Teaching a Course in Counseling Theories and Practice: Description and Evaluation

This article describes and evaluates an innovative way to teach a counseling theories and practices course to beginning counseling students. Cognitive and affective learning processes, continuous and systematic feedback, small group dynamics, and a cross-sectional approach to teaching theoretical concepts and techniques are described. This approach was implemented by using the following instructional format: didactic, demonstration, task simulation, and self-exploration. Evaluation included self—peer, student-staff, and staff-student evaluations and used measures obtained from six instrumented indices. Results suggest that this approach might be a useful alternative to teaching the traditional didactic course in theories and practices of counseling.     

Group Work in Counselor Education: A Decade of Growth

This study was designed to assess the current status of group work preparation in counselor education programs. The authors sent a questionnaire to a 10% (N = 310) stratified random sample by state of the membership of the Association for Specialists in Group Work. Respondents provided demographic information that was compared with two similar studies conducted 10 years ago. The results showed that counselor education programs are providing more and broader didactic and experiential group work preparation for graduates who are gaining employment in diversified work settings. In addition, the respondents surveyed indicated an increase in females as group workers and a more “active-instructive” role on the part of group counselors.