COUC 747 Week 2 DB Blog 2: Good to Great Example

Discussion Board Blog 2: Thread and Two Responses

COUC 747 Instruction in Counselor Education, Discussion Board Blog 2, Good to Great (thread and two responses)

Thread by [Student Name]

The blog prompt and the colleagues' posts are composites standing in for the course's own discussion board; the textbooks and published works are real; the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for COUC 747.

Thread

The business writer Collins (2001) built a bestseller around one question: why do some good companies become great while others never do? The question translates surprisingly well to counselor education. Most of us have had good instructors, organized and kind. A few were great: we still use what they taught, and we became different counselors because of them. I define a great counselor educator as one whose students learn more and practice better, and I want to suggest three habits that make the difference.

The first is facing honest evidence about learning. Collins found that great companies confronted unpleasant facts before choosing a strategy. Teachers do the same when they find out what students already know and still misunderstand. Vella (2002) makes assessing learners' needs the first principle of dialogue education, insisting that a teacher listen to learners before designing anything. Great teachers keep listening during the course, using brief checks of understanding rather than waiting for the final exam. In a counseling techniques course, that might be a one-minute written reflection after each role-play, read before the next class.

The second is deliberate practice. Chow et al. (2015) studied 69 therapists treating 4,580 clients and found that therapist characteristics such as experience, age and qualifications did not predict client outcomes, but the time therapists spent on targeted efforts to improve their skills did; the most effective therapists also reported putting more effort into reviewing recordings of their sessions alone. If deliberate practice separates the best therapists from the rest, it may also separate the best teachers: reviewing a recorded lecture, asking a colleague to observe or rehearsing a difficult discussion. Few of us were taught to practice teaching that way. Most doctoral students learn to teach by teaching, which builds experience but, as the therapist study suggests, experience alone may not build expertise.

The third is faith-informed scholarship. Jacobsen and Jacobsen (2004) argue for enlarging the conversation about how Christian faith and scholarship relate, so that faith can shape the questions a scholar asks and the care with which the scholar works, not only supply conclusions. For a counselor educator, that might mean letting a conviction about human dignity shape how we design feedback for students, as well as what we say about clients.

For my own first course next spring, I plan to start with a needs assessment, record two of my class sessions and review them with a mentor. Colleagues: what habit do you think most separates great teachers from good ones in our field?

Response to Elena

Elena, you suggested that the simplest way to identify great counselor educators is to look at their student evaluations, since students know who taught them well. I can see why that is appealing; evaluations are already collected and they give students a voice. But research raises doubts about whether ratings measure learning.

Uttl et al. (2017) went back to the multisection studies that earlier reviews had used to argue that student evaluations reflect how much students learn. In those studies, several sections of the same course take a common final exam, which allows ratings to be compared with achievement. Once the authors accounted for the small size of many studies, they concluded that student evaluation ratings and student learning are not related. Students may rate warmth, clarity and ease highly, which matter, but those ratings are not evidence that students learned more. Ratings may even reward instructors who make courses easier, which would push teaching in the wrong direction.

That does not mean ignoring students. Vella (2002) would say their perspective is essential to the design of a course. It suggests using evaluations for what they measure, such as the climate of the class, and using other evidence, such as skill assessments and supervisors' ratings of practicum students, for learning. Which kinds of evidence would you find most persuasive in your own program, and could they be gathered without adding much work for faculty?

Response to Marcus

Marcus, you wrote that great teachers teach students how to learn, not only what to learn, and that your master's students mostly reread and highlight before exams, then feel betrayed when they cannot recall the material. I agree, and research on learning techniques strongly supports your point.

Dunlosky et al. (2013) evaluated ten common learning techniques against evidence about how well their benefits hold across learners, materials and tasks. Practice testing and distributed practice, spreading study across sessions, received the highest ratings for usefulness. Highlighting and rereading, the techniques your students rely on, were rated low, even though students report using them heavily. Roediger and Karpicke (2006) showed why testing helps: students who took recall tests on prose passages retained far more of the material after a week than classmates who had spent the same time restudying, even though rereading made students feel more confident.

For counselor education, practice testing might include short recall quizzes on ethical codes or diagnostic criteria, and distributed practice might mean returning to a skill, such as reflection of feeling, in several class meetings rather than one. A final benefit is that the quizzes give the instructor the honest evidence about learning that I argued for in my own thread. Have you tried building low-stakes quizzes into a course, and how did students respond to them?

References

Chow, D. L., Miller, S. D., Seidel, J. A., Kane, R. T., Thornton, J. A., & Andrews, W. P. (2015). The role of deliberate practice in the development of highly effective psychotherapists. Psychotherapy, 52(3), 337-345. https://doi.org/10.1037/pst0000015

Collins, J. (2001). Good to great: Why some companies make the leap and others don't. HarperBusiness.

Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4-58. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100612453266

Jacobsen, D., & Jacobsen, R. H. (2004). Scholarship and Christian faith: Enlarging the conversation. Oxford University Press.

Roediger, H. L., III, & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249-255. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01693.x

Uttl, B., White, C. A., & Gonzalez, D. W. (2017). Meta-analysis of faculty's teaching effectiveness: Student evaluation of teaching ratings and student learning are not related. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 54, 22-42. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.stueduc.2016.08.007

Vella, J. (2002). Learning to listen, learning to teach: The power of dialogue in educating adults (Rev. ed.). Jossey-Bass.