Assessment strategy and rationale

The three assessment tasks used in this unit assist students to achieve the unit learning outcomes and develop the associated graduate attributes. All three assessment tasks focus on facilitating each student's individual development as a therapist.

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

The Journal is an essential and comprehensive record of students thoughts and experiences which they will use in Tasks 2 & 3.  Students need to 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 reflecting-team or while viewing a video recording of a family session. This journal builds students' capacity for generative and precise reflection and self-reflection as an acquired tertiary skill. By writing and discussing with the lecturers, supervisors and reflecting-team their observations and emotional responses, students develop their capacity to manage their emotional reactions and improve flexibility, manage anxiety and improve their emotional self-regulation, and thus develop their clinical decision-making. The journal keeping task contributes to improving 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, and their capacity to share expertise and skills in collaborative engagement in the systemic process. This task has been found to facilitate development of the complex constellation of cognitive–affective competencies which underpin development of automaticity of therapeutic responses and sound clinical decision-making in the heat of the moment.

Task 2: Folio of clinical reviews and evaluation of recorded reflecting team session (3 x each 500 words; total: 1500 words), Pass/Fail

The task of preparing a folio of 3 clinical reviews and evaluations emerging from live reflecting team sessions: i) where students are the therapists: succinctly describe and evaluate specific aspects of their process of conducting the therapy and then after watching the recording, describe, reflect on and evaluate what they notice about their own clinical work, ii) where they are in a reflecting team for the clients: describe and evaluate how they experienced and contributed to the reflecting team process, iii) where they are in a reflecting team for the therapist: describe and evaluate their contribution to the reflective dialogue. In each review identify personally relevant moments, themes, strengths and challenges they experienced. Apply an appropriate evaluation instrument, such as The System for Observing the Therapeutic Alliance (SOFTA). The SOFTA provides research informed support to the evaluations of their clinical work. The rationale here is that this process, including the evaluation instruments, alerts students to the core elements of precision and quality in the delivery of Family and Systemic Therapy treatments. Each clinical review is a 500-word piece which requires students to succinctly summarise their analysis of a specific aspect of the reflecting team process and coherently report it as reflection, self-reflection and evaluation. 

Task 3: Major written report (3,000 words), Pass/Fail

The rationale for this assessment task is that the process requires students to look for 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, thoughtful selection of what students wish to say and how they say it. This consequently improves their self-awareness and self-reflection on core themes that they 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.