Training the Counsellor

An Integrative Model

Mary Connor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415102186
• eBook ISBN: 9781134852567
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In Training the Counsellor, Mary Connor shares a decade of training experience to provide an invaluable resource for other counsellor trainers. The role of the trainer as facilitator, educator and assessor as well as key professional and ethical issues are all brought vividly to life through many case examples.
The focal point of the book is the integrative, four-stage model for training competent and reflective counsellors, with the relationship between trainee and client at the core of the model. The four stages are: the development of attitudes and values; knowledge and skills; client work and supervision; reflection and evaluation. Building on this model and drawing on her own wealth of experience, the author explore the interface between being professional and being human.
Training the Counsellor, offers stimulating reading and tested guidelines for good practice for all those involved in training other helping professionals.

Chapter 1

Developments in counselling training
A personal perspective

This chapter begins with my own training as a counsellor in 1969 and traces counselling developments in Britain over the past thirty years. In the early 1970s the first batch of trained counsellors were taking up posts as trainers and they searched for useful models. These initially came from the United States, and the influence of Rogers, Carkhuff, Egan, Gilmore, Kagan and Ivey is highlighted. In the mid-1980s a significant impact came from the British Association for Counselling when it set up the BAC Course Recognition Group and in 1988 produced a scheme for the recognition of counsellor training courses. This raised issues such as eclecticism or integration, supervision, standardisation, and training for trainers, and these are discussed against the backcloth of current professional and educational developments. This leads to the conclusion that counselling training will come of age when there are properly recognised courses for counsellor trainers world-wide.

These are exciting times. Counselling training is in its infancy and the infant is lively and energetic, exploring new territory, getting into scrapes and growing so fast it is hard to keep up. The demand for new counselling courses is increasing daily in every corner of our society.

THE BEGINNINGS

It seems a far cry from the year of 1969, when I was seconded from my job as a geography teacher to do a one-year full-time advanced diploma in counselling at Keele University. The first diploma courses in Britain were located in universities: Keele and Reading, then Birmingham and Exeter. They began in the mid-1960s. As they were based in universities they had to have a strong academic flavour, and people like myself were able to use that opportunity to move on to a Masters degree if successful. At that time the emphasis in training was on the client-centred approach, with Rogers to the fore. It was quite a shock to the large number of teachers and educators who populated my course because we had expected something much more structured and directive. I well remember going back to my school only to receive horrified looks from the rest of the staff when I tried to explain what was meant by being non-judgemental. I had to lie low with my ideas for a good few years until the culture was ready to accept them.

The British training scene was heavily influenced by visiting American professors as well as by American training films. In 1969 I was introduced not only to Carl Rogers on film, but also to Fritz Perls and Albert Ellis as they each counselled the famous ‘Gloria’. We learned about theories mainly from books, lectures and discussions. Our lecturers had not been counsellors themselves, but came from the fields of education, psychology, social work and careers guidance.

We were very fortunate to have access to video equipment and an interviewing room with a one-way screen. I remember a few sessions where one person would counsel and the whole group would observe through the one-way screen. There was an emphasis on the use of tests in counselling to aid assessment and to ‘diagnose’ the problem, and when I finished the course and became a school counsellor I remember requisitioning a whole battery of tests including Cattell’s 16PF, Eysenck’s Junior Personality Inventory, the Minnesota Counseling Inventory, the Rothwell Miller Interest Blank and Stott’s Social Adjustment Guide. These would not only be used with individuals who came for counselling, but also with a whole cohort of pupils to assess where there might be developmental needs. It was as if the profession of counselling had to establish itself by using tried and tested forms of assessment, emulating the psychologists who had already achieved respectability.

The notion of the self-development of the counsellor was being grasped and I well remember the T-group where we sat for an hour each week with a lecturer and wondered what on earth we were doing there. We each had a counselling placement too, for one term of the course. Above all we had plenty of essays, written examinations and a dissertation to complete. No one seemed to have heard about supervision at that stage and I don’t remember ever doing any structured exercises to practise counselling approaches. Strange as it may seem now, the word ‘skill’ was not in the vocabulary at that time. Carkhuff’s work on Rogers’ core conditions was only just percolating through in Britain at this stage and so we knew about congruence, respect and empathy but we did not know much about the specifics of communicating these qualities. We knew that the research showed that these core conditions needed to be experienced by the client in order to be therapeutic, but we weren ‘t introduced to the mechanics of it all. Ideas about experiential learning had not really taken on in universities and so almost every session was a lecture, where we took copious notes, followed by discussion. Occasionally there would be student-led seminars, but very little in the way of active workshops. So in 1969 counselling training was still quite formal and yet I had a wonderful year at Keele because the course staff (Jim Gill, Tony Bolger, Peter Daws and Una Maguire) were really committed to the development of counselling, and to us. I had a sound grounding in counselling theory, I was given some excellent training in research methodology, some useful frameworks for doing case-studies, plenty of practice in the administration of tests and an opportunity to counsel. The rest came later.

Meanwhile, there was another kind of training being offered through helping agencies and voluntary organisations. Such training courses were either heavily influenced by the psychoanalytic tradition or, at the other extreme, were keen to disclaim the notion of counselling in favour of terms such as guidance, helping or befriending. In areas such as social work, health and education, the behavioural approach was often favoured because it promised quick results.

In the late 1960s counsellors who had been trained on the one-year fulltime or two-year part-time diploma courses were now emerging from the universities and were having to make the case for employment as counsellors. Arguments had to be put forward in terms of cost effectiveness as well as in terms of therapeutic effectiveness. There was much suspicion around. Halmos was a sociologist who questioned what he referred to as ‘the faith’ of the counsellor. He asserted that counsellors did not have a clear idea about where they were coming from. At a later date he says:

The counsellor’s influence on his society is in a process of rapid growth…. This is what mainly explains my sociological interest in the contemporary counselling philosophy. In studying this philosophy one observes that the counsellor is reticent about his first principles. He is wont to deny that he asserts anything non-deterministic and non-mechanical about the nature of his help or indeed that he asserts these qualities about the nature of man. As a rule, he wants us to believe that a psychological theory is all that is needed to explain, account for, and justify his practice.

(Halmos 1982: 49–50)

Counselling was also receiving criticism because it was seen to be a means of social control. Cicourel and Kitsuse (1963) pinpointed the dangers in a study of some American high schools where it was evident that counsellors were trying to fit pupils into the system rather than helping them to determine their own goals.

COUNSELLORS BECOME TRAINERS

During the 1970s the counsellors who were trained on the first courses were growing in number and strength and Thorne writes about their impact on counselling training:

Many of the students from these pioneering courses subsequently gained posts of influence, particularly in educational institutions, and it was not long before many of them found themselves taking a training role in addition to their clinical work. The emergence of the British practitioner/trainer had a significant effect on training provision, for it was now increasingly possible to design courses that drew on the actual experience of practising British counsellors, as well as on the well established tradition from across the Atlantic. Gradually, too, trainers from other disciplines lost their primary role; courses became more clearly focused as they passed into the hands of those who were proud to call themselves counsellors and did not owe their principal allegiance to another profession.

(Thorne 1991: 2)

During the 1970s I noticed that counselling was beginning to be accepted and people were starting to apply the Rogerian principles of congruence, respect and empathy in other forms of helping relationships, such as nursing and teaching. This acceptance of the validity of basic counselling principles, and the acknowledgement that counselling skills could be effective in producing change and development, helped to boost the need for training across a wide field of paraprofessionals as well as amongst the growing body of professional counsellors.

Those of us who were now being asked to start training others had to look around to find the current state of the art. Brigid Proctor talks about how, on returning from work in the USA, she was asked to take over a course at a time when she had not even been a counsellor. She had a social work background and had worked as a probation officer. She was asked to take over a course which she describes as a ‘scissors and paste job, with a little bit of everything and no formal counselling theory and practice’ (Proctor 1991: 50). Under the leadership of Brigid Proctor, this course became well known for its radical attempts to be trainee-centred in all aspects of course organisation:

The ideology was one of student-centred co-operative learning. Our ideas and values derived from Carl Rogers, from radical psychiatry and from the principles on which therapeutic communities were based. We believed that counselling students should experience in training the kind of empathy, genuineness and respect for their own personal directions which we wanted them to be offering to clients. We also believed that this necessarily entailed becoming purposeful and confident in working with others. The learning community would be possible only to the extent that they experienced themselves as ‘owning’ the responsibility that truly lay with them.

(Proctor 1991: 52)

I envied this course for its ability to take the risks of being truly student-centred. I knew that I would need to work in a more structured way and I have reflected whether my background in education makes me more orthodox in my approach, and whether Brigid Proctor’s social work and probation background helped her to be more radical in hers. This leaves me pondering the effect of the professional background upon the counsellor trainer and the fact that the course will reflect that background, for good or ill.

Another early course developed under the leadership of Francesca Inskipp, later joined by Hazel Johns, Peter Cook and Ian Horton. This was based at North East London Polytechnic and there are two characteristics of this course which impacted upon my own development. One was their use of the Egan Skilled Helper Model in training. The other was their carefully thought out procedure for assessing counselling skills, which I later emulated and which was based on the work of Egan, Kagan and Ivey as discussed below.

A MODEL FOR TRAINING: THE SKILLED HELPER

When I was appointed as a full-time lecturer in counselling in 1979 I had run brief skills training courses in the evenings or for a couple of days at a time. Now I was expected to develop one-term or one-year courses. I looked around for some material that would help and I was told of Gerard Egan’s work. His first edition of The Skilled Helper was published in 1975. The British Association of Counselling (BAC) held a Northern Conference at which Gerard Egan was a visiting speaker. This was the early 1980s and by now there was an awareness that training must involve not only theoretical knowledge about counselling but also training in specific skills - a basis for which trainers found in the Egan model. He also offered a methodology - the triad of counsellor, client and observer which to this day most counselling courses use as a basis for the ‘laboratory’ or ‘counselling practicum’ experience as it was then called. Egan has always stated that his model is a model of the counselling process. But, sadly, many people did not hear that, and in Britain it is still often referred to mistakenly as the ‘Egan skills model’. Despite this misunderstanding, the Skilled Helper model has been successfully used because it has provided a clear framework for understanding the skills required at different stages of the counselling process. Egan calls it a problem management model.

DEVELOPING OUNSELLING SKILLS: MICROCOUNSELLING AND INTERPERSONAL PROCESS RECALL (IPR)

There were two other important influences from the USA at that time in counselling training. One was the influence of Susan Gilmore (1973) who had looked at the importance of developmental groups being used as a basis for skill development on counselling courses. Some courses still refer to the experiential group element of the course as ‘the Gilmore groups’. The other influence was that of Norman Kagan (1967) who developed the method of Interpersonal Process Recall which provided a helpful model for analysing counselling practice sessions. The method involved the counsellor, client and an inquirer debriefing a session together, either as it was actually happening, or immediately afterwards, preferably using a video recording of the session.

Carkhuff (1969) had isolated specific therapeutic skills and later developed useful scales for discriminating levels of effectiveness. Ivey had been trying to use the microteaching model from education and by 1971 Ivey and Authier had produced a large volume with the title Microcounseling in which they quoted numerous examples of the effectiveness of this as a training approach. It offered to trainers a systematic framework for skill development. The task appeared straightforward: to teach one skill at a time and so to build up a repertoire of responses. This was an analytic approach to the development of counselling skills and it helped to move counselling training away from the mystique which, to date, had often surrounded therapeutic effectiveness. Trainees would be given a written definition of the skill to be practised; they would see a demonstration of the skill either live or on video tape, and they would videotape their own performance and evaluate it against the written definition and against the modelled performance. This methodology was influenced by Bandura’s (1969) work on behavioural principles and by Strong’s (1968) work on social influence theory.

Throughout the 1980s and up to the present time the influence of Carkhuff, Kagan, Ivey and Egan can be seen in most counselling training courses where trainers have taken on, and adapted, the basic principles: isolating specific skills for development; having clear definitions of these; demonstrating them; giving the opportunity to practise within small groups where trainees rotate roles of counsellor, client and observer; and using video or audio recordings as a basis of debriefing and analysis. Baker and Daniels (1989) conducted a meta-analysis of eighty-one courses where the microcounselling approach was used. They concluded that it had made a significant impact on counselling training effectiveness, particularly as an effective approach for teaching simple, clearly defined skills. However, two points which emerged from their research need further consideration. The first concerns the problem of maintenance of skill over time and more research is needed to test out how well trainees sustain and develop skills. Research is also needed to identify factors which prevent trainees from being able to maintain proficiency acquired during training. The second point concerns the capacity of the microcounselling approach when training people in ‘higher order skills in more complex combinations’ (Baker and Daniels 1989: 219). There is a need for evidence about the appropriateness of this approach when training counsellors who need more than the basic skills.

The microcounselling approach lost a certain amount of favour in the late 1980s because it was feared that it would result in a mechanistic approach to counsellor training and might produce responses in trainees which were specific to the practice situation but which did not become integrated into a total style of counselling. The issue is about developing counselling competence and an individual counselling style, rather than just the performance of counselling skills. One way in which trainers have addressed this question is to design a course developmentally. This is what I have done. In the first year of the course trainees are expected to gain a working knowledge of the core theoretical model and to be able to demonstrate the specific skills which are required at each stage of the model (such as paraphrasing, summarising, goal-setting). In the second year of the course, it can be assumed that there is a satisfactory standard of basic skill development and the focus then turns to the higher-order skills (such as immediacy and self-disclosure) and to qualities such as support and resourcefulness.

DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN COUNSELLING AND COUNSELLING SKILLS

In 1985 the British Association for Counselling set up a working group to look at the recognition of counsellor training courses and by 1988 a scheme had been developed and agreed by representatives of the main training sectors: universities, polytechnics, voluntary agencies and private counselling organisations. There had been an ongoing debate in counselling circles about the difference between using counselling skills and counselling. The publication of the BAC Scheme for the Recognition of Counsellor Training Courses ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Developments in counselling training: A personal perspective
• Chapter 2: From counsellor to trainer
• Chapter 3: An integrative model for counsellor training
• Chapter 4: The model in practice
• Chapter 5: Dynamics of the training relationship
• Chapter 6: The trainer as facilitator
• Chapter 7: The trainer as educator
• Chapter 8: The trainer as assessor
• Chapter 9: Ethical and professional issues in counsellor training
• Chapter 10: Professional development of the counsellor trainer
• Bibliography