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The knowledge and skills acquired in this course are designed to address areas of competence required for registration as a counsellor and will be relevant to similar standards in most allied health disciplines. Modern counsellors typically integrate skills and theories from a range of models rather than being devoted to a single psychotherapeutic approach. This course helps students understand factors associated with client change that are common to all psychotherapeutic modalities as informed from decades of outcome research. This broader knowledge of what are referred to as ‘common factors’ provides counsellors a major conceptual framework to customize treatment in ways that maximize these factors. Counsellors also need exposure to the range of counselling modalities and methods that can be customized to different therapists, clients and treatment contexts. Different counselling modalities target different areas for intervention, whether this be via thinking, feeling, behaviour, insight, experience or other processes. The course provides students with an integrative framework, and exposure to the major theories so that students can begin constructing their own practice framework.

This course introduces to students the common factors of successful counselling. Students are introduced to the major counselling theories available and will identify and justify their own approach to developing a framework of practice.

This course contains a mandatory four-day residential school (30 hours) and 10 hours of mandatory online synchronous workshops, as per the program accreditation agreement between UniSQ and Counselling accreditation bodies. Non-compliance with this attendance requirement will result in the student not being able to pass the course.

On successful completion of this course students should be able to:

1. Describe and discuss the factors common to successful counselling outcomes
2. Critically discuss outcome research on topics related to therapeutic change;
3. Critically evaluate counselling theories including their strengths and weaknesses;
4. Display an in-depth understanding, applied skills and knowledge, and analysis of psychotherapeutic modalities and key interventions.