Developing a personal theory of counseling is essential for beginning counselors. Current approaches de‐emphasize life experiences before graduate training and fail to incorporate counselor developmental stages. This article presents a framework for strengthening development of a personal theory of counseling by integrating life experiences and counselor developmental stages with theory building approaches.
The authors address the need for promoting professionalism among graduate students and new counselors and outline specific, practical suggestions for incorporating professional development activities into training, supervision, professional, and organizational practice.
Although training standards for counseling students emphasize the importance of student evaluation, there is a lack of research that specifically describes how counselor educators may systematically assess the professional development of counselors-in-training. This exploratory study sought to determine a set of performance indicators for each of five identified components of professional development to provide counselor educators with an initial framework for assessing the professional growth of master's-level counseling students.
The authors investigated the purposes, benefits. and outcomes of sabbaticals for counselor educators. Forty-five counselor educators who had taken sabbaticals within the previous 5 years completed an on-line survey about aspects of their sabbatical leave. Sabbaticals were overwhelmingly reported to be positive and productive experiences that yielded personal and professional benefits.One aspect of working in academia, particularly for faculty members, has been the opportunity to take a sabbatical leave every few years. The concept of the sabbatical has its roots in the Old Testament prescription for a sabbatical year (or year of rest) every 7th year; the word sabbatical derives from the Hebrew Shenath shabbathon or year of rest (Bechtel, 1912). Sabbaticals were first introduced at Harvard in 1880 (Miller & Kang, 1997) and since then have become an integral part of higher education in the United States. A 1982 study by Anderson and Atelsek found that these types of leaves were offered by nearly all U.S. universities, more than 80% of 4-year colleges, and 60% of 2-year colleges. Despite the long tradition of sabbaticals in academia, studies on sabbaticalleaves have been limited, with most refereed publications appearing in the higher education literature. Because very few studies of sabbaticals exist and because of the lack of attention to this topic in counselor education, we decided to investigate the purposes, benefits, and outcomes of sabbaticals, using a national sample of counselor educators.
The author describes how student‐conducted and videotaped initial family interviews can provide a common frame of reference for learning family systems theories.
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