Counseling made transparent: pedagogy for a counseling theories course.(Innovative Methods)

The authors describe an innovative practice in classroom pedagogy for teaching counseling theories. In an attempt to make the counseling process "transparent" for students, instructors demonstrated clinical thinking using monologue and dialogue during role plays conducted in class. Support for this approach is offered, and feedback from students in the course is presented.

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Constructivist pedagogy is designed to allow students to wrestle with realistic dilemmas in the practice of counseling through reflection, self-monitoring, and complex problem solving (Halpern, 1994; Halpern & Associates, 1994; McKeachie & Svincki, 2006; Nelson & Neufeldt, 1998). Tang et al. (2004) found that involvement in or experience with counseling-related tasks helped counselors-in-training develop more confidence in performing counseling tasks. In addition, Cummings (2000) found that counseling interventions taught through classroom practice of clinical skills translated directly into actual counseling practice. Similarly, Grant (2006) found that experiential pedagogy using an actor and vignettes enhanced students' abilities to manage the therapeutic alliance and to process case conceptualizations. It seems that experience with the counseling environment and exposure to clinical thinking can give students the chance to practice thinking as a counselor.

Thinking as a counselor involves a number of dimensions. In terms of cognitive processing, Mayfield, Kardash, and Kivlighan (1999) confirmed Glasser and Chi's findings (as cited in Mayfield et al., 1999), reporting that experts differed from novices in that experts were more timely and accurate in clinical thinking, stemming from their better perception of large, meaningful patterns in their domain of practice (i.e., counseling); greater short- and long-term memory capacity for domain-specific information; enhanced speed of their basic skills; shorter time spent developing a problem representation; greater depth of problem representation; and efficient use of self-monitoring skills (p. 504). They called for counselor educators to help students "move beyond time/statement order [linear, sequential or chronological organization of topics] as an organizational pattern to more sophisticated [thematic] ways of thinking about clients" (p. 513) and to explicitly model case conceptualization as a way to "help novice counselors establish more complex and elaborate schemas" (p. 513).

Counseling schemas, the conceptual structures that help counselors make sense of clients and the issues with which they present, are often difficult to learn because of their abstract nature. In examining how students learn abstract concepts, Bransford, Brown, and Cocking (1999) observed that some students are not able to convert abstract concepts into application; what often occurs is either rote memorization of concepts with little-to-no meaning structure, or more disconcerting, the development of misconceptions. As counseling students progress through training, core curricular areas (e.g., counseling theories) form the foundation of their schemas; effective pedagogy in a theories class would help them construct meaningful schemas for eventual counseling practice.

Effective pedagogy in a counseling theories course that facilitates students' construction of meaningful structures would improve learning, thereby enhancing students' cognitive processing and clinical practice. Synthesizing recommendations in the literature relative to teaching counseling theories, Nelson and Neufeldt (1998) stated that instructors should place students in problem-focused situations and then have them work as groups to find solutions in a process that fosters social construction of applied concepts. There are three basic strategies for exposing students to these problem-focused situations: lecture, case studies, and demonstration. An examination of each strategy and corollary implications for pedagogy highlights the challenges for instructors.

First, the challenge of lecture alone is that students may have no sense of what practice looks like when a particular theory is used. Second, although the use of case studies helps with conceptualization, it does not always provide the session-by-session concrete image of "what to do." With respect to the third strategy--demonstration--several options exist that merit detailed examination.