ABSTRACT
These are a student’s comments during feedback from an assessed one-to-one interview on a training course for guidance practitioners. It was one of the ‘best’ interviews observed in the group that year, but that level of competence is not easy to attain and for the student it was hard won. Earlier in the year-let’s call the student Sam-I observed an interview where Sam spent most of the time giving the young person information without achieving the level of engagement described above as ‘the most important thing’. In the feedback of that earlier interview, Sam was rather pleased with the outcome and the assessor, Hazel, was not! My feedback focused on how she had overwhelmed the young person with information which, although not incorrect, was not based on an exploration of the young person’s current situation, their interests, their concerns, their resources or their constraints.
