Competencies Benchmarks Workgroup

Bob Hatcher and Kim Lassiter
 

I thought I'd give a brief report on Kim Lassiter's and my participation at the APA Competencies Benchmarks Workgroup meeting that was held in DC at the end of last week, prior to the Education Leadership Conference, which we also both attended.

I think that the Workgroup meeting was a highpoint for ADPTC participation in APA affairs. The idea behind the conference was built considerably on the ADPTC/CCTC Practicum Competencies Outline. The idea was to extend the concept of defining competencies to include pre-practicum, internship/readiness for licensure, and post-doctoral as well as practicum training. The impetus for this was largely the recently-passes APA Council of Representatives policy statement on the model licensing act, which incorporates practicum training with internship to replace the internship - post-doctoral sequence as preparation for licensure. So there is need to be more specific about what graduate students learn during their clinical education.  The  Board of Educational Affairs, chaired by Nadya Fouad, organized the meeting through a planning commitee (I was a member of this group). The idea was to invite 32 psychologists who are leaders in the domain of competencies and their assessment to form four groups, each to consider what the core competencies are for their portion of the educational sequence -- pre-practicum, practicum, internship and post-doc. The pre-prac group was led by Ray Crossman, chair of CCTC; I led the practicum group (with Kim as recorder); Steve McCutcheon, chair of APPIC, led the internship group, and Nadine Kaslow, now head of ABPP, led the post-doctoral group. The groups included many people that we all know, including Emil Rodolfa, Jeff Baker, Nancy Ellman and Linda Forest, and lots of CoA people. We all worked intensively for the 2 days and came up with a draft document that includes core competencies, behavioral indicators of the competencies, and methods for assessing these competencies. Nadya and Cathi Grus will work together to pull it all into a further draft document, which will be reviewed at the CCTC meeting in November, and then circulated widely for comment. During the course of the meeting, Kim and I got lots of comments about how the Practicum Competencies Document helped everyone in their tasks, which made us feel good.

There was a follow-up discussion about the Benchmarks Workgroup at ELC on Monday morning that Kim and I participated in as well.

I think that this effort will help position us further for good interaction and discussion with the  APPIC board this spring.