TPC Journal V8, Issue 2 - FULL ISSUE

The Professional Counselor | Volume 8, Issue 2 209 of metaphors in order to make personal meaning and increase understanding of these reflective practices. The use of DDR within our program has yielded a list of prompts and questions that could be used to encourage student counselors’ reflexivity around their discursive reflection artifacts. Examples might include: What did you notice about the interactions between you and your client during your discursive reflection? How has reflecting influenced your development as a practitioner? And, what would you choose as a metaphor for your reflective process as demonstrated by your discursive reflection between you and your client? Conclusion The purpose of counselor supervision has evolved to include the development of students’ reflective thinking and practices. Not only does reflection time in supervision enhance supervisees’ professional decision-making and skill development (Bernard & Goodyear, 2014), but the development of reflective practices is thought to facilitate or mediate the cognitive (Kolb, 1984; Strong, 2003), intra- and interpersonal (Holloway, 1995), and sociopolitical foundations (Freire, 1970) that support the complex roles and practices of counselors. Numerous methods to facilitate the development of reflective practices and thinking have been identified by scholars and researchers within counselor education (Griffith & Frieden, 2000; Neufeldt, 1999; Ward & House, 1998) and still more exist within a variety of disciplines in our broader educational family. Given both the importance and complexity of reflection, a broad and deep repertoire of methods available to counselor education faculty is extremely important. In this spirit, our recommendation of DDR as a method for developing counselor reflection and reflective practices is intended to contribute to the many fine approaches represented within counselor education. We believe it is important to recognize that DDR evolved from a process of reflective discourse among faculty and students with the purpose of improving and deepening our own reflective practices, particularly within supervision. In doing so, we recognize that DDR shares a conceptual pedigree with a rich family of reflection strategies and models as well as approaches to supervision. Nonetheless, the integration of two key features of DDR distinguishes it from other current methods within and beyond counselor education. First, DDR appears to be the only method for reflection that moves beyond examining only counseling experiences to reflection on the very process of reflection itself. We believe that although this extension of the reflective gaze appears complex and arduous, when implemented with adequate purpose and creativity, it can yield tremendous gains for our students, our profession, and most importantly our clients. Whether this iterative application of reflection is referred to as second order change or double-loop learning (Argyris, 1997), we believe it has the potential for profound systemic impact. In essence, reflection can ultimately differentiate learning that solves immediate problems from learning that explores the root causes of problems. Second, DDR broadens the participation of reflection on the counseling process to include clients. This represents a significant departure from most other approaches, and if reviews of discursive digital reflections include the clients themselves, then it truly distinguishes DDR. In our own application of this approach, the inclusion of clients in the reflective process seems not only to have greatly enhanced the reflective capacity of our students, but also to have nurtured those of our clients as well. Additionally, our students who have participated in DDR have noted that they believe their engagement in collaborative reflection with their clients has provided considerable context and insight into some of the interpersonal variables of the counseling relationship—particularly multicultural ones. Thus, the use of DDR as described and demonstrated within our preparation model may be of particular interest for the cross-cultural and relationship skills development of