TPC-Journal-V1-Issue2

The Professional Counselor \ Volume 1, Issue 2 145 This standard, however, does not specifically describe or offer suggestions on how doctoral programs should train their students to teach or how a teaching internship should be developed and implemented. CACREP Standard II.B.2 also mandates students should be provided with opportunities to “develop collaborative relationships with program faculty in teaching , supervision, research, professional writing, and service to the profession and the public” (CACREP, 2009, p. 53l; emphasis added). Finally, as stated in the “Doctoral Learning Outcomes” section of the 2009 CACREP Standards, graduates should be knowledgeable about theory and methods related to teaching and they should have developed their own philosophy of teaching. Our interest in this topic grew out of our experiences learning to teach at the graduate level. The first author learned to teach by co-teaching with a faculty member when she was a doctoral student, even though her program did not have a formal teaching internship. The faculty member then required doctoral advisees to complete a formal teaching internship until the time her program made the decision that all counselor education doctoral students were required to complete a didactic course on teaching as well as complete a teaching internship. The second author completed a didactic course as part of her doctoral program, and did her teaching internship with the first author. Our basic assumption going into the study was that completing a teaching internship is important in helping doctoral students become competent teachers. We discussed our assumptions and thoughts about the teaching experiences of CES students before and during the current study. A review of the counseling literature uncovered no research related to how doctoral students in counselor education are being trained to teach in accordance with CACREP standards. Thus, CES students who plan to spend a significant portion of their academic careers teaching are not able to access information that describes how CES graduates are best prepared to teach, specifically what works and what does not work from the perspectives of faculty and other students. To address this gap in the literature, we conducted a preliminary study to answer the following research questions: (a) How are doctoral programs in counselor education training their CES students to teach? And, (b) What are the experiences of CES students who have completed a teaching internship? Methodology We used both quantitative and qualitative questions to answer the research questions. We collected descriptive data to investigate how counselor education programs are training CES students to teach and used general qualitative inquiry to learn about the teaching internship experiences of CES students. Our study was conducted in two phases. In Phase 1, we surveyed CES professors who were doctoral coordinators about the training their programs provide to doctoral students with regard to teaching. In Phase 2 we surveyed CES students who were completing or had recently completed their teaching internship. We could not find an appropriate survey for our study, so we developed questions for both phases of the study based on our review of the literature on teaching at the collegiate level. For Phase 1 of the study, we sent email surveys to the doctoral coordinators for all CACREP-accredited CES programs. The survey, which included the language from CACREP (2009) Doctoral Standard III.B, consisted of the following questions: (a) How many doctoral students are accepted into your program each year? (b) What is the main focus of your program (i.e., train faculty, train researchers, train supervisors and practitioners)? (c) How does your program meet CACREP Doctoral Standard II.B? (d) Does your program offer or require a didactic teaching course? (e) Does your program offer or require a teaching internship? And, (f) What other opportunities does your program offer that allow doctoral students to gain teaching experience? At the time we collected data there were 44 CACREP accredited doctoral programs, and despite repeated contacts with program coordinators encouraging their participation, we received responses from only 16 doctoral coordinators (36% response rate). For Phase 2, we sent email surveys containing open-ended questions to the ten doctoral coordinators who responded that their programs offered a teaching internship—not all programs offered a teaching internship—asking them to forward the survey to students currently completing or who had completed their teaching internship. Fourteen students responded and all questions were answered. The student survey noted we were looking specifically at the teaching internship experience, not teaching assistant experiences, and asked questions about (a) teaching experiences prior to the doctoral teaching internship, (b) what students appreciated most about the teaching internship, (c) what they found most and least helpful about the teaching internship, (d) if they had a separate didactic course related to teaching, what was most and