Sherrie Bruner, Everett Painter, Alessandra Rhinehart, and Anna Lora Taylor teamed up to enter the American Counseling Association (ACA) Graduate Student Ethics Case Study Competition and placed 3^rd overall. All four are in the Counselor Education Program –  Bruner, Painter, and Taylor as PhD students and Rhinehart as a PhD Candidate.

ACA explains that this competition is an opportunity for graduate students to analyze a potential ethical case and create an appropriate decision-making plan of how to respond.

Once receiving the case scenario, Bruner, Painter, Rhinehart, and Taylor had to identify the dilemma, list their proposed ethical actions, justify those proposed actions, and describe the decision-making model used to arrive at that decision. They chose Welfel’s ethical decision-making model. Painter explained that this model incorporates reflection as a final step, which is not explicit in many other decision-making models. The team’s full essay response is posted on the ACA website.

They placed third out of thirty-nine teams, each winning a fifty-dollar gift certificate to the ACA Bookstore, a certificate, and letter of recognition. Plus, their names are going to be published in Counseling Today, and their team essay response will be submitted to VISTAS (an online peer-reviewed article database) for consideration of publication. Also, they have all been invited to attend the ACA Annual Conference and Expo in Orlando, Florida next month to be recognized at the National Awards Ceremony. Bruner and Rhinehart are planning to attend the conference.

Three Counselor Education PhD candidates – Blair Mynatt, Brittany Pollard, and Adam Stephens – won first place in the Graduate Student Poster Competition at the 57th Annual Tennessee Counseling Association (TCA) Conference. Counselor Education PhD student, Everett Painter, also placed second in the same competition.

TCA only accepted thirty posters for this Graduate Student Presentation. The competition was split between masters and doctorate levels, with first and second place prizes awarded among both groups. Most Tennessee universities with counseling programs were represented in the competition.

The TCA 57th Annual Conference was held November 22-25 in Murfreesboro, TN, with the theme of “Fostering Ideal Relationships to Strengthen Teamwork.”

Mynatt, Pollard, and Stephens presented “A Content Analysis of Teaching Syllabi in Counselor Education Programs” highlighting the characteristics of doctoral teaching courses pertaining to CACREP’s learning outcome for teaching.

Painter presented “Developing a Model of Trauma-Sensitive Supervision” sharing findings, providing an opportunity to discuss a case, and examining the necessary components of such a model.