TPC-Journal-V5-Issue1

The Professional Counselor /Volume 5, Issue 1 115 when successful academic progress becomes an expectation defined by mastery of clearly defined basic skills. Counseling students struggle to appropriately apply these skills, while linked with timing and delivery. Counseling is a unique experience that is different from daily communications in social interactions. As counselors-in-training learn the art of counseling, they become aware of the necessity of using their skills to empower their clients to set appropriate goals. Often empowerment, a concept that focuses on clients’ ability to choose their own solutions in life situations and issues, is a lofty ideal that is difficult to define. Even the definition of empowerment is ever-evolving (Asimakopoulou, Gilbert, Newton, & Scrambler, 2012). Empowerment’s overarching theme further contributes to the complexities of the learning process for beginning students (Hill, 2005). While no one would argue the importance of empowerment or the significance of the therapeutic relationship, it also is critical that beginning students master many interpersonal skills while learning to observe, effectively attend to, and play an interpersonal role in shaping and guiding the counseling session (Ackerman & Hilsenroth, 2001; Chang et al., 2009; Jacobs, 1994; Jacobs, Masson, Harvill, & Schimmel, 2012; Meier & Davis, 2011). In fact, the second belief of Jacob’s impact therapy is that “people don’t mind being led if they are led well” (1994, p. 8). Therefore, it becomes imperative that educators incorporate logical process teaching methods in order to simplify this initial learning process, and cognitive mapping pedagogy provides that logical process. Cognitive Mapping Pedagogy A concept map is “a schematic device for representing a set of concepts and meanings embedded in a framework of propositions” (Novak & Gowin, 1984, p. 15). According to Akinsanya & Williams (2004), cognitive mapping provides an interactive teaching environment incorporating communication, group dynamics and motivation. Concept maps promote awareness of the roles of relationships within the categories and are ideal for the measurement of students’ learning (Akinsanya & Williams, 2004). Nurses have been successful in the utilization of cognitive mapping in order to build upon new concepts and incorporate these new concepts into their working framework. The cognitive mapping strategy ensures that both the curriculum and learning processes align with the nurses’ practical application of patient care (Akinsanya & Williams, 2004). Counselor educators, in an initial basic skills course, focus on improving how students understand their basic counseling skills and navigate their individual learning styles. The counselor educator’s goal is for students to become successful counselors. Creating a classroom of trust filled with simplistic, graphic learning tools can generate a safe learning environment and reduce anxiety. “The reduction of anxiety removes unnecessary barriers to learning and to performing complex, multidimensional, and multisensory tasks, of which counseling is a prime example” (McAuliffe & Eriksen, 2002, p. 50). Furthermore, by using graphic learning tools, the counselor educator links what is in his or her mind with what is in the student counselor’s mind in order to enable the student counselor to effectively utilize past experiences with new knowledge. In other words, cognitive mapping helps graphically relate a foreign concept to prior learning experience by using experiential links between old knowledge and new learning. These experiential links create a deeper level of learning (Akinsanya & Williams, 2004). By using cognitive mapping in this research, the counselor educator forms a visual representation of the links of communication between student counselor and client. The cognitive mapping visual representation can track student counselor awareness with the communication of the client.