Introduction
Improving ones own or the practice skills of others involves observing practice directly and reflecting on it with an eye to increasing its effectiveness. Steve de Shazer wrote:
"Therapists are interested in the doing of therapy and … only the observation of sessions or watching of videotapes of therapy sessions can give them the ‘data’ they need [to better understand how to do therapy and to deepen their skills]” (1994, p. 65).
We share de Shazer’s view that the direct observation of therapeutic dialogues is essential to improving practice skills because direct observation is the best way to establish what is actually happening in the interactions between a practitioner and a client.
You have spent several weeks learning the method of microanalysis and examining therapists' contributions to therapy dialogues (topic choice, formulations, questions, and grounding sequences). This week we will turn to using some of these tools to improve your own therapy or coaching skills and/or the skills of practitioners you may be supervising or mentoring. The readings for this week (Smock Jordan, 2010; Taylor & Simon, 2014) describes ways of using a microanalysis of learners’ video clips of their own therapy sessions to enhance their skills in therapy, supervision, or mentoring. These sources focus on teaching the skills of solution-focused brief therapy, but the activities they describe are easily adaptable to training any therapy model as well as to coaching or related practices.
Learning Objectives
- Use microanalysis and your knowledge of topic choice, formulations, and questions to improve your therapy, coaching, supervision, or mentoring skills
- Learn Smock Jordan’s approach to improving these skills by comparing brief excerpts from the video of a session.
- Apply Taylor and Simon's notion of "opportunities analysis" when constructing alternative possibilities for responding to the client or supervisee in the chosen excerpts from the video of a session.
- Practice identifying the transformations in the formulations and composing alternative formulations when it seems this would improve skills.
- Practice identifying the embedded presuppositions in the questions and composing alternative questions when it seems this would improve skills.
Readings
Smock Jordan, S. A. (2010). Evidence-based supervision: Identifying successful moments of
SFBT. In T. S. Nelson (Ed.), Doing something different: Solution-focused brief therapy practices (pp. 197-200). New York: Routledge.
Taylor, L., & Simon, J. (2014). Opportunities: Organizing the solution-focused interview. Journal of Systemic Therapies, 33, pp. 62-78.
This reading illustrates a procedure for one person listening to each utterance of another person (in this case, a client) in a purposeful, detailed fashion so as to construct responses that influence the dialogue in a solution-focused direction.
Exercise
The exercise for this week is to use your microanalysis skills to analyze selected parts of the role-played session you recorded for Week 13. Recall that this could be a session where you were the therapist or coach, or it could be a session where you were the supervisor or mentor or it could be a session where you explored something of interest to the person you interviewed. Be sure to do the required reading first as it will serve as a guide to the other activities.
1. Create an ELAN file and select two excerpts: (a) an approximately two to three minute segment when you felt things were going well, and (b) a two to three minute segment when you felt things were not going as well (or where you felt the client's/supervisee's/interviewee's language was more challenging to respond to in a solution-focused way). Create two tiers in your ELAN, one labeled with your role (Therapist, Coach, Supervisor, Mentor, or Interviewer) and one for the other person's role (Client, Supervisee, Mentee, or Interviewee). Complete a transcript for each segment on these first two tiers.
3. Then create six new tiers:
Tier 3: “Topic Choices”
Tier 4: "Topic Choices: Self-compliments or Alternatives”
Tier 5: "Formulations"
Tier 6: “Formulations: Self-compliments or Alternatives”
Tier 7: “Not-knowing Questions"
Tier 8: “Not-knowing Questions: Self-compliments or Alternatives”
4. Select each utterance in your excerpts, and use the third tier to do a topic-choice analysis on what you actually said. Reflect on these choices, and use the fourth tier to say why you like each choice OR to propose other choices you might rather have made.
5. On the fifth tier, select and annotate each formulation you made. Consider the transformations each formulation made, and use the sixth tier to say why this was a useful formulation OR to suggest alternatives that would create preferred transformations. Enter the alternatives on the sixth tier. (You don't need to record what the transformations were or could be. Just use your knowledge of the principles to guide your choices.)
6. On the seventh tier, select and annotate the not-knowing questions. As you know, some may contain a formulation, which will already be entered on the fifth tier. Focus here on the part that is the not-knowing question. Again, consider the embedded presuppositions in your questions, and use the eighth tier to suggest any alternative questions that may have preferred presuppositions. (As before, you don't need to record what the presuppositions were or could be.)
7. Upload your completed ELAN to the sub-folder for Week 15 in the Dropbox folder: “Uploads, IMA Online Course.”
Postings
1. Questions
a. Give one example of how your microanalysis of a topic choice, formulation, or question helped you create an alternative.
b. Was this microanalysis of your own session using ELAN useful for improving your skills? Explain.
c. If you are a supervisor or mentor, could you productively work this way with a supervisee or mentee on his or her session? Explain.
(Questions post is due by midnight Saturday evening, May 20.)
2. Comparisons
Download two other class members completed exercises in ELAN for this week. After comparing their ELANs to your own, answer this question: What did you learn from your comparisons, if anything, that goes beyond what you learned from looking at your own ELAN?
(Comparisons post is due by midnight Monday evening, May 22.)
Posting on Special Assignment (please do this post under Week 16)
Week 16 is about where you would like to go next using your microanalysis skills. Two weeks ago we asked you to be thinking about possibilities. We suggested the possibilities include:
- Focusing more on your own therapy practice, coaching, supervision, or mentoring.
- Or you might be interested in research, possibly leading to a thesis or dissertation.
- Or you might want to focus more closely on one of the phenomena in this course--or on what you noticed inductively in Week 14.
- Or do something completely different. . . .
This week we ask you to post on your goal in two or three paragraphs. We will then assign you to an appropriate instructor for Week 16, who will respond to your particular interest, hopefully, in a helpful and encouraging way.
PDF of Instructions
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