ABSTRACT
Teaching helping and listening skills to psychology students is best accomplished by having them counsel with real people. Students enrolled in Interviewing and Case History Techniques course are usually just beginning graduate school and have diverse backgrounds and experiences; therefore, the first phase of the course consists of 2 weeks of teaching and learning. The undergraduate and a member of the graduate counseling methods class meet outside class for one mock session at the beginning of the semester and one at the end. Students videotape their sessions. Students are informed that the use of questions in an interview is, contrary to popular belief, not an essential tool of the skilled interviewer. An alternative for providing a counseling experience without using real clients is to have the students counsel each other in role-playing situations. However, there are some distinct disadvantages of using introductory psychology students as analogue clients.
