Course overview
Counselling Skills 2 builds on the fundamental elements of Counselling Skills 1. Students will develop a range of discrete skills including applying counselling interventions, reviewing client progress, structuring a session, managing risk and safety issues, and beginning and ending sessions effectively. Through the practice and observation of counselling skills students will be given maximum opportunity to acquire and develop appropriate and intentional counselling responses with various real client scenarios. Throughout the semester, students will be provided with ample opportunities to practice and develop their psychotherapeutic skills. Specifically, during class time, students will work in therapeutic teams and provide counselling to a number of surrogate client presentations. Course teaching staff will observe students in these tasks and providing relevant and timely feedback. The practical assessment of clinical competencies at the end of the course is a compulsory assessment and a pass is required in order to enrol in Placement 1a in the second year of the Masters Program.
Course learning outcomes
- Demonstrate an understanding of the purpose and skills involved in all stages of the counselling process
- Identify the change of counsellor orientation and responses involved in each stage of the counselling process
- Demonstrate skills for engaging client strengths and enlisting these in the therapeutic process
- Work empathically to generate client data, to analyse the data, and to critique and rate one's own counselling responses and set goals for improvement
- Demonstrate skills for dealing effectively with common difficulties that present in counselling
- Demonstrate self-awareness at both a personal and professional level.