Question – What concerns would you have about school rankings like those of the Fraser Institute based on achievement test results? If you are passionate about education and feel like you need some quick adrenaline check out this video by the same organization. Holy not educators Batman…

Here are some thoughts I expressed on this.

Point 1 - Academics are only a fraction of what makes a good school. As a parent and an educator, I am most concerned that my own kids and my students learn how to learn and how to love learning. While some fundamental skills are undoubtedly necessary, I would argue a case for the “intangibles” of a school as making the key ranking differences.

Such typically unconsidered factors would include: how interested are students (yes even high school) in going to school. How all school community members would rate the rapport between faculty and students. How satisfied the teachers are with their jobs. The quality and number of the extracurricular activities offered. The access the school provides to technology and web 2.0 tools. How varied the classroom practices are. Among others…

Point 2 - If the goal of education is to create people who perform well on standardized tests, then a system that is oriented toward that outcome is exactly what should be created. Performing well on standardized tests, however, is a near useless life skill as far as I am concerned. At this point, I am almost sick of the hype around 21st century education but considering the arcane nature of ranking schools based solely (soulessly) on test performance doesn’t the following make more sense?

“21st century education is flexible, creative, challenging, and complex. It addresses a rapidly changing world filled with fantastic new problems as well as exciting new possibilities” (Possibilities for 21st Century Education, 2008).

I am not worried about professional evaluation. I can teach students to do well on a test or I can help people develop into imaginative, motivated, voracious learners who know how to learn what they will need to know when they create the future. Unfortunately the differences between the two with regard to style of teaching, learning, and what it means to perform do not work well in tandem. One is teaching people how to succeed in a box that was created in the past. The other is teaching people how to succeed outside the box that hasn’t been created yet.

Possibilities for 21st Century Education. (2008). Retrieved July 05, 2010 from 21st Century Schools: http://www.21stcenturyschools.com/​what_is_21st_century_education.htm.

Images: As far as I could tell these images are open source. If I am mistaken please post a reply to this post indicating that and I will take them down.

One potential impact this holds for counselling is that we are possibly more attuned to each others’ subtle shifts in mood but further removed from an actual experience of each other. This mode of existence may leave a therapeutic domain that relies on such fundamentals as empathy and understanding deficient in the millions of opportunities to practice and hone these skills.

Bergum & Dossetor (2005) proposed that:

While not obvious in this short quotation, this comment was primarily a response to a detached pathological view of therapy work. I offer that it is also a useful response to an expanding interpersonal culture with increasing rates of interaction but arguably decreasing intimacy. To me, the idea of deep and meaningful interaction is akin to “presence” as pointed to over two thousand years ago by the questions of Lao Tsu in the Tao-Te-Ching.



Can you coax your mind from its wandering
 and keep to the original oneness?
Can you let your body become
 supple as a newborn child’s?
Can you cleanse your inner vision
 until you see nothing but the light?
Can you love people and lead them
 without imposing your will?
Can you deal with the most vital matters
 by letting events take their course?
Can you step back from you own mind
 and thus understand all things?

Counsellors must work to be more and more helpful amidst a decline of certain forms of intimacy.  A look at modern day idea of embodiment against a backdrop of a Taoist interpretation of presence offers us meaningful direction and insight into where we should be placing our emphasis.

Bergum, V.,  & Dossetor, J. (2005). Relational ethics: The full meaning of respect. Hagerstown, MD: University Publishing Group.

Lao, T. (1995). Tao-Te-Ching (S. Mitchell, trans) Retrieved June 01, 2009 from Academic Brooklyn, academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu: http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/core9/phalsall/texts/ taote-v3.html. (Original work published 6th Century BC)

Shadow Climbing in Grass Valley

Because outcomes are so influenced by the nature of the therapeutic relationship, counsellors and counselling related research pays close attention to the development of the working alliance. To that end, Gerald Corey (2009) defined “therapy at its best is an active collaborative process of working with the client as an active self-healer” (p 18). This week for GCAP 671 Course – Developing the Working Alliance we were asked to post a response to this question.

The working alliance can be said to exist in nearly every relationship, counselling or not. Are there any situations where you might not find a working alliance?

I enjoyed this question and appreciate the responses that preceded mine citing vast differences in value systems and beliefs. I chose not to go that path with this, below is my answer to my classmates. I look forward to seeing what kind of responses I get on the grad school forum.

(Please don’t read too much emotion into this post. I wanted to present my dissent as convincingly as possible but am not on a mission about this.)

If I can take a respectful oppositional stance, I disagree with the premise of this question. Isn’t the title of this course, “Developing a Working Alliance”? If working alliances were so commonly available why would we be spending an entire unit of this program (conceivably more) on how to create them? I would argue further that to state it this way cheapens the process of cultivating an effective working relationship and denigrates our professional skill-set.

A more accurate premise for me would be to say that “nearly every relationship has the potential to become a working alliance”. In absence of that addition, I would offer in response to this question that, semantics aside, any relationship that lacks Corey’s (2009) starting eight behaviors of the therapeutic relationship would not fall into the category of a working alliance.

I’ve heard things in North America have changed since Obama came on board in the US but I can’t believe they have changed to the point where nearly every relationship contains these qualities. Prove me wrong, please. ~ Adam

Corey, G. (2008). The art of integrative counselling (2nd ed.). Belmont, CA: Brooks Cole.

We were given the following case study to analyze:

A female client presents to you with some apprehension regarding a fairly new relationship. She has been dating and spending time with someone that she thinks might be worth a longer-term commitment. On the one hand, this person shares many of the same values and beliefs as your client. The two of them enjoy time together watching movies, taking walks, and eating out. They also share some core beliefs about religion and education and the value of on-going self-development. Your client says that she is really developing feelings of fondness and caring in the relationship. On the other hand, your client is worried because her last relationship started well but ended badly and unexpectedly. She describes the last relationship as starting in much the same way, and after a period of closeness and intimacy, her last partner left unexpectedly. Now she fears that this may happen again and is scared that her reluctance to connect further might be a kind of “catch-22″ – she fears going deeper because it might fall apart, but the fear of going deeper might be the thing that leads this relationship to fall apart.

Here is a graphic depicting how the information can be tracked using Keeney’s gallery approach.

Taking this further, yesterday I entered my notes from sessions with clients into a hosted form very similar to this sample immediately following or during session. (Don’t mind the Japanese formatting on the form, its because of my region) Try punching in some details into the form. Go ahead… I made a sample to goof around with, you can’t hurt anything. The button at the bottom should say “submit” but reads in Japanese for me here so I’m not sure what you’ll see exactly.

Once information is entered into the form it automatically gets put into this spreadsheet. Obviously the spreadsheet with my client notes on it is password protected so that only I can view it, but for this demo I hosted the form so you could see how it works. I put in the “Pierre” information just so it wouldn’t be empty.

I can keep a weekly or daily log using the spreadsheet and it gives me an automatic time stamp. Like any spread sheet it enables me to sort the data by name etc as I want. We use a separate database at work but it wasn’t hard to cut and paste the content from these cells into the fields at work.

What suggestions or feedback do you have? Do you think this would be useful for you? We have wi-fi everywhere and heaps of bandwidth. I am on a MacBook so it is dead simple to open and use wherever I am. It might not work without that infrastructure..other issues?

Keeney, B.P. (2001). Improvisational therapy: A practical guide for creative clinical strategies. Guilford Press.

• You already possess the knowledge to create change in your life.
• You could walk out the front door tomorrow morning into a better reality but choose not to.
• The process involves three steps: set direction, work hard, and think positive.

photo by Brian Farrell

Setting Direction

Ask anyone what is their worst physical feature or to identify their biggest weakness and they will readily have an answer for you. I like when things connect to a believable story so let’s uphold that it’s an evolutionary trait to notice deficiency from our caveman days. It’s a realistic story after all… Grog “the caveman” noticed that there are fewer fish in the cache on the riverbank than his family requires so he sets about sorting it out ahead of the long winter. Grog notices how horrible the rain clouds look but doesn’t pay much attention to sunny days. We are still brilliant at noticing our faults but not always as capable of sorting out the solution.

Take a minute to evaluate your cache.

If you were already the person that you wish you were, what kind of person would you be?
What would you be doing if you were living as you would want?
Is what you are doing at this time taking you closer to or farther away from your goals?*

If you are having trouble coming up with answers ask yourself:

What don’t you want to think about?
What are your hesitating to address that would be important for you to consider?

Work Hard

One of the other aspects of reality to accept and harness is that change requires work. In one of Neil Richard’s, former YIS headmaster, final speeches before he left the school he said, “The secret to a lucky life is hard work.” While all work needn’t be hard, the essence of these words holds true. Change will not happen without effort. Set direction and take proactive steps toward seeing those goals to fruition.

If you don’t know what steps to take elicit help from people you trust and respect. Counsellors are also a great source of support in this way.

Think Positive

In a current study Richard Wiseman, psychologist, extensively interviewed, over 400 men and women who considered themselves either significantly lucky or unlucky. Participants kept diaries, participated in laboratory experiments and responded to various assessment instruments. Wiseman found that both “unlucky” and “lucky” people held almost no insight into the true sources of their good or bad fortunes. What he did find was that their thoughts and behavior held significant influence. I’ve mentioned behavior above in terms of working hard to make change but what of the thoughts.

Wiseman found that “Lucky people create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations”. Athletes and other performers can attest to the power of positive thinking and visualization but we often forget about this in our own lives on the day-to-day challenges we face. Think positively and positive things will happen.

Tomorrow morning when you walk out of your front door, ask yourself what choices you are making that day. Do you allow yourself time to check your cache and set better direction? Are you willing to work hard for the changes you’d like to see? Do you allow yourself to expect the absolute best?

* These questions from p34. Corey, G. (2008). The art of integrative counselling (2nd ed.). Belmont, CA: Brooks Cole.

On the way up Taruyama, Niigata

After 3 weeks holiday I just finished my first week back to the graduate school grind. This unit everyone in this program is carrying two courses – Professional Ethics and Developing a Working Alliance.

Of most interest were the core competencies of the counsellor and a case study that required us to introduce deontological and utilitarian ethical perspectives. The focus topic concerned a hypothetical decision about funding for a rehabilitation program. I jumped in early firing off some initial thoughts based on Kant’s categorical imperative.

The key question for me involves the moral acceptability, if any, of manipulating others to accomplish noble ends. Kant and Mill distinguish the two in a useful but problematic manner. The deontologists uphold an imperative not to use others as a means to an ends full stop. The consequentialists evaluate the merit of the outcome to determine the morality of the means.

I was raised in a New England home based in part on the beliefs of the founder of Quakerism, George Fox. Chief among these was that “there is that of God in everyone”. Fox’s words mandate non-violence based on the inherent worth of all people, call it God or something else. Consistent with this belief, as a counsellor based in a school, I routinely advocate for the respect, influence, and power of individual teens and youth as a group. In practice, I have no issue with fundamentally valuing “all people” and am more than willing to convince, stifle, or circumvent those that stand in the way.

This is worth discussion because I find it morally inconsistent to respect and value all people, yet unquestioningly oppose those that behave in opposition to this imperative. In other words, actions will betray the belief that people who agree with me have inherent value and those that don’t can be dealt with as they fit in as means to a better end. As such, the first week back highlighted this paradox of virtuous action that resists efforts to harm and destroy, yet simultaneously seeks to eliminate those that disagree.