Tag Archives: NCE

Passed the NCE!

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Good news world: I recently passed the National Counselor Examination!!! I have to say Howard Rosenthal is still relevant! I used his audio exam guides that were passed down to me by other counselors. Registering for the NCE was probably the most difficult piece of the testing process. Over a month the confirmation email sat in my inbox, registration just a click away. I had waited years to get to this point and when it came I wanted nothing more than to never click that link. A little voice in my head saying “what if you fail? what if you’re not meant to be a counselor? what will you do?” kept me from registering for what felt like an eternity.

Then one night while working late a coworker was asking if I’d taken the test. I lowered my head and said “I haven’t even registered yet”. That night I made a commitment to register for the test before anymore excuses about being busy came up. On a Thursday morning I registered for an 8am Saturday testing time. That meant I had less than 2 days to brush up on everything I was sure to have forgotten. Aside from Rosenthal’s super test review, the anxiety reduction techniques is probably what calmed me enough to take the exam.

Advice for future testers:
-Find the testing location BEFORE the day of your exam. (I went to the wrong building initially).
-Take breaks throughout the exam! The clock stops and you can get up and run around, stretch, get some water, or just take a mental break.
-Utilize all of the relaxation techniques you teach clients.
-Finally, take the test as soon as you can into your supervision process. This will allow you enough time to re-take the test if needed without having to reapply for licensure.

8 CACREP Areas

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This post will be a brief overview of the 8 Counsel for the Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) areas that the NCE is developed from: professional orientation, research and program evaluation, appraisal, lifestyle and career development, helping relationships, group counseling, human growth & development, and social & cultural foundations.

Professional orientation consists of the various aspects of the counseling profession. Essentially, being knowledgeable about the different types of licenses available, accreditation, ethics, legal responsibilities, and roles of a counselor.

Research and program evaluations is exactly what it sounds like. Research and evaluations are a prominent factor in the counseling profession and if you conducted your own research this section should be relatively easy. Review the different types of experiments, components of scientific designs, and a few prominent influences that are important including Occam’s Razor and where that came from. For the record, it came from a fellow named William of Occam’s, a 14th century theologian and philosopher and suggests that we interpret results in the simplest way.

Appraisal is a big fancy word for assessing things. In therapy that usually means people. There are different tests, to name a few: projective tests, intelligence tests, personality tests, achievement tests, aptitude tests, interest inventories, and informal assessments (like journaling). It’s important to know the tests that are frequently used by clinicians, who in history influenced or created them, good practices for interpreting results, and non-testing approaches to appraisal.

Lifestyle and career development includes several theories and influential people. One of the real big theories is the Trait and Factor theory, which has a model that matches an individual to a position. The big names with trait and factor are Parsons, Williamson, and Patterson. The nemonic I use for their names is trait and factor matches ‘people with places,’ and each persons name fits right in. Other big names in occupational theories include Roe, Brill, tend Holland…all structural/personality theorists. A few more names (because history is important) are Hoppock, Azrin, Krumboltz, Crites, Schlossberg, Tiedemand, and O’Hara.

Helping relationships entails learning a lot of different studies that help you understand the process of counseling and consulting. This area consists of several models and understanding the practical applications of them. For the NCE, being familiar with the goals, techniques, and people associated with the following therapies will cover a lot of ground: Psychoanalytic, Adlerian, Existential, Person-Centered, Gestalt, Reality, Behavior, Cognitive Behavior, Feminist, and Family Systems.

The group counseling area involves learning about purposes, development of stages, methods, dynamics, roles and leadership styles. Some big names in group therapy are Moreno, Pratt, Davis, Slavson, Lewin, and Window. I really don’t have a lot of knowledge in this area, a major resource I use is the massive amounts of literature written by Gerald Corey.

Human growth & development is following the lifespan from birth to death. There are theories of development for individuals, families, personalities, and neurological behaviors. There are several individuals that contributed theories including Festinger, Erikson, Jung, Kegan, Kelly, Kohlberg, Lewin, Loevinger, Maslow, Murray, Pavlov, Perry, Piaget, Rogers, Sullivan, and Thorndike. Sounds like a lot of names, but they all in their own way contributed to our understandings of human lives.

Social & cultural foundations focuses on theories surrounding multicultural, social justice, trends and diversity in groups around the world. A counselor’s role includes promoting and appreciating various social and cultural aspects of societies attitudes, beliefs, and experiences. Some key words/concepts with social & cultural foundations include: proxemics, prop inquiry, contextualism, mores, folkways, ecological culture, ethnocentrism, acculturation, assimilation, white privilege, emic and etic viewpoints, autoplastic, and alloplastic views, and congruity theory.

After writing these short blurbs, I begin to wonder if each might be a good blog post.

Ref:
Council for accreditation of counseling and related educational program (CACREP): The 2001 Standards (2005). Section II: Program objectives and curriculum (pp. 6-13).

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