Juliane E. Field
Associate Professor
University of Colorado Colorado Springs
College of Education
Counseling and Human Services
Counseling
1470 Austin Bluffs Parkway
Colorado Springs, CO 80918
719.255.5145
a. What is the central question, issue, or problem you plan to explore in your proposed work?
How do graduate level, counseling laboratory courses influence students cognitive and moral development? Further, what teaching and training practices used within the laboratory experience promote optimal growth and development?
b. Why is your central question, issue, or problem important, to you and to others who might benefit from or build on your findings?
The Counsel for Accreditation for Counseling and Related Education Programs (CACREP) requires that graduate programs in counseling consistently evaluate the academic, professional and personal development of students to ensure that insightful, ethical, skilled practitioners be employed as helping professionals. Academic achievement, content knowledge and counseling skills are readily observable entities, yet what constitutes “effective” personal growth and development among counseling graduate students is more difficult to define and measure. The Department of Counseling and Human Services, a CACREP accredited program at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, has a unique approach to addressing personal growth and development for its students. All students enrolled in either the Clinical Mental Health or School Counseling Master’s degree programs are required to complete three separate counseling laboratories (COUN 5020 – Lab in Individual Counseling, COUN 5110 – Lab in Group Counseling and COUN 5330 – Lab in Systems Counseling). Further, in each laboratory experience, students are required to identify personal goals that (1) will increase their capacity to form effective therapeutic alliances with future, diverse clients and students and (2) they are willing to address in the laboratory experience with their peers. Examples of student goals include increasing healthy stress management practices, refining communication skills, managing anxiety related to speaking in a counseling setting, increasing interpersonal trust through healing conflictual relationships, etc.
Each laboratory group is assigned a laboratory leader who is a graduate of one of the DCHS degree programs and is personally selected for his/her exceptional counseling skills, ethical judgment and leadership abilities. Based on the professional assessment of seasoned counseling educators who teach in this department, a large majority of students fully participate in this growth opportunity and change personally as a result of this sequence of laboratory experiences. Personal growth is frequently demonstrated through visible shifts in interpersonal style or skills, enhanced emotional presence and/or regulation and self-care practices. Additionally, students self report personal transformation as part of the comprehensive exam process prior to graduation. Yet despite these observations and self reports, the department has not specifically measured cognitive complexity and moral development among graduate students. Both are variables which enhance a student’s capacity to relate to others, demonstrate empathy, interpersonal flexibility and autonomy to complete complex counseling tasks. Further, other than the standard Faculty Course Questionnaires (FCQs), the department has not collected data regarding specific effective and ineffective teaching and training practices associated with the laboratory experience. Empirical evidence of the change process helps to reinforce this particular training model at UCCS as well as provide evidence based practice strategies to share with other counselor education programs that are held to the same training mandates due to CACREP accreditation or institutional standards. Uncovering specific teaching and training strategies that have proved to be beneficial or troublesome will also serve to enhance the evolving pedagogy and practices associated with these courses. In conclusion, counselor education programs across the country are seeking educational strategies and practices which enhance the personal growth of counseling graduate students and are empirically verifiable.
c. How do you plan to conduct your investigation? What sources of evidence do you plan to examine? What methods might you employ to gather and make sense of this evidence?
I will use a mixed methods approach. This includes structured, individual qualitative interviews at the end of each lab experience and pre/post (i.e. administration prior to enrolling in first lab and administration upon completion of the third lab) administration of two instruments which measure cognitive complexity (i.e. conceptual level) and moral reasoning.
I will examine the content of each qualitative interview to assess qualitative changes in thinking and reasoning for each participant in the study. I will also collect specific information regarding teaching and training practices associated with the lab that have proved most beneficial to the students. Using constant comparative methodology, I will analyze the content of all interviews to identify core concepts and themes that emerge in the data for the entire sample. Therefore, this data collection will enhance the data on cognitive and moral development as well as provide specific feedback to the Department of Counseling and Human Services on effective and ineffective teaching and training strategies that are used. The Paragraph Completion Method (PCM) (Hunt, Butler, Noy & Rosser, 1978) will be administered to measure cognitive complexity (i.e. conceptual level) of each participant and the Defining Issues Test (DIT) (Rest, 1986) will be used to measure moral reasoning. Pre and post test comparisons will reveal growth for either construct.
d. How might you make your work available to others in ways that facilitate scholarly critique and review, and that contribute to thought and practice beyond the local?
After completion of the study, I plan to submit a paper to the American Counseling Association (ACA), the main organization for professional counselors, to present my findings at its annual conference. I also plan to develop a manuscript that will be submitted to a peer reviewed journal of the American Counseling Association.
e. Include a literature review of the theory and effective teaching practice of the subject of your inquiry in order to locate your research in the literature preceding it.
Effective counseling practice requires a complex set of skills which are operationalized within a therapeutic alliance or within a counseling relationship where the client feels validated, supported and understood. A therapeutic or working alliance is defined as “the affective or bond elements such as liking, respect, and trust as well as the quality of the collaboration between therapist and client in establishing the tasks and goals of treatment” (Fitzpatrick & Irannejad, 2008, p. 438). Two decades of research have consistently found that the therapeutic relationship is one of the most salient variables in whether or not clients benefit from psychological treatment. Skovholt, Ronnestad and Jennings (1997) found that the single, most important variable in therapeutic change is the establishment of the therapeutic alliance or counseling relationship. The utilization of specific counseling theories, strategies or techniques may be benign or counterproductive attempts toward change when the client does not believe that he or she matters or is important to the counselor.
When considering a counselor’s capacity for developing a therapeutic alliance with diverse clientele, the counselor’s personhood is a key variable in this process. In an attempt to understand what personal characteristics may obstruct the formation of a therapeutic alliance, Schroeder and Davis (2004) identified paradigmatic challenges that may impede the counselor’s ability to form a dynamic therapeutic alliance. Paradigmatic challenges include “intrapersonal
qualities, intrapsychic conflicts, personality structures or social or interpersonal
communication styles” (Wheeler, 2007, p.248). Therefore, counselors who are rigid in their beliefs about self or others, experiencing their own psychological symptoms without effective coping tools are unable to interpersonally connect and value their clients unconditionally will be compromised in their counseling practice.
To be both effectual and ethical, counselor training programs must consider the personhood of their counseling trainees and provide educational opportunities for personal growth and development. The Counsel for Accreditation for Counseling and Related Education Programs (CACREP), the most prestigious accrediting body for counselor training programs in the US, requires that graduate programs in counseling consistently evaluate the academic, professional and personal development of their students. Yet, despite this mandate, specific standards for personal development are not articulated. For example, in the 2009 CACREP Standards, in Section II: Professional Identity, part 5: Helping Relationships, a standard reads that counseling trainees must be aware of “counselor characteristics and behaviors that influence helping processes”(p.12), yet the nature of what specific developmental or psychological properties (e.g. cognitive development) make this consciousness possible are not indicated.
Cognitive Developmental Theory (CDT) is one theoretical paradigm which helps to explain the specific variables that are involved in the personal development of counseling trainees. Cognitive Developmental Theory, developed by Sprinthall & Thies-Sprinthall (1983), encompasses moral, ego, cognitive and conceptual development. According to this model, individuals who demonstrate higher levels of cognitive development possess the capacity for greater adaptability and complex thinking and reasoning. Individuals with advanced levels of cognitive development “are able to see alternative points of view and respond to the world in ways that are increasingly more effective” (Sias, Lambie & Foster, 2006, p. 101). Counseling trainees who possess advanced cognitive development are more likely to demonstrate empathy and understanding for their clients as well as effectively manage emotional intensity, complex problems solving and intellectual flexibility (Sias, Lambie & Foster, 2006). Therefore, faculty of counseling training programs must be mindful of how specific educational practices contribute to the likelihood that master’s degree seeking students will enhance their cognitive development and interpersonal efficacy. Faculty observation and assessment and feedback from students are two sources of data regarding how coursework, assignments, skill building activities and experiential tasks contribute to these developmental processes.
The purpose of this research is to investigate the impact of participation in a sequence of three counseling labs during the first year of a graduate school on the cognitive development (including conceptual complexity and moral development) of counseling graduate students. This research will also illuminate current, specific educational practices associated with the lab experience which increase or decrease the effectiveness of this component of the training.
References:
Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs. (2009). 2009
Standards. Retrieved from: http://cacrep.org/template/index.cfm
Fitzpatrick, M. R. & Irannejad, S. (2008). Adolescent readiness for change and the working.
alliance in counseling. Journal of Counseling and Development, 86, 438-445.
Shroder, T., & David, J. (2004). Therapists’ experience of difficulty in practice. Psychotherapy
Research, 14, 328-345.
Sias, S. M., Lambie, G. W., & Foster, V. (2006). Conceptual and moral development of
substance abuse counselors: Implications for training. Journal of Addictions &
Offender Counseling, 26, 99-110.
Skovholt, T. M., Ronnestad, M. H., & Jennings, L. (1997). Searching for expertise in counseling,
psychotherapy, and professional psychology. Education Psychology Review, 9, 361-369.
Sprinthall, N. A., & Thies-Sprinthall, L. (1983). The teacher as an adult learner: A cognitive
Developmental view. In G. Griffin (Ed.), Staff development: Eighty-second yearbook of
The National Society for the Study of Education (pp.13-35). Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Wheeler, S. (2007). What shall we do with the wounded healer? The supervisor’s dilemma.
Psychodynamic Practice, 13, 245-256.
f. What is your record of innovation in teaching and/or the assessment of learning?
My university teaching career began in August of 2002 at Slippery Rock University, Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania. During my seven years at this university, I taught both undergraduate and counseling and student affairs graduate students. The following are a few examples of my creative approach to teaching. I demonstrated innovation in my teaching by using various forms of instruction and diverse strategies to facilitate learning. I frequently used partner work, group work, role plays, various forms of technology and media and creative assignments to maintain student engagement and challenge their understanding of course material. During an undergraduate course in Educational Psychology, small groups were required to select one topic from the course that they were particularly intrigued by and develop a commercial (video or DVD) which “sold” why this topic was an important element in their future k-12 teaching careers. During a summer section of Educational Psychology, my students and I spent the day assisting with a summer day camp for 3rd -5th grade children. This experiential opportunity allowed my students to interact with elementary aged children and apply some of the theoretical tenets we were exploring in the class.
I was the first faculty member in my previous department to incorporate a semester long service learning project during a graduate level career counseling course. During the course, my students developed curriculum materials (classroom guidance, small group counseling and individual counseling) based on the career development and career counseling theories covered in the course. They then used these curriculum materials with local, academically “at risk” middle school students during an after school program. After each session with the middle school students, the graduate students would reflect on the effectiveness of their materials and their counseling skills. At the end of the course, several graduate students reported that this experience made a significant contribution to their evolving counseling skills and confidence as helping professionals.
I have had the great fortune of being a faculty member at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs since August of 2009. During my short time at UCCS, I have taught two new courses, co-developed a new course (Crisis Counseling) and am slated to develop a new elective course (Human Sexuality) by spring of 2011. My creative approach to teaching continues in my current position. While teaching the Psychology of the College Student course at the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA), I had various USAFA cadets visit the class and participate in activities to bring various aspects of their cognitive, moral and psychosocial development to light. This opportunity allowed the AOC graduate students to link important tenets of various theories to dynamic complex lives of cadets that they will work with in the future.
Assessment of learning is an essential element in effective instruction. Therefore, I use a variety of assessment techniques so that students have diverse opportunities to demonstrate their ability to comprehend and apply course material. For example, during the Systems Counseling laboratory course, the students write reflection papers, complete counseling exercises and participate in the laboratory groups to earn points toward their final grade. AOC students (US Air Force Academy) read articles, take quizzes, interview cadets to apply tenets of various developmental theories and provide presentations to peers to demonstrate knowledge and application of their course work. Finally, in an effort to receive ongoing feedback from students, I frequently request anonymous, written evaluations throughout the semester so that I can make appropriate changes or alterations to enhance my overall effectiveness as an instructor.
g. Are you able to attend the required meetings as specified in Section 5, What are the Benefits?
Yes. I look forward to collaborating with and learning from other CU researchers.
h. Can you suggest an appropriate coach/mentor for your project? Please also provide the email address for your proposed coach/mentor.
Dr. David Fenell, (dfenell@uccs.edu) Professor and Chairperson of the Department of Counseling and Human Services, College of Education, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
i. If your project is selected, are you willing to serve as a coach in PTLC in a future year?
Yes.
