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Professional Counseling

This guide is an overview of resources available for professional counseling students at Carlow University.

Requirements

Students are required to write a reflection paper based upon dispositional data provided over the course of your Tier I courses. The paper must cover the following three areas:

  • Counselor Identity
    • Describe counselor identity and the importance of counselors-in-training identifying with the counseling profession. Reflect on your counselor identity and the ethics of knowledge and skills specific to the profession. Use the ACA Code of Ethics and professional competencies in addition to other professional scholarly literature to provide evidence of your understanding of counselor identity.
  • Dispositional Data
    • Provide insight on how the professional dispositions relate to the process of becoming a counselor. Clearly state and reflect on the three (3) highest scored dispositions and the three lowest scored dispositions. Describe the dispositional area and what contributed to you receiving the score. Connect the counselor dispositions to the professional scholarly literature to support your reflection and understanding of the counseling profession and dispositional areas.
  • Areas of Professional Growth
    • Describe your professional growth since starting the program. Highlight what you have done professionally to grow and how you plan to improve your low scored dispositional areas. Also, describe your readiness to partake in the clinical fieldwork experiences. Use professional scholarly literature to show evidence of the rigor and efficacy of your professional growth and plan.

The reflection paper must be 7-10 pages in length and follow APA format including a title page, abstract, headers, in-text citations, references, etc. The paper needs to be both substantive and written in a professional manner and includes proper spelling, punctuation, grammar, page formatting, and clear articulation of ideas. Students are required to use and cite 5-7 counseling scholarly references to clarify their understanding of the profession as it relates to the dispositions. Scholarly literature includes counseling scholarly journals. Textbooks or web sources (i.e., websites) are not acceptable.