Spring, 2016Professor Cunningham
Brandeis University Department of Psychology
Psychology 161b
Clinical Psychology Practicum II
Professor Joseph Cunningham Spring, 2016
E-mail: (x63304) M, 9-11:50 Office Hours: M, 130-3; Th, 11-1150AM; or by appointment Brown 115
Course Objectives and Learning Goals
Welcome to the second semester of this experiential learning practicum and pair of 4-credit seminars (Psyc 161 a&b) that are designed to integrate your community service experience with that of your seminar peers, and with theory and research in clinical psychology. In our seminar discussions, individual journals, exams, oral presentations, and self-evaluation papers, we will draw upon empirical research, case studies, fiction, poetry, journalism, and memoirs to explore scientific and humanistic perspectives on the helping role. We will exchange accounts of our personal helping role experiences in supporting people with and without clinical diagnoses, emphasizing the perspective of everyday human challenge and adaptation on how we understand the helping role.
Specific learning outcomes include:
1.) Reflect on our personal developmental trajectory, and its relation to our interest in the helping role.
2.) Learn to listen to a person’s story without prejudice, apart from our reactions or the person’s diagnosis, to identify the person’s strengths and challenges, and to evaluate in subsequent interactions and discussions whether what we’ve come to understand is what the person meant to express.
3.) Acquire a deeper understanding of our own interpersonal strengths and challenges, and their implications for assuming a helping role.
4.) Listen to and support the helping role challenges and achievements of your peers in the seminar, share your own with them, and learn about the power of peer supervision.
5.) Integrate the above skills with our understanding of evidence-based theory and research on clinical assessment, diagnosis, and treatment, and consider how they jointly impact on the provision of behavioral and psychological support to the people with whom we are working.
6.) Design and implement a learning activity for your peers, such that their participation will enable them to discover some aspect of being an effective helper that you have found to be important in your own helping role this year.
Course Requirements
As you are aware from last semester, the unique nature of the practicum commitment to your fellow students and to the practicum agency includes your waiver of the standard option to drop the course.In undertaking this training, you are assuming serious and substantial responsibilities. Your practicum placement is a job, for which you are compensated with training and supervision. Your supervisors and co-workers expect of you what they expect of each other —- compassion, honesty, intelligence, effort, dependability and mutual support. These characteristics are also essential to your seminar participation, which itself requires a commitment to open, often uncomfortable examination of your interpersonal strengths and weaknesses.
The above demands are in addition to the rigorous academic course requirements -- a lot of reading, analysis and discussion; more reading; written examinations; seminar presentations; research papers. In short, your workload in each of these courses exceeds that of the conventional course, qualitatively and quantitatively. Your field supervisors will provide you and me with a formal written evaluation of your practicum work sometime during the month of February, and at the end of this semester I will write a personal letter to you which willreview my impressions of your strengths and weaknesses in the helping role. However, these aspects of evaluation and feedback do not impact on your course grade, which is determined solely through my evaluation of your written and oral contributions in the seminar.
In conjunction with the site-based work and reflection assignments in this course, you also have the opportunity to enroll in the two-credit EL94a course this semester. We will review forms for signing up for that in our first class.
Finally, if travel to your placement site involves expense for public transportation or gas, you can apply for some partial reimbursement from the Experiential Learning Program by e-mailing Daniel Langenthal ().
Texts and Reading Assignments
Frank, J.D. (1993). Persuasion and healing: A comparative study of psychotherapy. (3rd Ed.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins.
Robinson, M. (1980). Housekeeping. New York: Picador.
Saks, Elyn R. (2007). The center cannot hold: my journey through madness. New York: Hyperion.
Trull, T.J. & Prinstein, M.J. (2013) (8th Ed.). Clinical psychology, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Cengage.
Watzlawick, P., Weakland, J., & Fisch, R. (1974). Change: Principles of problem formation and problem resolution. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
The above required texts are available in the university bookstore. They will be supplemented periodically by reserve readings which will be announced in class. A tentative schedule for discussing the readings is presented below.
Meetings Topics/Readings
1/20 (‘Deis Mon.)Reunion; Overview
1/25Saks
2/1Saks/T&P, Ch. 11-15
2/8Saks/ T&P, Ch. 11-15
2/15 NO CLASS – FEBRUARY RECESS
2/22Frank; Ch. 16-20; JOURNAL
2/29Frank; Presentations
3/7Watzlawick, et. al.; Presentations
3/14Watzlawick, et. al.; Presentations; JOURNAL
3/21 Robinson; Presentations
3/28 NO CLASS – MARCH RECESS
4/4 Robinson; Presentations
4/11 Presentations
4/18 Presentations
4/25 NO CLASS – SPRING RECESS
5/2 “Good night, good night. Parting is such sweet sorrow.”
~ William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
5/6 SELF-EVAL PAPER DUE AT NOON
Requirements:
Your course grade will be an average of the following:
Participation in discussion and group supervision 20%
Presentation 40%
Self-Evaluation (Due May 6 at 12 noon) 40%
Written descriptions of the presentation and self-evaluation projects are attached.
I encourage you to begin work on both of the projects as soon as possible. Each will require considerable revision beyond the first attempt. I will assist you in that process, but I can only follow your lead.
Presentation Project
The goal of this project is to enable your peers to achieve their own understanding of something you learned in responding to some problem or event at your practicum site. The problem or event should be significant in that you learned something from it which had a notable impact on your understanding of the helping role. The design of your project should lead the participants to their own discovery of perceptions, feelings, and thoughts which parallel those of the people involved in the event (e.g., yourself, other staff, clients) and which you believe contributed to your learning in the event. You should avoid abstract, didactic explanations or descriptions of what happened and why you think it was important until after the participants have commented on their experience. Ideally, the experience of their participation in your presentation should lead them to phenomenally discover those aspects which you believe were important about what happened. At the conclusion of your presentation, you should provide several good references from relevant research and theoretical literature on the topic.
In the past, successful projects have been achieved through a variety of formats, including dramatization, problem-solving exercises, group processing, and role-playing. Of course, you may utilize any format which you believe will be most effective. We will schedule an initial meeting to discuss your ideas for the project before the end of January, and several follow-up meetings thereafter to hone your presentation design.
Guidelines for Self-Evaluation
In preparing this project, I think it would be helpful to consider the following types of questions/issues:
1.What specific professional and/or personal goals did you have in registering for this course last Fall?
2.What additional goals did you formulate in the initial weeks of the course/practicum?
3.What was your rationale for selecting a specific practicum agency? Was that rationale implemented in the choice you eventually made?
4.Prior to beginning your practicum, what was your assessment of your relative strengths and weaknesses as a potential helping professional?
5.Prior to enrolling in the course, what were your short-term and long-term career plans? How confident or certain were you of those plans?
6.How much insight/awareness about your interpersonal and/or personality style had you developed prior to the course?
7.What was your sense of which theoretical models are most useful in mental health intervention before your practicum experience?
8.What was your sense of how intervention effectiveness might vary with different clients and different types of psychopathology prior to the course?
You might first outline some thoughts about these questions and any others which you might think are relevant. Then consider how your clinical and classroom experience during the year has changed or confirmed your thoughts in each area. Consider also whether your experience has effected your personal or professional development in ways which transcend a specific question or area. Such effects may take the form of enhancing understanding, creating confusion or doing both with respect to different domains. The point is to reflect on if and how you've changed or are changing as a result of the experience, both personally and professionally. Toward the end of the paper, you should also include sections in which: a) you critique your own performance (e.g., what did you do well and what could you have done better?) and b) you briefly relate some of your observations in the paper to your current plans for the future.
For this type of project to be successful, it is important that you work on it in intervals, between now and its due date, May 6 at 12 noon. You should sketch out some ideas, put them aside for a few days, and then return to them for revision and extension. Continue that process until you find that your need to make revision, as determined by the occurrence of new or different observations while reading what you've last written, diminishes. You are encouraged to see me to discuss any questions or problems you have in completing the project.
If you are a student with a documented disability on record at Brandeis University and wish to have a reasonable accommodation made for you in this class, please see me immediately.
You are expected to be honest in all of your academic work. The University policy on academic honesty is distributed annually as section 5 of the Rights and Responsibilities handbook. Instances of alleged dishonesty will be forwarded to the Office of Campus Life for possible referral to the Student Judicial System. Potential sanctions include failure in the course and suspension from the University. If you have any questions about my expectations, please ask.
Success in this 4-credit hour graduate-level course is based on the expectation that students will spend a minimum of 12 hours of study time per week in preparation for class (service at the placement site, readings, papers, discussion sections, preparation for exams, etc.).