Fourth Practice Session Reflection

In this essay I will describe key elements of Psychodynamic theory, Person-Centred theory and Cognitive-Behavioural theory. I will also identify the key differences between the above theories. I shall also describe how counselling theory underpins the use of counselling skills in practise. I will then end with my conclusion.

As the standards of the counseling profession are continuously being shaped, I desire to play a role in the educating

Reflection for practice in health care is predetermined skilled activity where individual evaluates and explains own ideas, feelings, behavior and intervention and provides clinical reason of its effectiveness. Reflection is a process of looking at own behavior and changing self rather than expecting others to change. While changing self, values and moral should be considered. However cultural background, workplace culture highly influences the values. For example: medical restrain: Medical restrain is restricting the movement of a patient with slight pain in order to prevent harming themselves and others. At the time when I used to work in an institution I have seen many cases of restrain. I

Kaplan, D. M., & Gladding, S. T. (2011). A vision for the future of counseling: The 20/20 principles for unifying and strengthening the profession. Journal of Counseling & Development, 89(3), 367-372.

When planning this essay I assumed that I would just produce a narrative of the primary skills and how they can enhance any counselling relationship but after some thought I felt that for the sake of congruence, ‘a core condition’, along side that narrative I would relate it to my own learning experience.

The purpose of this paper is to assess my skills as a counselor, while reflecting on an interview, which was recorded earlier this month. This 25 minute interview was my third meeting with the client. In my first meeting with the client, I introduced myself and clearly defined our roles; the expectations of the counseling process and asked her for permission to videotape the interview.

I have been at my site for about 14 to 15 weeks and have been feeling more comfortable in my experience. Although at the same time as I need to do some more studying of interventions and learning more about skills for my client’s well-being. After presenting my second case presentation I decided to reread some of the chapters from our process and procedures course again, since it has been a while since I looked at these intervention skills (as I took this course about 1.5 years ago). It was a while ago and I think now I need to brush up on using these approaches now. I think this presentation was useful because it showed me that I need to continue working on my skills as a practicum student. I received a lot of good feedback and I am taking a step in the right direction to think about the skills I need to be a good counselor.

As I complete my first two weeks as an Aspiring Principal Intern (API), I believe it is important to reflect on my experiences and what I have accomplished so far.  I have found my first week as an API to be relevant and fulfilling.  I am fortunate to be surrounded by a strong and supportive administrative team, quality teachers, support staff and outstanding students!

In my practicum I had a classroom of 20 children. 1 child was African American, the rest where Caucasian. All of these children were low-income children, on free and reduced lunch. This classroom was also a split classroom consisting of half kindergarten students and half slower learning first grade students. This made the classroom very diverse and allowed me to see different ways to teach students in this situation. My teacher taught her lessons by grouping children based on their learning level. This allowed for each student to get more one onone help from the teacher, along with having the lesson adapted to his or her grade level. One child in the classroom had developmental delay in fine and gross motor ability. This student left the classroom each day at a specific time and had received help from a specialist. I was fortunate to be able to watch the therapy and learn how they help students like this in the school district.

This paper is a graduate-level counseling assignment. The assignment was designed to aid the student in learning how to write a direct conversation of a counseling session. It is a tool for the student to learn how to reproduce a recording session in written form. All phases of a counseling session were reviewed. The remarks of the therapist were analyzed. The professionalism of the counseling was examined.

Going into this second skills practice activity, I was less anxious than the very first one that we completed. This session included Dana, Anthoneek, Margaret and myself. I think having gone through the process before, as well as having spent half a semester with the content, I was much more prepared this time around. While this session was easier, I still faced a few challenges. I had to build upon previous skills that I’d already implemented with newer ones. For example, using skills to gain information was something I worked to incorporate in my session as a counselor. I also tried to ask appropriate and helpful questions to support my “client.” Therefore, using these recently learned skills in combination with proper opening and closing procedures, and basic skills proved a little challenging in the beginning.

Through this self-reflection I have discovered that I can sometimes be critical of myself when reviewing my counseling skills. For instance, through the evaluation process of my voice recorded session there were more areas that I felt that I could improve upon than my site supervisor pointed out. This allowed me to understand that I am an effective school counselor and my skills are appropriate as a new school counselor. Some of my identified strengths included being able to build excellent rapport with the student by using advanced communication and attending skills. For instance, I used vocal qualities to match the student’s tone throughout the session to show understanding and interest (Ivey, Ivey, & Zalaquett, 2016). Further, another strength was being able to use developmentally appropriate language with the first grade student. This helped to support the relationship and be able to have the student understand what was being said. Another strength, which was new for me, was the use of developmentally appropriate visual charts which helped the student to understand what I was talking about because of his concrete developmental stage (Henderson & Thompson,

Drama, as Heatchote ( Wagner, 1999) put it, is not special . It is something that people do everyday for different purposes , in a complex process that involve their emotion, imaginations, and intelligence. People recreate ( re-live) a past event or visualize ( pre-live) an upcoming role that they have to cope with . If it does not happen visually for other people to see, then it may occur only in our minds . One close example of this mental imaging activity is the act of lesson planning by teachers. When planning a lesson I often imagine what I will do in a class to make sure that I would do it properly . I will think how to begin : what ice breakers I will use to build up a case and how I will deliver them. As I think of core activities to have in a class, my mind also wonders about what jokes I will tell when students show signs of boredom and how I will deliver them. At times, my mind brought me to the memories of past incidents or successful teaching events and have all them mashed up with the plan. Soon as I have them organized, these staged plans are stored on writing forms , but many of them are just stored in my memory.

This unit was created with my class from the 16-17 school year in mind. My class last year, as a whole performed above average on almost every indicator. I found myself running across a problem I know that many teachers don’t often come across. I found that for about half of my class the curriculum was not challenging enough, for about one-fourth of the class, it was just right, and for the other fourth it was a little more challenging. I know typically this is the other way around, but I designed this unit specifically to meet the needs of all of my learners.

On November 6th, 2017 at Fulton County Juvenile Court Center. Upon my arrival at the building, I was immediately asked to see my ID, but I had left all my items in the car so the two officer had to make sure that I did not have a phone and proceeded to let me enter the court house through a metal detector and asked me to place my notebook in a gray box to be sent through a dual-energy X-ray system. As I walked in the courtroom, it took me by surprise of how the set-up was because I was thinking that it would look like the courtrooms that are presented on television. Although, this set-up was very different. In the courtroom they had a total of four benches on the right side and three on the left side. Most of the probation officer, school counselors, and other people that were working on the behalf of the juvenile defendant were sitting on the left side of the room and that is where I decided to sit as well. There were no raised layers except for the judge. There was no defendant box, but there were two stands on each side facing towards the judge for both parties. While observing the people that were coming in for a hearing it took me by surprise that none of the young adults or parents were in business causal clothing. Majority of the cases that were being heard were dealing with the African American ethnicity.