Developing a Pre-practicum Environment for Beginning Counselors: Growing My Counselor Educator Self

This paper is a narrative of the challenges experienced as a faculty member in an attempt to transform the existing educational model for how school and clinical mental health counselors are trained to enter field-based clinical experiences with students and clients. The author shares the pre-practicum laboratory training as an important step towards the growth of a counselor both personally and professionally. The laboratory training addresses aspects of student anxiety and self-efficacy with relation to live supervision with use of technology, nature of feedback, reflective journaling, reflective teams, and process group experiences as pedagogical adjuncts to enhance the training and developmental needs of beginning counseling students