17you think we’re doing this? What’s the point?” Usually someone will come up
with a compelling rationale.- Point out the resistance and talk about how it’s natural to feel a little embarrassed
or hesitant when trying out new things. - Self-disclose about your own discomfort with certain helping skills and talk
about some of the mistakes you’ve made as a genetic counselor, especially recent
ones. This will help students realize genetic counseling is not easy and that
everyone at any point in their professional development has something to learn. - If feasible, have volunteers come in to serve as patients for the students during
role-plays. Outsiders can provide influential feedback about what worked and
what didn’t during the role-play. Also, it usually is more difficult to discount a
volunteer’s feedback as opposed to a classmate’s comments. - Talk with students about the difference between helping skills training and their
other courses with respect to performance and evaluation. Brainstorm with them
ways to manage the stress and anxiety of being evaluated on their interpersonal skills
and sensitivity (see Appendix 5 for guidelines on giving and receiving feedback). - At times, you may be the only one who has a realistic or valid perception of what
happened during a role-play or other activity and how well or poorly a student
did during the activity. You will need to be tactful (especially when the rest of the
group says a student did a wonderful job). You could try saying, “Here’s another
way to consider doing it...” or “Let’s talk about the plusses and minuses of how
you responded when the patient said....”
1.4 Skills Integration
The basic skills are introduced one chapter at a time, and therefore students may have
difficulty seeing how they all fit together. You need to help them understand how to
integrate the skills into a model of helping. We recommend four activities to help
students make connections across the basic skills and broader concepts. The first
activity, Student-Generated Discussion Questions Activity (Appendix 6 ), asks stu-
dents to periodically develop questions based on the readings, classroom activities,
and their own personal reflections about genetic counseling and then discuss one or
more questions in small groups. This activity is intended to give student opportuni-
ties to critically reflect upon clinical issues that are important to them. In our experi-
ence, these questions change as the semester progresses, so we advise students
against writing all of their questions in advance. We retain everyone’s discussion
questions and attempt to address them at various times throughout the semester.
The second activity, Genetic Counseling Interview Analysis (Appendix 7 ),
involves a paper which can be assigned later in the course after students have been
introduced to most of the basic helping skills. This paper is based on students watching
a live, 50-min simulated genetic counseling session between a genetic counselor
and “patient” from outside the course. The activity and resulting paper provide
students with an opportunity to consolidate their learning and allow the instructor to
1.4 Skills Integration