Professional blog

The Individual Internship Plan assists you with the development of your goals and objectives for your entire field experience process. The development of the plan occurs each quarter in conjunction with the Mid-Quarter Evaluation and the Supervision Evaluation of Student forms. It is a tool that will help you assess your progress in the professional dispositions and your cultural sensitivity.

In this Assignment, you will review your individual internship plan goals and provide a self-analysis regarding the progression of your goals, barriers/challenges to your goals, and any insights you discovered about yourself as a Counselor-in-training. 

I am comfortable with Awareness of personal bias, privilege, and power is essential to counseling effectiveness. Competency in this area is further demonstrated by sensitivity to the personal beliefs, attitudes, values, and behaviors of others. The School of Counseling’s Cultural Competency Assessment (CCA) provides students with a 22 question self evaluation to measure their opportunities to develop or engage in actions that value the fundamental rights, dignity, and worth of diverse individuals, families, groups, and communities. Students can use their results to assist with honoring diversity and embracing a multicultural approach in support of unique social and cultural contexts.

The ethical use of counseling-related knowledge and skills with individuals, families, groups, and communities requires continual monitoring of effectiveness. To facilitate this practice in counseling students, the School of Counseling’s Professional Practice Assessment (PPA) adds 20 questions to the 10 key professional dispositions contained in the Student Development Assessment (SDA). These questions have students evaluate their opportunities to engage each disposition during supervised practicum and internship field experiences so they can take steps to improve their efficacy when necessary. This helps students to continually monitor their effectiveness in the ethical use of counseling-related knowledge and skills with individuals, families, groups, and communities.

Professional Practice is the application of theory and the development of counseling skills and professional dispositions under mentorship and supervision. Professional dispositions are the values, commitments, and ethics that influence student behavior toward faculty, peers, supervisors, clients, and others. Because CACREP Standards require that counselor education programs evaluate student professional dispositions, please rate your actions in each of the 10 key professional dispositions using the following scale:

Cultural Competency:

“Culture is the systems of knowledge, concepts, rules, and practices that are learned and transmitted across generations. Culture includes language, religion and spirituality, family structures, life-cycle stages, ceremonial rituals, and customs, as well as moral and legal systems. Cultures are open, dynamic systems that undergo continuous change over time; in the contemporary world, most individuals and groups are exposed to multiple cultures, which they use to fashion their own identities and make sense of experience” (APA, 2013, p. 749).
Competency is the ability “not to overgeneralize cultural information or stereotype groups in terms of fixed cultural traits” (APA, 2013, p. 749). Counselors demonstrate cultural competency through consistent application of the knowledge, personal awareness, sensitivity, dispositions, and skills pertinent to ethical work with diverse individuals, families, groups, and communities (CACREP, 2016).