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 tasks focus on facilitating the individual development of students as therapists.

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 Assessment 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 the 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 students' observations and emotional responses, they develop their capacity to manage their emotional reactions and improve flexibility and emotional self-regulation, thus developing their clinical decision-making. The journal keeping task contributes to improving students' cognitive-relational functioning, developing their capacity to manage their 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, 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 competencies which under-pin 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, 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 therapist: 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 students are in a reflecting team for the clients: describe and evaluate how they experienced and contributed to the reflecting team process, iii) where students are in a reflecting team for the therapist: describe and evaluate their contribution to the reflective dialogue. In each review identify the personally relevant moments, themes, strengths and challenges that were experienced. Apply appropriate evaluation instruments, such as the System for Observing the Therapeutic Alliance (SOFTA). The SOFTA provides research informed support to evaluations of the 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: Presentation of learning from readings participation in reflecting team and live supervision, Pass/Fail

This task requires students to identify themes in their learning process and succinctly present a summary to their colleagues. This task builds a number of core Family and Systemic Theray competencies requiring meta-cognitive skills. It is very challenging to observe oneself while in-the-moment attending to the processes unfolding in the session, however it is an essential competency that family and systemic therapists need to develop. This task focuses students on and develops ‘split attention’ to both being attentive to the process in the session while attending to ‘what am I doing, how well am I doing it’ and ‘what do I do next’? This task provides students with authentic practice of these Family and Systemic Therapy competencies, and shares their observations with colleagues by describing what and how they are learning. It enriches student learning at multiple levels. The discipline of summarising the themes of the learning process and producing a coherent and succinct narrative is an analogue for systemic formulation, within the larger training group, which provides students with both additional practice and valuable feedback.

This task allows students to practice core Family and Systemic Therapy competencies and genuinely builds their confidence and generates change within themselves, and adds to the richness of learning for their colleagues. It can be directly translated to students work with families.