Creating Opportunities for Teaching, Training & Consultation as an Aspiring Psychologist

Jingle Guy: If you are looking to become a psychologist, then let this be your guide. With this podcast at your side, you'll be on your way to being qualified. It's The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast with Dr. Marianne Trent.

Marianne: Hi, welcome along [00:00:30] to The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast. I, as ever, am Dr. Marianne Trent. Let's think today about opportunities for you to do teaching as an aspiring psychologist. Of course, it can be one of the really useful core competencies to demonstrate your readiness for becoming either a trainee clinical psychologist or other types of psychologists, too. It's really helpful if you are able to demonstrate that you've had experience of teaching information to others. It might look like actual [00:01:00] teaching. Perhaps you've done English as a foreign language stuff. Maybe you've had time in Japan or something, teaching English. Maybe you've done Camp America type stuff, and done mentoring and sort of leadership and nurturing and childcare. Or maybe you are retraining and you have been a teacher, teacher before. It might be like me. My teaching experience when I got onto clinical training had been from doing training within the private hospital that I worked in.

I was in a forensic [00:01:30] service. And I mentioned in a previous podcast episode that one of my responsibilities was doing behavioral observations for a specific tool, which we called the modified overt aggression scale. It was a little fiddly and the idea was that, actually, in order for it to be valid and for the data to count that everyone really needed to be using the tool in the same way. We were needing to make sure that they were interpreting it in the same [00:02:00] way. So the levels of aggression or violence or anger. And I seem to recall that if someone had been really, really angry, kind of ended up breaking someone's leg, for example, which would obviously be extreme. The most extreme sort of score that you could get, that you want them to obviously report it in a certain way. But if someone, for example, had kicked a chair, then that would be less extreme.

So we needed to make sure that people were recording consistently, [00:02:30] if that makes sense. Because it was a bit fiddly, it was important that we were communicating to the unit staff, how we needed that to be done. We would do that at the induction, which happened when people joined the hospital. But also if you work for a private hospital or you work for any large organization, you will likely be, oh, so familiar with refresher yearly training.

We decided that it wasn't great use of the qualified psychologist time to be doing all this training, [00:03:00] because it was predictable. Absolutely, the psychologist had a hand in designing the training and supporting us with that. We decided that, yes, our time would be well placed and it would be good for our experience and for our developing relationships with people in the hospital, in our units to do that training ourselves. It was in a training venue in the hospital and it was quite a formal situation to sort of 20, 30 people at a time. But [00:03:30] it gave me and my colleague the opportunity to be able to tick teaching off on our competencies for the big form.

It might be useful for you to think about whether there's anything that you are doing in your day to day job that you could help upscale others on. Either as a repeatable predictable thing, or maybe you could do some sort of consultation or some sort of formulation session for people regularly. Or, teaching them some skills, in maybe [00:04:00] some nice soothing breathing that then they might be able to teach their clients. Could you maybe pick some strategies that you currently use and help teach them to the staff that you work with? Or maybe you've got the opportunity to run a group? When I was in my assistant role, I ran a group for old adults who had dementia diagnosis. And we implemented the cognitive stimulation therapy group, which was fully lovely, but there's teaching elements in that as well of course. [00:04:30] Groups are a great experience for you as an aspiring psychologist and great experience for you as a qualified psychologist too.

It's just useful thinking if there's a protocol or a manual or some book or approach that you really like and you think would really resonate with your clients. Then it can be worth thinking through in your supervision about whether that's something you could use and to bring to the service and to teach others about. [00:05:00] So don't be afraid to ask and to think outside the box and to think about the benefits of what you are offering to your service but you are allowed to benefit to. I think the pandemic certainly caused the NHS to modernize by about 20 years within the space of about a year. It meant that we were able to bring online more flexible ways of working, which meant that I was able to host Zoom groups. And had I stayed in the NHS, it was my plan to create [00:05:30] a waiting list group where people could come along monthly and do stabilization work with me.

There was no need to book and anyone who was either male or female on the separate list, depending on which week it was, who was on the waiting list for psychology, would be able to come along via Zoom at this set time on a set date and come along if they were free. And if they wanted to do stabilization work as a standalone session. And I would've been really super excited to do that. So maybe if that's something you [00:06:00] think your service could benefit from and you could run that with a qualified psychologist. Or if you actually feel like you have the skills and experience to be able to do that yourself with the assistance of a more junior member perhaps, or someone else too in your team.

Because it's useful to run groups in twos just to help with things you might miss, especially when it's via Zoom because you can't have eyes everywhere. But could that be an opportunity for you to do some teaching? And some sort of group work, that is absolutely a crossover between [00:06:30] teaching, training and group work. Because you need to make sure that your style is such, that people can engage with what you're saying. Stick around and I will be right back after this quick advert.

Jingle Guy: If you're looking to become a psychologist then let this be your guide. Through our lessons and experience that will help you get qualified. So, come and take a look, it's right here in this book. It's The Clinical Psychologist Collective. It's The Clinical Psychologist Collective.

Beth: Hi, [00:07:30] my name is Beth and I'm a psychological wellbeing practitioner from Newcastle. I just wanted to say the biggest thank you to the contributors of the Clinical Psychologist Collective book. I've enjoyed reading this so much and have loved having an insight into the range of backgrounds and experiences people have. [inaudible 00:07:49] for the doctorate and it's been really interesting seeing the potential barriers to the application as well and how I can try and work around this. I really started to doubt myself and whether was good enough [00:08:00] to apply for the clinical psychology doctorate, but this has really given me the confidence boost that I needed to give it a shot. So the biggest thank you ever.

Jingle Guy: If you're looking to become a psychologist, then this be your guide. Through our lessons and experience that will help you get qualified. So, come and take a look, it's right here in this [00:08:30] book. It's The Clinical Psychologist Collective. It's The Clinical Psychologist Collective.

Marianne: Is it just me who ends up singing those jingles in the shower [00:09:00] or when I'm chopping food? I just love them. So it can be useful to think about the ways that you can tap into teaching too. When I was on the doctorate, sometimes we had people who are like local assistant psychologists coming along to some of our teaching sessions. And I recall that happening at least on a couple of occasions. So it might be worth you making contact with your local course and asking if any of the teaching sessions are kind of more open forum [00:09:30] because that certainly was the case when I was there. It was the specialist teaching modules in the third year and if they were under subscribed. And where I was, there was two different universities that you could opt in to the Friday teaching in year three. But it meant that sometimes there was just a few people on the course on that day and they might have loads of empty spaces.

It makes sense for people to benefit from those. So it might be that there's a similar option for you in your local area. And then you can get your experience [00:10:00] really up to date, really useful teaching and see how it's done and think about whether you might be able to do some teaching, some training or some consultation. So I hope you found that useful. Just don't be afraid to think outside the box. If you think this might be useful for you to thicken up this particular competency and could you decide to take this on, maybe you could think about reading a [00:10:30] particular book. Maybe that your whole department might not have time to read and then like do a little digest for them or a research paper or go along to some training event on behalf of your department. And then teach it to them, disseminate the pertinent points in a much shorter period of time.

And you could get a bit, we see here on your PowerPoint or your canvas, whatever floats your boat. But could you demonstrate that you have the ability to teach, to do what we call [00:11:00] comprehension. So to comprehend what's been said and put it across then to others in a way that helps them in a meaningful way. I think this flexibility and this thinking outside the box-ness is one of the things that we are particularly good at in the psychology field. And for you really to start building and thickening those competencies for your own career as an aspiring psychologist. And it might well just be the type of thing that you can use if only [00:11:30] to develop your own confidence. Before then going on to do something a little bit more formal in terms of teaching. And if you've done your psychology undergrad thesis, perhaps you could present that to your department, if there's any useful learning points there for them too.

It's about thinking about creating those opportunities. Why did I just say creating so weirdly? Sorry about that one. If actually you recognize that there's a lot of skills and talents in your department, then could you maybe put [00:12:00] together a monthly program where you all teach each other? You could perhaps be the lead, you could hold it together, head it up and you might maybe do more spaces in the year than other people because it's your baby. And I hope you have some fun with this and that you find it helpful. If you've got any other ideas for how you can cram some teaching, training and consultation into your work, then do give me a shout and I'd really be happy to expand on this further. I hope you find it [00:12:30] useful. And if you do, please leave me a review, rate it and of course, subscribe. Take care and I'll catch up with you very soon.

Jingle Guy: If you are looking to become a psychologist then let this be your guide. With this podcast at your side, you'll be on your way to being qualified. It's The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast with Dr. Marianne Trent.

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