours of supervised counseling practicum experience, of which 40 hours are in direct service with actual clients. 
  • Track student progress toward 600 hours of supervised counseling internship experience, of which 240 hours are in direct service with actual clients, in a setting relevant to their specialty area. 

The above can easily be facilitated, tracked, and verified using Tevera’s field experience solution!

Learn more here.

 STEP 5

Review Program Outcomes

In the spirit of continuous development, you must be able to demonstrate that aggregated data on student achievement is collected and reviewed according to your framework and that you are meeting your program’s benchmarks, or are using the data you’ve collected to improve your program. You must also share those results with communities of interest so that they may participate in program review and continuous improvement efforts as well.

Tevera’s robust reporting capabilities, you’ll be able to aggregate and disaggregate any assessment data for thorough review by your program faculty and communities of interest, as well as COAMFTE accreditors! 

Book an overview today to learn more about Tevera and see it in action!