Reflective practice

At the Confident Futures class today we did a group exercise where someone (Jurg) was asked to think of a problem they'd encountered on the course, present it to the group, then the group asked the him questions, whilst being really careful not to offer their own opinion. Once quite a number of questions were asked, Jurg then said how his thinking had moved on about the problem just based on the questions we'd asked. We were then also allowed to offer limited suggestions, the point being that Jurg was to come to his own solutions, not ours.

I think the exercise was useful for everyone as although it wasn't our problems being addressed it offered new insights into a situation someone else had experienced, and I certainly got some food for thought from it.

It struck me that this would have been a brilliant technique to have used throughout the course as a sort of debrief after interviewing, placements, groupwork etc. We would all learn from each other's experiences.

life space drawings

I thought this was such a powerful tool to have available and am really keen to try it out in practice. What I am intrigued about is how different people will react to it. For example would some of my accountant friends feel able to sit and draw pictures or would they be more comfortable with some kind of numerical based approach - maybe rating different aspects of their lives then taking it from there. I actually thought having to draw gave the freedom to think about things in quite a different way, and allowed me to put things down on paper that I wouldn't have wanted to verbalise.

Centigrade interviews

I found my Centigrade interviews a bit sad in some ways as it just seemed like the pupils I saw hadn't really absorbed much from whatever careers education they had received. They really seemed just about as clueless as I was at that stage, although at least I had the excuse of really having received next to no careers guidance. (The careers adviser at our school did a talk to our maths class about becoming an actuary. Even with my very limited knowledge of the world of work at that stage I knew I had as much chance of that happening as I did of becoming an astraunaut! He really lost all credibility after that talk as far as I was concerned.)

Anyway the first girl was swithering about medicine, nursing, pharmacy, or bio-chemistry. Fair enough partly it depended on grades but she didn't seem to have any idea of whether a job working with people in a caring profession was what she wanted or whether she'd prefer to be behind the scenes with very little people contact. I just felt that was a really fundamental thing to know before having to make a decision. I know they are so young and its very difficult but it would be good if school kids all got some kind of exposure to different work experience and knew a bit more about who they actually are before they leave school. I was wondering if kids at private schools are the same at that stage or if they are more self aware, from the opportunities and activities they get to take part in. Maybe its a big ask I'm making but there just seems an awful lot of potential for mistakes to be made in career choices if you leave school not knowing much at all about yourself. Maybe more focus should be put on this rather than filling in applications forms and other activities further down the decision making process.

Professional ethics

Sorry to wind the clock back a bit but I've been meaning to post something on professional ethics. I do find it pretty alarming that there isn't a proper code of ethics issued by the ICG. I also find it really worrying that some of the existing codes in place for counsellors can be seen to be just for the protection of the professional themselves. A well written code of ethics shouldn't be about that at all. It should instead highlight danger areas and potential pitfalls that we could get ourselves into that might compromise our integrity, independence and professional opinion. When integrity, independence and our objectivity go out the window that's when we're not doing our job properly, and the client isn't getting the experience that they deserve.

I think a new much more comprehensive code of ethics for careers guidance needs to be welcomed, yes we need to read it carefully and not just take it at face value, but if its been written properly then we don't need to be overly cynical about it.