Cognitive Style in Counselor Education: A Comparison of Practicum Supervisors and Counselors in Training

The authors compared practicum supervisors and counseling students in training in terms of dominant cognitive style and related cognitive style of counselors in training to supervision process and outcome measures. A sample of 18 supervisors and 46 students completed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. After at least six supervision sessions, supervisors rated the counseling students on the Counselor Evaluation Rating Scale and the students rated the quality of the supervision relationship using the Barrett-Lennard Relationship Inventory. Supervisors had a stronger Thinking orientation and less variability on the Sensing-Intuiting orientation than did counselors in training. In contrast to previous research, a strong relationship between the cognitive style of counselors in training and supervision process and outcome measures was not detected in this study.     

Religious Worldviews and the Common School: The French Dilemma

This article explores, in the French context, an aspect of what Terence McLaughlin (1991) has described in an unpublished paper as the 'dilemma of substantiality' faced by any school system endeavouring to promote neutrality. In France, in order that the public or common school be genuinely open to all students, not only is the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols forbidden but so too is any direct teaching of religion. The cultural consequences resulting from this prohibition have led to the mandating of cross-curricular teaching about religion. This article aims to show that the civic principles (la laïcité) on which this teaching is based pose in an acute and problematic form the 'dilemma of substantiality'.     

Parallel Process in a Course on Counseling Supervision

The learning of supervision implies not only acquisition of formal knowledge but also changes in the learner. Because these changes cannot be completely specified at the outset, the way a supervisor learns must be through a mixture of experiential and didactic teaching. The dialectic between the “inner” and the “outer” learnings required for counselors to change their roles to becoming supervisors forms the substance of this article. Early in the course, the class was fascinated by the seeming inevitability of “parallel process” issues between supervisor, trainee, and client. In the second half of the year, the beginning supervisors took on a new group of trainees and learned the importance of having a developmental model to guide their work. The bias in the course as a whole was that all learning requires a change in relationship, that supervision needs to be understood developmentally, and that it is best to treat beginning supervisors and trainees as creative geniuses.