Teaching Counseling Through a Semester-Long Role Play

✍ Scribed by FREDRIC E. RABINOWITZ

• Publisher: American Counseling Association
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 495 KB
• Volume: 36
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0011-0035
• DOI: 10.1002/j.1556-6978.1997.tb00388.x

✦ Synopsis

This article describes a semester-long role play of a client by the instructor in an advanced undergraduate counseling seminar. This training method allowed students without counseling experience to actively learn about the issues and challenges of the counseling process.

Training for beginning counselors often includes didactic learning and experiential exposure to the counseling process. Students read about counseling theories, watch counseling demonstrations, and practice foundation skills such as nonverbal attending, paraphrasing, clarifying, perception checking, reflecting, and indirect leading (Cormier & Hackney, 1993; Egan. 1990; Ivey, Ivey, & Simek-Downing, 1987). It has also been suggested that students be encouraged to experientially learn how to make active counseling interventions . One effective method to help beginning students, who do not have access to a clinical population, learn counseling skills is through role playing .

In the popular interpersonal-process-recall method, one student acts as the counselor, another portrays a client, and a third student or the instructor observes the session . Feedback is given to the counselor by the client and the observer at the end of the mock session. Teachers of counseling skills have also used students from introductory psy-Fredric E. Rabinowitz i s a professor i n the Department of Psychology at the University of Redlands, Redlands, Calgornia.