Assessment strategy and rationale

The three assessments used in this unit assist students to achieve the unit learning outcomes and develop the associated graduate attributes. 

Task 1: Journal Keeping: Personal-Professional Journal, Hurdle

The Journal is a comprehensive record of students' thoughts and experiences which they will use in Tasks 2 & 3. Students make this journal an emotionally honest and safe personal recording of their reflections, self-reflections, ideas, feelings, and emotional responses which emerge in the course of the interaction in the tutorial team, in role play or while viewing a video recording of a family session. This journal builds the capacity for generative and precise reflection and open-dialogue as an acquired tertiary skill. By recording and discussing observations and emotional responses with their lecturers and tutorial team, students can develop their capacity to manage emotional reactions, improve flexibility, and improve their emotional self-regulation. The journal keeping task enhances students' cognitive-relational functioning, developing their capacity to manage attentional and memory process, so that they can notice and recall sequences of interaction and place their attention on important relational episodes. This task also builds students' confidence in their unique personal knowledge, as well as their capacity to share their expertise and skills in collaborative engagement in systemic process. This task has been found to facilitate development of the complex constellation of cognitive–affective skills which under-pin development of automaticity of therapeutic responses and sound clinical decision-making in the heat of the moment.

Task 2: Major written report 3,000 word, Pass/Fail

The rationale for this assessment task is that the process requires students to begin looking for the themes emerging from their journal, as they need to do for client families. This systemic theme-recognition and reflection process is a fundamental Family and Systemic Therapy competency. Succinctly summarising and integrating these themes into a written piece of this length, is a cognitive-affective discipline and generates growth in precision of expression, consequently improving self-awareness and self-reflection on core themes that students find in their journal. These fundamental competencies need deliberate extended practice and are known to contribute to the quality of the therapeutic alliance and effectiveness of Family and Systemic Therapy practice.

Task 3: Presentation of learning from reading, tutorial team dynamics, family of origin work, Pass/Fail

In this task students practice systemic formulation and how to build a balanced alliance in the collaborative learning relational system, all of which are fundamental to Family and Systemic Therapy competency. This task requires students to draw a link between day-to-day phenomena and appropriate and succinct use of the Family and Systemic Therapy concepts and language-practices, to describe ‘what’s there’ and how students and others responded to a particular experience. This task provides students with authentic practice of these Family and Systemic Therapy competencies. In return students' learning experience is enriched at multiple levels. By producing a coherent and succinct narrative about their learning, how they are facing the dilemmas and challenges of integrating the relational language of Family and Systemic Therapy into their practices, students are generating a systemic formulation. The act of sharing their understanding, which is an analogue for systemic formulation, within the larger training group, provides students with both additional practice and valuable feedback. Research indicates that sound and genuine systemic formulations evoke respect and curiosity, while improving the therapeutic alliance, and contribute to a safe process of an ‘exchange of differences in perspective’. This task allows students to practice and genuinely build their confidence, and as an analogue of one of the core processes of Family Systems, generates change in students, contributes to the richness of learning for colleagues and can be directly translated to work with families.