TPC-Journal-V5-Issue4

The Professional Counselor /Volume 5, Issue 4 467 counseling and other mental health disciplines enhances cross-discipline practice. These authors highlighted the importance of enlisting faculty representatives who are grounded in counselor and counselor educator identities, who also understand the value of interdisciplinary training and who have the interpersonal skills and expertise necessary for negotiating challenging interdisciplinary conversations. An understanding and appreciation of the interdisciplinary training protocol as a tool for enhancing professional interdisciplinary teamwork should be a core-guiding objective for counseling and all participating faculty members (Bemak, 1998), of course, but a solid grounding in one’s own professional identity also is critical. We learned that counseling faculty must invest in preparing students for participation in interdisciplinary training. The preparation process should be progressive in nature with scheduled periodic check-in sessions, particularly during interdisciplinary clinical training. In our experience, the challenge of navigating professional roles and functions during the interdisciplinary clinical training sessions was most difficult for our students. Counseling students appeared to need multiple opportunities to process their interdisciplinary practice experiences. It was most beneficial to students when the participating faculty had a clear understanding of all the training protocols and processes. Secondly, positive outcomes came from pre-coaching for skills and knowledge with students during the counseling program post-module review and skills practice review session, and encouraging them to have the confidence to speak up about their concerns, professional differences, identities, and even to volunteer to demonstrate their skills when in the interdisciplinary training sessions. This is consistent with the Reubling et al. (2014) findings in a study comparing students’ attitudes and perceptions in pre- and post-training experiences. Our experience highlighted the value of openly discussing the differences in professional and social capital in society and the impact that those differences have on students’ approaches to the interdisciplinary training experience. Such discussions helped boost students’ confidence to acknowledge issues that they avoided addressing in the initial phases of the training. Having a clear feedback loop from students to faculty, so that faculty can provide feedback to fellow collaborators at subsequent interdisciplinary training sessions, was particularly beneficial. Finally, having a clear protocol for interventions with non-cooperative and challenging students was beneficial. For example, counseling students were required to sign a behavior and participation contract that was submitted prior to engagement in the interdisciplinary clinical training portions of the program. The foresight by the counseling program to request this contract may have been why no counseling student was cited for behavioral concerns during the interdisciplinary clinical training sessions. There were a handful of participants in other disciplines who required intervention from their own program directors regarding behavioral concerns emerging during interactions with training faculty who were not in their discipline area. Professional boundaries. For this counselor education program’s faculty, it was necessary to have a good sense of the boundaries of engagement during the project’s initiation phases. Interdisciplinary training collaborations require much compromise in the curriculum development and training implementation phase; we wanted to be sure that the interdisciplinary training program would enhance rather than compromise the training experience of counseling students. We were consistently willing to compromise and accommodate other disciplines’ perspectives, so long as training processes that are essential to the training of counselors were incorporated in the interdisciplinary training protocol. This is consistent with the recommendations of Nancarrow et al. (2013) regarding interdisciplinary training participants needing to understand and respect the professional roles, functions and boundaries of collaborators.