WEEK 1 - what is counselling

Question 1

What shapes our understanding/definitions of counseling

Answer 1

*Experience of counselling
*Ideas from our social network
*Pop-culture – novels, TV, Movies
*Relationship with a counsellor
*How counselling is talked about at school/workplace
*Formal Study

Question 2

Why is reflective practice necessary?

Answer 2

-Essential for responsible and ethical practice – invites us to take responsibility for our actions and values

-Enables us as practitioners to learn from experience – to
question our stories

-Provides strategies to bring things out in the open & frame questions never asked before

-Challenges assumptions, social and cultural biases, inequalities & questions our own behaviours which may silence or marginalize voices of others.

-Builds confidence in our practice

-Prevents stagnation – antidote to complacency, habit and blindness

-Helps us to link theory to practice

Question 3

What is critical relfection?

Answer 3

Critical reflection is a process that involves the ‘unsettling’ of
assumptions held individually, socially, professionally, theoretically and politically that influence our lives

Question 4

Why is the inductive learning cycle significant

Answer 4

*Centers you (the participant) rather than the facilitator

*Enables us to constantly grow our practice through building
on and/or changing our behaviour as a result of an experience or input

*Research has shown that people learn best by “doing.”

*while “ideas are formed in the minds of individuals,
interaction between individuals typically plays a critical role
in developing these ideas … ‘communities of interaction’
contribute to the amplification and development of new
knowledge” Nonaka (1994)

*Overcoming this tendency to simply agree and go along
can increase the team’s access to multiple viewpoints .., a
process that stimulates critical thinking and deep learning
(Kayes, 2001).