COUC 747 Week 5 DB Blog 5: Teaching with the Grain Example

Discussion Board Blog 5: Thread and Two Responses

COUC 747 Instruction in Counselor Education, Discussion Board Blog 5, Teaching with the Grain (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 studies are real; the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for COUC 747.

Thread

My grandfather built cabinets, and the first thing he taught me was to plane a board along the grain. Against the grain, the wood tears no matter how sharp the blade or how hard you push. Teaching is similar. Learners have a grain, patterns in how they come to understand and do things, and when we design against it, effort and good intentions are not enough. I want to suggest three ways counselor educators can teach with the grain.

First, start from what learners bring. Vella (2002) builds dialogue education on respect for adults' experience, and McKeachie and Svinicki (2014) remind teachers that new learning is built on what students already know, including their misconceptions. Most master's students arrive with years of helping friends and family, which gives them both a resource and a set of habits, such as advice-giving, that must be unlearned. A course that ignores those habits will watch them return in the first practicum session.

Second, replace long lecture with practice. When Freeman et al. (2014) pooled the published comparisons of lecture-based and active sections of college STEM courses, the active sections came out ahead by nearly half a standard deviation on exams, and the lecture sections lost noticeably more students to failing grades, a pattern that held across disciplines. The advantage appeared in every class size but was strongest where enrollment stayed at 50 or below, a size that fits nearly every counseling course I know. The study did not examine counseling, but its message about passive listening is hard to ignore. If chemistry students learn more by working problems in class, counseling students are even more likely to learn by practicing the very conversations they will have with clients.

Third, treat empathy as a skill that grows with deliberate teaching, not a trait students either have or lack. A meta-analysis of 18 randomized controlled trials of empathy training with 1,018 participants found a medium effect (Teding van Berkhout & Malouff, 2016), g = 0.63, or 0.51 after adjusting for possible publication bias. Effects were larger when trainees were health professionals or university students and when empathy was measured objectively rather than by self-report.

In a skills course, teaching with the grain might look like this: a short demonstration of reflection of feeling, immediate practice in triads, specific feedback and a second attempt, all within one class session. Lecture still has a place, but it serves practice instead of replacing it. The instructor's main work shifts from talking to watching, listening and coaching, which is also what supervisors do.

Colleagues: which practice in your own courses feels most like teaching with the grain?

Response to Priya

Priya, you wrote that you are skeptical about teaching counseling skills online, because so much of empathy is nonverbal and you worry that students practicing on video calls learn a flattened version of the work. I share part of that concern, especially for first-semester students who have never watched a live session, but the broader research on distance education suggests that the format itself matters less than the design.

Bernard et al. (2004) gathered nearly two decades of research setting distance courses beside classroom versions and coded hundreds of results on achievement, attitudes and retention. On average the two formats came out about even, but the spread was wide: many distance courses outperformed their classroom counterparts, and many did worse. Interestingly, asynchronous courses tended to favor distance education on achievement, while synchronous courses tended to favor the classroom.

For skills courses, that suggests asking which parts of practice need to be live and which can be recorded. Recorded role-plays, reviewed with timestamped feedback, may give students more chances to watch their own nonverbal behavior than a single live demonstration would. Live sessions could be reserved for the moments when immediate coaching matters most. Would your program allow a hybrid design along those lines, perhaps with one residential intensive for the skills that most depend on presence?

Response to Daniel

Daniel, you wrote that the article for this module convinced you that counselor educators need an evidence base for teaching just as counselors need one for practice. I agree, and there is a useful starting point in our own literature, even if it borrows heavily from other disciplines.

Malott et al. (2014) reviewed the evidence-based teaching literature from fields outside counselor education and organized its findings for counselor educators in three areas: developing an effective learning environment, structuring intentional learning experiences and assessing teaching effectiveness. They then discussed what those findings mean for training doctoral students to teach. Their framework fits this module well, and it is concrete enough to use in course planning, since the grain of learning shows up in all three areas: the climate students learn in, the sequence of tasks they practice and the evidence we gather about whether they learned.

One implication is that doctoral programs like ours should give students supervised teaching experience with feedback, not only coursework about teaching, much as counseling programs supervise practicum. The doctoral programs I have looked at vary widely here, from a single teaching internship to none at all. Do you think a teaching practicum with observation and feedback would have helped the faculty who taught you?

References

Bernard, R. M., Abrami, P. C., Lou, Y., Borokhovski, E., Wade, A., Wozney, L., Wallet, P. A., Fiset, M., & Huang, B. (2004). How does distance education compare with classroom instruction? A meta-analysis of the empirical literature. Review of Educational Research, 74(3), 379-439. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543074003379

Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(23), 8410-8415. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1319030111

Malott, K. M., Hall, K. H., Sheely-Moore, A., Krell, M. M., & Cardaciotto, L. (2014). Evidence-based teaching in higher education: Application to counselor education. Counselor Education and Supervision, 53(4), 294-305. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1556-6978.2014.00064.x

McKeachie, W. J., & Svinicki, M. (2014). McKeachie's teaching tips: Strategies, research, and theory for college and university teachers (14th ed.). Wadsworth Cengage Learning.

Teding van Berkhout, E., & Malouff, J. M. (2016). The efficacy of empathy training: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 63(1), 32-41. https://doi.org/10.1037/cou0000093

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