"It Works for Me": Advice and Tips for Teaching/Supervision of the Practicum Trainee
Steve Lisman, Ph.D.
I'm pleased to provide this inaugural column of what I hope will be a steady source of advice and tips on various aspects of practicum training. The idea for the column was serendipitous, and began with the kind of request that reflects how much benefit so many Clinic Directors derive from the ADPTC listserve. Margo Adams Larsen, clinic director at University of North Dakota, requested assistance via the listserve in developing scenarios that depict a variety of situations that therapists face in order to create a training tape. As one of several respondents, I suggested that she consult a particular text that I use, at which point Phyllis Terry Friedman, newsletter co-editor, asked me if I might expand my remarks for the newsletter. In the course of my doing so, I realized that it would be helpful periodically to read about what others did in various training situations, so I asked Phyllis if she had considered having a column of practicum teaching tips. Voila! I wound up as a column editor.
With this column, I would like to formally request your own ideas to share with the membership. I heard a lot of them during informal conversation at the mid-winter meeting. Now is your chance to tell others about something you do in your practicum training to guide trainees in their professional development. What we have in mind is something that might be conveyed in several paragraphs at most, something short of an extended "how-to" piece, replete with outcome tests and citations. Perhaps those might work well in the new training journal the Emil Rodolfa (Training and Education in Professional Psychology) described. Nor is the column meant to replace the immediate deluge of collegial responses one received on the listserve when submitting a query. So please write to me (slisman@binghamton.edu) with your ideas for supervision and practicum training. We'll offer them up for the benefit of everyone.
On March 27, 2006, Margo Adams Larsen wrote to the ADPTC Listserve:
"One of my colleagues has recruited my collaboration in developing a didactic tutorial training video for our (and potentially other) graduate psychology students. We would like to capture some of those difficult, uncomfortable, awkward situations that occur and provide an instructional model for responding to these situations in a variety of approaches. For example, how to respond when the client asks you a personal question regarding your religious beliefs, or how to respond when a patient becomes demanding or tearful in session. Our goal is to capture common situations that might off-balance a first/second year student (or even situations that might challenge others), and role-play client/therapist interactions."
My expanded reply and "Teaching Tip" follow:
A veritable treasure trove of situations such as those you noted can be found in Pipes & Davenport, Introduction to Psychotherapy: Common Clinical Wisdom. Chapters such as, "Mistakes that Therapists Make", "Therapist Fears and Concerns" and "Questions that Beginning Therapists Ask" will provide you with many situations and various possible solutions that typically transcend a single therapy orientation
I use the text, Introduction to Psychotherapy: Common Clinical Wisdom, as one of the assigned texts for the course I teach, "Techniques of Behavior Change". Unlike the book by Clara Hill, Helping Skills, it does not lead the student through the sequence of building a relationship, developing insight, taking action. Rather if focuses on what the authors deem the generic wisdom of all experienced therapists, framed in didactic narrative as well as numerous vignettes. Other noteworthy chapters (besides the ones I noted earlier) are: "Resistance", "Responsibility", "The Therapeutic Stance", "Client Fears", etc. For class, the students will be assigned to read a chapter and to write a 2-page reaction paper that they must turn in to me 2 days before class. I scribble comments all over them, note to myself any worthwhile issues they raised, and then combine my prepared remarks with highlighting their reactions in order to generate a very active discussion (there are usually 8-10 students) for the first 45-60 minutes. I have been doing this for two years at the suggestion of a grad student, who was irritated that she read all the material, but knew that others did not, and wished I had a system that held them more accountable. Now the students do all the reading, become much more engaged with the material in the text, and, most interesting to me, have embarked on a process that allows me to know them and to connect with them in ways that exceed any prior classes. I think that is because many of the students lapse into reactions that are quite surprisingly disclosing, and also that I am carrying on a "private conversation" with them in my commentary and marginalia.
