This chapter examines performing effective student evaluations, evaluating a student’s strengths and weaknesses, and documenting student progress, including sample forms and templates. It also provides coaching tips and interventions for poorly performing students. As the instructor it is our fundamental responsibility to provide daily assessments on your students’ progress. Verbal feedback must be given immediately and often. Always start with the positive aspects of the students’ performance. It is our responsibility to write down our immediate thoughts and observations of each student in an objective, anecdotal format after any interaction, whether positive or negative. Sample action verbs will help to describe the students’ actions while in the clinical setting. The chapter also helps us to identify and address behaviors or patterns of behavior that require documentation and intervention. It offers some helpful tips to use when counseling students regarding their performance deficiencies.

This chapter discusses the type of group work using rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) principles and practices. Several methods of psychotherapy, such as psychoanalysis, employ group therapy for expediency reasons. REBT distinctly uses an educational rather than a medical or psychodynamic model. REBT includes a number of role-playing and behavior modification methods that can be done during individual therapy sessions but that are more effective in group. Clients who are shy or who have interpersonal problems are particularly encouraged to join a group because it is often more therapeutic for them to work out their problems with their peers than to work on them only with an individual therapist. In cognitive-behavioral therapy in general and in group REBT in particular, the activity level of the therapist tends to be high. Group REBT and counseling especially have intrinsic disadvantages and limitations when compared to more individualized REBT proc.

This chapter focuses on the unique characteristics presented by three special populations that frequently receive psychotropic medications–children and adolescents, older adults, and women who are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. It is intended to sensitize social work practitioners to the unique considerations frequently encountered with these populations and to highlight the importance of combining medication therapy with counseling when addressing the mental health needs of these special populations. The chapter also provides a sampling of some Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (5th ed.; DSM-5) diagnoses frequently identified in children and highlights the medications commonly used to treat the mental disorders. Assessing and determining the medications to use to assist children and adolescents suffering from a mental disorder is never easy. Two conditions that present a particular challenge for prescribers and other members of the collaborative team are attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and conduct-related disorders.

This chapter provides an overview of the medication issues and concerns social workers will encounter when treating clients who suffer from depression. It focuses primarily on major depressive disorder but can be applied to any mental health disorder characteristic of these depressive symptoms. Strategies are presented to better understand how these disorders are treated pharmacologically including the short- and long-term efficacy, side effects, and other important considerations designed to increase the effectiveness of social work intervention strategies. The National Association of Social Workers (NASW) Code of Ethics requires social workers to remain competent by staying abreast of the latest research in their area of specialty (NASW, 2008b). Social workers must be up to date on how antidepressant medications affect the depressed client's biopsychosocial functioning and how these medications influence the course of counseling.

This chapter discusses some of the basic ideas that the author drew upon while blending the solution focused and narrative therapy models. The blending of the two models has resulted in a practice that is both meaningful and action oriented. The author refers to this new model as Solution-Focused Narrative Therapy (SFNT). The narrative therapy approach focuses on the belief that a person’s perception of himself or herself results from many things including the person’s values, the values of others, the present context, or story that is in place. The context, or story within which the problem exists, influences how the person interacts with others, senses her place in the world, and leads her life. For example, the author worked with a couple who sought counseling to improve their communication with each other.

The goal of grief therapy is somewhat different from the goal of grief counseling in that grief therapy seeks to help the bereaved individual identify and resolve the conflicts of separation that preclude resolution of the mourning tasks. The procedures for grief therapy are rule out physical disease, set up the contract and establish an alliance, revive memories of the deceased, assess the mourning tasks with which the patient is struggling, deal with affect or lack of affect stimulated by memories, explore and defuse linking objects, help the patient acknowledge the finality of the loss, help the patient design a new life without the deceased, assess and help the patient improve social relationships, help the patient deal with the fantasy of ending grieving. The three types of change that help to evaluate the effectiveness of grief therapy are changes in subjective experience, behavioral changes, and symptom relief.

This chapter presents information about the theory of mourning and why it is necessary, and addresses issues of differential diagnosis between normal and path logical grief. It presents a variety of loss types that induce a grief response including the loss from a sudden death, the loss of a job, and losses from surgery such as amputations. One aspect unique to author’s program proved to be a very successful training technique. The author had developed a series of vignettes based on cases in his files that represented a variety of situations and grief-related issues. Twenty of these are included in this chapter and can be used in training. Most of the vignettes are set up to address the issue of grief counseling, not the issue of grief therapy. Grief therapy is a much more complicated procedure and cannot be addressed in such an abbreviated manner.

Counseling adults in transition is an exciting and challenging job that gives us an opportunity to function at many different levels. Advocacy, consulting, and program development are three ways that one can assist the clients with their transitions–through changing the situation, enhancing their sense of self, developing more supports, and increasing the strategies available to them. Some counselors now work in the corporate world, and others are community organizers; some counselors design programs in colleges and universities, whereas others develop workshops for senior centers; some walk the halls of legislatures as lobbyists, whereas still others talk about mental health on talk shows, on their own or others’ blogs, on twitter, or other internet sites and social media. This chapter talks about a variety of ways counselors can do these things, including consulting, developing programs, and advocacy.