TPC Journal-Vol 9- Issue 4-FULL ISSUE

The Professional Counselor | Volume 9, Issue 4 365 help decrease learners’ anxiety about an unfamiliar learning environment (Knowles, 1975). Counseling faculty can emphasize that grades will not be reflective of learners’ self-disclosure, but they also note the role of honesty about one’s experience in facilitating growth (ACA, 2014, F.8.d.). Finally, counseling faculty can clarify appropriate faculty–student roles (ACA, 2014, F.10.; Morrisett & Gadbois, 2006). This may be particularly important in a humanistic classroom where the power differential between faculty member and student is decreased. Teaching from a person-centered perspective is not an all-or-nothing endeavor. Just as each of the attitudes of a person-centered educator lie on a continuum, so do activities that may be utilized in the classroom (Rogers & Freiberg, 1994). For example, self-assessment and student-directed inquiry are on the more purely humanistic side of the spectrum while lecture and questioning are on the teacher- focused extreme. Projects, portfolios, and role-plays fall somewhere in the middle. Additionally, person-centered counseling faculty may choose to assign one self-directed project and several teacher-directed assignments for practical reasons or because of their personal comfort level. Accountability. One purpose of accountability measures, such as licensure and accreditation standards, is to confirm that individuals are qualified to provide the services they are offering, and institutions that make some statement to the public about the qualifications of an individual also have a responsibility to that public to graduate only those who meet such qualifications (Mearns, 1997). From a purely theoretical person-centered perspective, such external requirements as CACREP standards and the grades required by universities represent an external locus of control and could impede the process of learning by causing the learner to conform to external methods of evaluation (Gould, 2012; Rogers & Freiberg, 1994). Ideally, individuals would pursue learning solely out of an intrinsic desire for growth, and facilitators of learning would not have to worry with grades or formal assessments. Rogers disliked summative assessment because it implied that a person had reached an endpoint (Mearns, 1997), and person-centered educators believe growth is a dynamic process (Knowles, 1959; Rogers, 1957). However, from a practical perspective, accountability is necessary, both at the course level and the program level, to ensure CITs are adequately prepared and to protect students from programs that purport to train counselors but do not have sufficiently rigorous standards to adequately prepare their students for the work of effective counseling. CACREP standards are aimed at ensuring that counseling programs produce competent counselors. Although many practices required to meet accreditation standards, such as the use of program-wide rubrics for specific classes, are not consistent with a person-centered and humanistic approach to learning (Hansen, 2009), person-centered educators can find ways to work within this context to maintain a facilitative learning environment. One possibility is for counseling faculty to give students the learning objectives for a certain course or rubric for a key assessment and allow students to create individual projects or products that will show their competency in the learning outcomes the standard or assessment is intended to address. Another option is the use of portfolios to measure some of the learning outcomes (Barrio Minton & Gibson, 2012). These alternate assignments are not intended to be viewed as ways of circumventing the CACREP standards, but as ways of meeting them via practices that are most meaningful for students and that best facilitate their learning. Although person-centered counseling faculty have to operate in a learning environment that emphasizes external accountability requirements, they do not have to give up their approach to learning (Hansen, 2009; Mearns, 1997). Even if program policies require some specific assessments, counseling faculty have flexibility with other measures of learning outcomes. Furthermore, they can frame what they are already doing in terms that appeal to accreditation reviewers. Mearns (1997)