Personal Growth

You will be expected to produce deeply reflective, highly professional, and relevant journal reflections. It is important to know the line between deep reflection of personal growth and revealing too much information about your personal life. Be cautious about what you share as it pertains to your personal life and attempt to focus the reflection on who you are as a therapist. The person of the therapist is a very important developmental process for beginning therapist. It is a time for students to go deep and get to know themselves and how “the self” impacts and is impacted by the counselling experience. If you are not sure how to write a reflective journal, research it. There is a great deal of good information on the internet that will help guide you
Reference Support: For each Reflective Journal assignment, provide reference source support for your journal reflections from combined learnings from the Consultation Seminars, Supervision, scholarly readings, your personal reflections, and client sessions (remembering to leave out any client identifiers). For each resource reviewed, include in-text citations in the body of your writings and include a References list at the end of the Journal. Use APA current formatting.
The Reflective Journal has a three-fold purpose:

1. Your reflective journals help in the development of the person of the therapist in terms of recognizing and realizing who you are amidst this work, where you can get triggered, and where you may have personal biases that could interfere with your work with a client.
2. Your reflective journals give you a chance to interact with course material includ-ing the seminars, self-directed reading and researching, self-assessments and any assignments that have occurred. It provides you with the opportunity to syn-thesize your internal development with supervision and evidence-based prac-tice.
3. Lastly, the reflective journals give you a place to process through areas of struggle, identify triggers, and ask questions about how to deal with specific populations
   Rubrics:
   Content Reflection: Reflection always demonstrates a high degree of critical thinking in applying, analyzing, and evaluating professional progress. Insightful and relevant connections made through contextual explanations, inferences, and examples. (40)
   Professional Growth: Conveys strong evidence of reflection. Expresses many ideas, supported effectively by relevant evidence or rationales.Demonstrates significant professional growth and awareness of deeper meaning through inferences made, examples, well devel-oped insights, and substantial depth in perceptions and challenges.Synthesizes current expe-rience into future implications. (40)
   Writing Quality: Written at the graduate level. Writing is clear, concise, and well organized with excellent sentence/paragraph construction. Thoughts are always expressed in a coherent and logical manner. No errors in grammar, punctuation, usage, or spelling. No colloquial lan-guage used.(20)

Reflective Journal Central focus
As I round up my practicum, I am having mixed feelings (have really learned enough in my almost two and half years in schools considering the competition and obstacles faced by those who graduated before me and are still struggling being employed or starting private practice…Confused’. This robbed off on my service delivery as a counsellor at some point.
At the same time, I am being encouraged by all the various client’s population I have seen in the last 6 months and the number of hours I had put-in to earned my graduation and the various trainings both from my site supervisor and practicum coordinator including my professional colleagues.
Overall, keeping a positive mindset with continuous development under supervision will keep has become my watchword.