Authored by Michael Maxwell*
Abstract
The purpose of the current qualitative study was to demonstrate the efficacy of an innovative instructional strategy for assessing self-efficacy of counselors-in-training. The results of the study provide the themes that emerged from the collected data. The assignment and script offer an innovative way for counselor educators to assess their counseling intern students’ levels of self-efficacy by use of the Big Claw Metaphorical Activity. It was concluded that this activity may assist counselor educators in helping to develop counseling interns’ levels of self-efficacy when working with clients in counseling.
Keywords: Counselor; Intern; Self-Efficacy; Qualitative; Instruction
Introduction
As a counselor educator for a graduate program, the author recognized a wide variety of student experiences, skill sets, and performance confidence levels. The common curriculum sequence for graduate counseling students is to complete (or near complete) their didactic coursework and pre-practicum interactions prior to entering their internship clinical experience at a mental health agency. Having successfully completed the coursework and skill practice experiences, in theory, counseling students have exhibited the readiness to transition from a solely classroom-style learning to utilizing their learned skills with their clients at their internship agencies.
Functioning as a practicum and internship seminar instructor, the author also observed a variation of student confidence levels for working with actual clients at a mental health agency, despite the preparation that took place prior. In order to meet the individual needs of each intern student while working in a group seminar format, the author recognized the need to first assess the current level of self-efficacy for each student. The purpose of this study was to demonstrate the effectiveness of an innovative instructional strategy for assessing self-efficacy of counselors-in-training. The research question that encouraged the purpose was the following: what common themes might emerge from conducting a qualitative inquiry into a directed activity for counseling students’ experiences, potentially shedding light on the participants’ self-efficacy in the work of counseling?
Self-efficacy
How one psychologically approaches a given task is directly associated with how he or she views how he or she will perform in that task [1]. Counseling students tend to vary in their personal and professional experiences, which can bare a substantial impact on how they feel about their ability to work with others in a counseling setting.
According to Al-Darmaki [2], counselor educators have observed that some students experience anxiety and self-doubt at the beginning of their practicum classes, potentially as a result of low self-efficacy. The potential problem for counselor educators is having a reliable tool for assessing practicum and intern students’ levels of self-efficacy. Counselor educators’ ability to accurately assess the level of self-efficacy of their practicum and intern students is imperative for gauging where to modify the training curriculum.
This idea of personal ability (sense of worth) as related to certain tasks can be viewed as self-efficacy. Self-efficacy stems from the seminal work of Albert Bandura and his Social Cognitive Theory, where human behavior is defined as an interaction of personal factors, behavior, and the environment [3-5]. Selfefficacy was defined by Bandura [2] as “the conviction that one can successfully execute desired behavior” (p. 93). Bandura [5] expanded his definition of self-efficacy “as people’s beliefs about their capabilities to produce designed levels of performance that exercise influence over events that affect their lives”.
Furthermore, self-efficacy is considered an individual’s confidence that he or she can successfully accomplish a given task. Bandura’s [3] research indicated that individuals who possessed high levels of self-confidence in their own abilities would approach difficult tasks as challenges rather than as obstacles and approach threatening situations with assurance that they can exercise control over the situation. Additionally, other social cognitive constructs, such as counselor anxiety and outcome expectations, may be important facilitators in the relationship between counselor selfefficacy and counselor performance [6]. According to Larson and Daniels [7] counseling self-efficacy (CSE) is defined as “one’s beliefs or judgments about his or her capabilities to effectively counsel a client in the near future”.
Implicit assumptions of counseling self-efficacy theory include the following:
• CSE is a primary mechanism through which effective counseling occurs and strong CSE beliefs result in enhanced counselor-in-training perseverance in the face of difficult counselor tasks;
• counseling students who experienced higher levels of counseling self-efficacy are better able to receive and incorporate evaluative feedback into their learning experiences than students who do not have high counseling self-efficacy [7- 9].
One of the major goals of counselor supervision and training is to develop proficient counselors by increasing their level of competency and self-efficacy [8] [10-12]. If counselor educators and supervisors can identify specific variables that influence the outcome of supervision, they may then be able to tailor their instruction to best fit the individual needs of each counseling student.
According to Fernando and Hulse-Kilacky [13], a relationship exists between having a sense of preparedness and the perceived self-efficacy of counselors-in-training regarding their ability to handle crisis interventions. Self-efficacy may be a critical variable in the perceived sense of preparedness experienced by beginning counselors faced with crisis situations. Ambiguity is commonly accepted as an inherent characteristic in counseling. While experienced practitioners may be better capable of working with ambiguous therapeutic content, some ambiguous tasks can have the tendency to generate a sense of crisis in beginning counseling students.
Ambiguity
Sawyer, Peters, and Willis [1], defined ambiguity, or the state of being ambiguous, as being open to more than one interpretation or being uncertain. Ambiguity tolerance is congruent with human development, thus a necessary component of counseling student development, identity, and effectiveness. The goal for counselor educators is to create effective counselors in addition to promoting the optimal counselor identity development of the counselors-intraining. Anxiety and frustration are expected when students are faced with increasingly ambiguous concepts of counseling [1,14]. Accepting ambiguity’s place in the counseling relationship, and how to respond to it can be an important element to any counseling training program.
Self-efficacy and trust in the counseling process are essential elements in addressing this concern of ambiguity [15]. The more important question becomes, what is the role of ambiguity in fostering counselor identity development and enhancing counseling effectiveness. Validating the role of ambiguity may be a helpful way of making meaning of the struggles and frustrations many counseling students experience in their training [14,16] Effective counselor educators can connect educational experiences to the unavoidable interactions and emotions encountered by counseling students (i.e., ambiguity). Perhaps counselor educators may assume responsibility for recognizing that ambiguity does exist as a legitimate part of the counseling student’s learning processes. Ambiguity can be expected as an element inherent in the counseling process. This innate characteristic is not necessarily one to attempt to reduce, but instead, mitigate its undesirable impact. Reflective of the current study, counselor educators may help students to reframe their understanding of their core skills by addressing their purpose. An operative connector for assisting counseling students with comprehending ambiguity’s function in the counseling process is the use of metaphor. According to Kaufer [17], it is difficult to conceptualize ambiguity without its tie to metaphorical ideology.
Metaphor
According to the Merriam-Webster [18] definition, a metaphor is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them. In other words, a metaphor can be considered a phrase or idea used to compare two originally unlike thoughts, but typically have a single common characteristic. Metaphors are used to help create a clearer, more relevant description from the metaphorical content to the actual concept.
In a fundamental way of thinking, metaphors are any activity that communicates to the self (Lankton & Lankton, 1989). Fox [19] expanded this notion by considering metaphors to assist in the organization of personal experiences. According to Powell and Royce [20] metaphors can be considered an alternate way of knowing in contrast to rational and empirical knowing. Metaphors allow students the avenue for considering alternative possibilities to modify their self-conceptual paradigm [21,22]. Therefore, metaphors can be used as a source of meaning making, thereby becoming a useful tool in counseling and counselor education.
Awareness of preconceived beliefs about self, constitutes an important step in the change process. Metaphors do not change an actual issue, but instead, the student’s perception of the issue [23]. With this said, we use metaphors to understand our experiences from a novel perspective. Metaphors are fundamental in the way we think [24].
The Use of Metaphor in Counselor Training
Counseling students have theories about themselves that directly influence their practice. It is important for students to clarify these self-theories, and metaphors are effective ways to ascertain these personal assumptions [25,26].
Oftentimes, when we are unable to find the language to express our thoughts, we resort to metaphors to assist in creating that clarity. Metaphors not only have the power to describe self but can also transform self. According to Leary [27], these metaphorical concepts are not simply descriptive, they have also been transformative: “their use has led to changes in human self-reference and hence to human self-consciousness” (p. 14). According to Langer [28], a specific reason for the broad appeal of metaphor as a means of eliciting growth and change is that it allows new knowledge and ideas to be conveyed using frames of reference that are familiar to the learner.
A possible life-occurrence may alter a counseling student’s view of self. For example, despite learning adequate skills and receiving quality supervision, a counselor in training might experience unexplained client loss. A counselor in training might also experience a client’s suicide, anger at the counseling process or perceived idea that the counselor is not helpful. These situations may affect counseling student self-efficacy [29]. Taking this concept one step further, Leary stated the following: “How counselors perceive the organization of the self, and the metaphors they use, is reflected in the approaches they take when engaging with clients” (p. 243). Furthermore, it is difficult to adequately prepare a counselor in training for these types of situations. One possible method to help counselors in training become aware of these realities and accept that clients may not respond to counseling efforts is introducing an experiential, metaphorical exercise [30].
Sommer and Jane [31] discovered that using metaphorical activities to enhance supervision is to facilitate personal interpretations that can help the counselor-in-training and supervisor understand and give meaning to the phenomenological experience of being new counselors. The use of myths and stories as metaphors for counseling and supervision may provide rich opportunities for discussion and reflection for supervisors and counselors-in-training as beginning counselor develop competence, confidence, and a professional sense of self.
According to Campbell [32], metaphors also allow people to ascribe affect to language by evoking past emotions. Supervision is commonly conceptualized as a process that involves a progression through various developmental stages. Sometimes this process could be a painful and turbulent experience for the counselorin- training [32]. Hence, metaphor can be exercised as a tool for helping counselors-in-training understand this developmental process [30].
It is essential for counselors-in-training to become aware of the layers of their own defense systems, which have evolved from past evaluative experiences. The purpose of this process is to prevent the beginning counselors from
• Becoming overly defensive or
• Project their past supervision experiences on the current evaluative process.
Fall and Sutton (2004) presented an example of a structured metaphoric drawing activity in which the counselors-in- training were asked at the mid-semester point of their field observation to draw pictures that depict the students’ perceptions of their stage of development in becoming a counselor.
Counseling students reported they believed the activity helped them identify issues within their experiences that were previously unrecognized, facilitating their ability to conceptualize these struggles and triumphs within the context of their own developmental process of becoming a counselor (Fall & Sutton, 2004).
Giuffrida, Jordan, Saiz and Barnes, (2007) discovered that metaphoric activities can provide a valuable tool for facilitating counselors-in-training growth and development. Metaphoric activities seem to be particularly useful in helping counselorsin- training understand the process of becoming a counselor. The benefits associated with metaphoric activities include allowing supervisors and counselors-in-training to develop a shared language with which to conceptualize cases, help counselors-intraining think about their interactions with a client in a novel frame, and encouraging students to find their own solutions to problems rather than relying on their supervisors for answers [33].
Method
Considering the paucity of empirical research in the area of assessing counseling student self-efficacy, a phenomenological qualitative research method was chosen to collect, analyze, interpret, and report the data. It seemed most fitting to envision the current study from a phenomenological lens, as the participants’ individual and personal perspectives will provide the substance of the emerging themes. According to Polkinghorne (1989), phenomenological psychology is a perspective that recognizes the domain of meaningful experience as the fundamental location of knowledge. Phenomenological psychology allows for the investigation of structures that are typical or general for groups of people. When using a phenomenological psychology method, the researcher places the emphasis on descriptions from the research participants instead of the researcher’s self-report [34,35]. Giorgi (1985) stated that “by adopting a strictly descriptive approach, we can let the phenomena speak for themselves, and when we do, we discover that whatever appears suggests in its very appearance something more which does not appear”.
To read more about this article..Open access Journal of Addiction and Psychology
Please follow the URL to access more information about this article
To know more about our Journals....Iris Publishers
No comments:
Post a Comment