TPC Journal V8, Issue 2 - FULL ISSUE

204 The Professional Counselor | Volume 8, Issue 2 session is “to make covert communication overt” (Bradley et al., 2001, p. 103). The process and goal of IPR mutual recall sessions significantly influenced the development of DDR. However, the two are distinct in that IPR mutual recall sessions involve the examination of counseling sessions, whereas DDR involves a recorded discursive reflection on the counseling process between the supervisee and the client that can then be reviewed during supervision. Reflecting teams. The reflecting teams grew out of Anderson’s (1990) work as a family therapist. Essentially, the reflecting team lifted the veil on the reflections and dialogue among a team of therapists regarding the clients’ family therapy so that the clients could hear, interact with, and benefit from those reflections. This radical restructuring of the roles and barriers among and between all involved in the therapeutic process—the therapist, the clients, and the reflecting team—represents a deep egalitarianism that honors all voices and acknowledges each with great inclusivity. Importantly, the family and the therapist benefit from the multitude of reflections, perspectives, conjectures, and solutions generated from various participants (Bernard & Goodyear, 2014). The development of DDR was strongly influenced by the reflecting team attributes of egalitarianism and attention to a multiplicity of perspectives. Our efforts to develop DDR using reflecting teams were largely based on our intent to create an approach that demystifies the counseling process for our students and their clients. The use of DDR involves students and clients as partners who collaboratively contemplate counseling and reflective processes. Furthermore, DDR provides them with the perceptions and reactions of others beyond the supervisee in order for them to be better able to become more active participants in their own therapeutic process rather than relying on one sole “expert.” Moving Toward DDR in Practice DDR evolved from the programmatic use of other modes of developing reflective practitioners. It is the belief of the current authors that the narrative behind the evolution of DDR is important because it highlights and parallels the same collaborative-discursive reflection that we believe this approach embodies. Through collaborative-reflective inquiry into our own supervision processes, faculty and students in our field experience courses gradually developed reflective practices and modes that eventually became what we now refer to as DDR. As described above, like many other programs, we utilized written reflective journals as a supervision tool for a few years. Our use of written reflective journals was initially motivated by our desire to encourage student development toward becoming more reflective practitioners as well as to address the temporal limitations of supervision. This was based on our assumption that reflective insights do not occur exclusively during supervision sessions with faculty, whether those supervision sessions are individual, triadic, or group sessions. By integrating written reflective journals within our field experience courses, we believe we create opportunities for students to reflect on their experiences and document those reflections virtually any time they occur. These written reflective journals can then serve as focal points during subsequent supervision sessions, or they can remain a method of written discourse between the faculty supervisor and the supervised student beyond the important time spent during more traditional face-to-face supervision. The positive response that our faculty received regarding the use of written reflective journals, coupled with the enthusiasm students demonstrated for other tasks utilizing digital video, encouraged our faculty to explore the use of digital video as a mode for reflective journaling rather than writing. We also were motivated to explore the use of alternative media for reflective journals by challenges we perceived regarding the use of written reflective journals. Specifically, as a faculty, we were concerned