Anne Rannning

Abstract

Students recording and editing their own role plays of a family based intervention

Background

Psychology students lack practical training with psychotherapeutic intervention, and role-plays is one was to shift learning towards practical skills and competences. Video-recordings are used in training for feedback and reflection of one’s professional practice.

Aim

To provide the students with a learning experience where they could develop skills and competences in conducting a Family Talk intervention. To explore students’ own edited video-recordings of the role-plays as being the assignment product.

Context, setting and participants

The topic of this course was intergenerational transmission of mental illness with a focus on life circumstances of children of parents with mental illness and preventive, family-based interventions. This master-level 7,5 ECTS course was a 14 days class with 30 students and 1 teacher.

Methods

Students go into groups to work with role-plays. The teacher visits groups and provides supervision. The group assignment of edited video footage of their roleplays in an optional format.

Results

Students were able to reflect on difficulties and dynamics at play in families with parental mental illness drawing on their knowledge from the curriculum. Students were able to follow the manual of the intervention method in a systematic way. Most groups have had the same student playing the clinician in all sessions.

All students were attentive to the end-product – the videos – and spent time considering how and what to edit. Three students found role plays, especially in front of the camera overwhelming, but agreed to take the role of filming to participate anyway, which has worked well. The playful and imaginative process seems to have created a joyful learning environment.

Discussion

Overall, using roleplays in the course was effective in shifting from semantic learning (learning “that”) to a more procedural kind of learning (learning “how”). Results showed high acceptability among students to do role plays and film it on videos. It is a limitation only one student per group gets the experience of being the therapist. Filming and editing took away more attention to the experience of the role-plays than expected.

Implications for the future

I will do role-plays again but will await the final evaluations of the students about their experiences of doing the videos. If I give students video assignments again, I will have to consider possibilities for: 1. more students can play the role of the therapist, 2. Make it less stressful for students to be filmed. 3. Mitigate students’ perfectionism and focus attention on role plays.