Reflective practice criterion 6 - video transcript

Karen Lloyd: We are going to start looking at the reflective practice criterion now. From here on in it is very important that you reference what you're submitting to us to the BACP criterion. When I talk about referencing, I mean referencing to our criteria I don't mean providing academic references. You don't need to do that, some people do put them in and you're welcome to put them in if you feel it’s supporting something that you're saying but it's not necessary. But you must reference to the criteria and for criteria 6 and criteria 7 you have a maximum of 900 words for each of those sections, for criterion 8 you have a thousand words [now 1,400 words], and for criterion 9 which is the case material you have got a total of 3,000 words.

Now if I can offer you a hint or a tip here what we want you to do, it is to reference each of these sections as stand-alone sections. We do ... we look at the whole application form when we are assessing but when you're writing your submission for criterion 6 we only want you to reference to criterion 6. When you're submitting the part of your application about your self-awareness and you're writing about criterion 7 we only want you to reference criterion 7. That may become clearer once we go onto the rest of the application.

Someone is looking a bit puzzled there, but sometimes people cross reference between the different sections and we don't want you to do that. Criterion 6 is about your CPD activity and we would like you to tell us about one CPD activity that you have undertaken in the 12 months prior to applying for accreditation.

So it must be within that 12 month calendar period. If you're submitting your application today and today is 9 March 2015 you must have done this activity since 10 March 2014. For 6.2 we are asking you to tell us about your rationale for undertaking that activity. So there must be some relevance to your practice for doing it, why did you decide to do it to undertake that training?

Then for criterion 6.3 we’re asking you to tell us how the learning taken from, or the learning development taken from the activity has subsequently been applied to your practice in the counselling room. So can we have a look at this particular criterion in a bit more detail?

So thinking about the CPD that you have undertaken in the last 12 months, what sort of things might you be able to use?

Delegate: Workshops.

Karen Lloyd: Workshops, good yes.

Delegate: I'm just thinking is it ok to use books for CPD?

Karen Lloyd: Reading, yes.

Delegate: Conferences.

Karen Lloyd: Conferences, yes.

Delegate: Online resources.

Karen Lloyd: Good yes. A lot of people are doing some development online these days. So anything like that. Somebody mentioned reading. If you are going to use reading as your activity in the last 12 months then, because we need to know the date of the activity, you will have to give us broadly the date on which you did the particular piece of reading or research that you were doing.

You can use longer courses if they didn't form part of your core practitioner training. If you've already met the 450 hours eligibility criteria for applying and you've gone on to do another piece of training since then, like a master's for example, you could use that for criterion 6 if you wanted to.

Now when we come to criterion 6.2 we’re asking you to give us your rationale for choosing the activity in relation to your practice, and what we want to know is the reason why you chose to do this piece of training. I don't know about you but I quite often get things coming into my mailbox that sounds really interesting and you know it might be a bit of training that's being run in Tuscany or somewhere like that and I think that just sounds lovely, but actually can I justify doing that training to myself in terms of the impact is going to have on my practice?

If it’s not relevant to my practice then I may still choose to do it but actually what we're interested in for accreditation is how you are continuing to develop your skills and knowledge for the benefit of your clients, you know, once you've graduated. Ok? Then for 6.3 we want you to tell us how the activity has influenced your counselling practice in the counselling room. So you've got 900 words for criterion 6 and I would suggest that you need to use a larger part of your word count for criterion 6.3. So 6.1 really just a couple of sentences for you to tell us about the activity and give us the date.

Then 6.2 a little bit more about why you chose to do this CPD activity with relation to your training. What relevance does it have? 6.2 We want you to tell us the reason that you decided to do that piece of training, or that development activity, what relevance does it have to your counselling practice. Then for 6.3 you might write a little bit more because here we want you to tell us how the learning from that development activity has been used in support of your clients in the counselling room.

Now talking about pitfalls that people fall into, sometimes a mistake people make is that they use far too much of their 900 words telling us about the activity. So someone may, for example, decide to tell us that they did some CBT training and they occasionally use, you know, 700 words then telling us what CBT is. Now what we are interested in is why did you choose to do this development activity in the first place? Then how have you applied what you’ve learnt from that activity in your counselling practice? If you're thinking about your 900 words I would weight it so that the larger part is spent on application to practice.