SUU - Department of Psychology: Practicum/Internship

     Guidelines for Writing Practicum And Internship Papers
       John T. Ault, Ph.D.
       Last updated: 11 January 2005

Writing the three papers described briefly in the practicum syllabus normally results in many benefits. The papers guide analytic activities. They bring into focus major principles that students should carry with them into their professional lives. They consolidate learning. They turn a professional work experience into a full, formal, educational opportunity. Perhaps most importantly, the papers assist students in gaining perspective on themselves and the human service field.

Ideally, students should do all three papers for each different practicum and internship setting. Given the reality of time demands, however, the expectation is that each student does at least one set of three, quality papers for the practicum course and then one update paper for Advanced Practicum and one update paper for each internship thereafter. When, however, all field hours are completed at the time of the writing of the original three papers there is no need for update papers.

The growth paper should both summarize and illustrate what the student learned as a person and as a professional. From the information in both the professional and clinical process journals the student should be able to answer such questions as:

What did I learn about myself through being confronted with clinical, ethical, professional, or legal dilemmas?

How did I contribute to the learning and mutual support of staff and other students?

The answers to these, and other, self-generated questions, should consolidate the personal and professional growth experienced in the practicum or internship setting.

Please note: the above questions are for illustration purposes; they need not be mechanically answered in the paper.

Every quality program operates from a base of one or more models. In many cases the service models are embedded within a policy statement, regulations, memos, agency folklore, values of staff persons, directives, formal service statements, and heritage of former, influential people.

1. Therapy/Direct Intervention. Few agencies, or even discrete programs, follow a single therapy/clinical intervention paradigm, such as behavior modification, reality therapy, cognitive therapy, or person-centered therapy. Most agencies draw upon techniques from many different sources. This reality presents a significant challenge for the practicum student. Disentangling the various intervention techniques, and identifying the therapy model from which the techniques originated, can be difficult.

Students usually acquire the skills necessary to perform such analyses in PSY 4340, Introduction to Counseling and Psychotherapy. Students who have not taken that course can borrow a relevant textbook and do sufficient reading so as to be able to perform at least a minimally adequate analysis of the agency’s clinical interventions. Master level analyses is not expected, just an honest effort.

The ultimate goal of analyzing the agency’s intervention models is to identifying the compatibility of those interventions. Some clinical models combine easily into a coherent approach. The basic assumptions and goals are compatible, or at least not mutually exclusive. Far too often, however, agencies create hybrids from models that contain assumptions or goals that radically contradict each other. When this occurs, staff and clients become confused and frustrated. They typically cannot see that the cause of their lack of progress is their attempt to implement techniques originating from mutually exclusive models.

As an illustration of this problem consider a program that uses techniques from both behavior modification and reality therapy, a common combination in juvenile corrections programs. Behaviorism is grounded in determinism. Within that model, human behavior, like that of all other organisms, results from prior conditioning. What is commonly called free choice has no place within the behaviorism model. In contrast, choice and accountability is the absolute core principle upon which reality therapy is constructed. Unless carefully developed by a person who understands both models thoroughly, a program using both behavioral and reality therapy interventions implicitly affirms to its clients, “you are absolutely responsible for your choices and you are incapable of making choices.” A person rewarded and condemned for making choices she/he cannot make naturally feels the double bind and typically responds by becoming more pathological.

2. Broad Service Models. Therapy, rehabilitation, or other service procedures operate within the context of broad human service models, such as Normalization, Quality of Life, Medical, and Education/Skill-training. After examining the program from the perspective of the specific interventions, practicum students should evaluate the program from the perspective of these broader service models.

As with the specific clinical interventions, agency staff persons often mix and match these broader service models. Again, as with the specific therapeutic techniques, some of these are compatible and some are not.

These service models will be presented in class during the practicum course. Information regarding them is not available in any one textbook.

In summary, the Service Model Paper strives to identify the intervention models in use at the host agency, from specific therapies to broad models, and then evaluate the compatibility of these various models.

Theory and practice rarely coincide perfectly. Few programs consistently do what they proclaim. The comparison paper identifies, and attempts to explain, the differences between what ought to be and what is. To do this, students should consider at least the following factors:

1. Social, political, and economic context. Agencies must operate within a political, social, and economic environment. Administrators usually feel required to adapt their service models in order to survive, given "real world" factors. Thus the comparison paper should consider the influences of these outside realities. Such a perspective helps to resolve some of the disillusionment that students may otherwise feel. It may also help students clarify their own values and career objectives.

2. Personal projection. A critical skill needed to write a valid comparison paper is the ability to separate agency flaws from personal inadequacies. The Freudian defense mechanism of projection becomes especially relevant here.

Projection involves two steps. First, the person represses the unacceptable truth about his/her own self. Then the person attributes to others, or the organization, that which is abhorrent within her or himself. Often, agency staff project onto supervisors, co-workers, and the organization faults that exist more seriously within themselves than within the others whom they perceive as defective.

In writing the Comparison Paper, the student should actively question to what extent the perceived faults are external versus internal, to what extent they are real versus the result of projection. Determining which is which may be the most valuable benefit of writing the comparison paper.

To the extent that agency problems are judged as real, the student should then strive to understand and explain the reasons for their existence, for example, how much they result from social, political, or economic pressures, administrator inadequacies, owner greed, or problems intrinsic to the client population. To the extent that the perceived problems result from projection, the student should do a self-evaluation to determine the causes of the projections. In either case this paper should conclude with some suggested, corrective measures, either for the agency or the student.

After writing a satisfactory set of three papers, students in the advanced practicum and internship courses need only write update papers. These papers, in essence, complete the statement, “Since I last wrote my papers here is what I have learned.” Update papers present the new discoveries that came with additional experience. They should address all three areas: personal and professional growth, service models, and comparisons between theory and reality. Students who had completed all of their field hours at the time of writing the original three papers do not need to write update papers.

Length of a paper is not a good predictor of either its quality or its grade. At the two extremes, a two-page paper is too short and a 50 page paper is unnecessarily long.

The best way to do well is to make a point and then illustrate that point with examples. Broad generalities, which a student could have written before taking the course, are of little value. A stream of un-interpreted facts, on the other hand, is equally useless. The basic task is to sort through all of the information, discover insights, and then state those insights with a sufficient number of examples so as to justify the conlcusions.

As an illustration of this point consider the following quote from a previous student paper:

Some clinical skills that I have developed as a part of this practicum have been the ability to clarify myself at needed times as a therapist does with a client, or a friend with a friend. I have also learned to separate the personal feelings of friendship and trust from the clinical feelings of setting limits, rules, and sometimes, facing rejection. I have also found a need to see each person, especially the children, with a different perspective to find the good and the potential in the individual. All of these skills have proved useful both during the practicum, and in my personal thought, and in my relationships with others.

This student provided four pages of similar, broad general statements, never giving an illustration or concrete details. The student affirmed that she gained perspective on the difference between a clinical relationship and a friendship but never illustrated how that perspective came to her or specifically what the perspective was. She similarly affirmed that she learned to separate personal feelings from clinical feelings but gave neither examples nor details. The same problem existed with the affirmation of learning to see people as individuals. Such broad statements could easily be made by a person who never took the course.

In contrast, in the following quote the student affirmed the importance of empowering clients and the great amount of patience and self-discipline required to do that. Then she provided a detailed example of a context in which she learned and applied that principle.

Another thing that we have been working on is tying their shoes. I have learned a great deal of patience in this. Who ever knew that it could take an eight year old fifteen minutes to tie his shoes, and that’s with help. I found that if I didn’t pressure him and he could take his time he could eventually get his shoes tied. It has always been easier for his parents to not wait for him to tie his own shoes and just do it for him. I learned that children need to be given the time to do things for themselves. No matter how much longer it took I learned to never do something for Jim that I knew he could do for himself.

Both papers were the same length and neither was particularly well written. The second received a +3 while the first only a +1. The second author stated and illustrated many excellent insights, clearly fulfilling the intent of the exercise. The first, in contrast, never got beyond broad generalities, thereby demonstrating little.

Attaching the journals from which the papers are written is optional. The journals are especially helpful when the papers themselves are not clearly or completely written. Journals do not need to be typed. They are simply attached and will be returned with the graded papers. Confidentiality will be maintained by the course instructor when journals are included.

Writing the original three papers involves an extensive time commitment. The practicum, nevertheless, is typically the best time to perform these analyses. Work pressures after graduation usually exceed academic pressures before graduation.

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