A Guide to Thinking and Acting Like an Expert leads counseling students through the step-by-step process of receiving client information, synthesizing the data, and understanding how to respond and act effectively. With a central focus on this procedural knowledge, this guide also concentrates on developing the skills needed to build client relationships in order to elicit helpful client disclosure, and, ultimately, become an “expert” counselor who can extract the important information from a situation and move from the ‘if’ of the client data to the ‘then’ of an intervention or solution.

 

While the text highlights four essential theories regarding successful counseling — solution-focused, behavioral, cognitive, and transtheoretical — what makes A Guide to Thinking and Acting Like an Expert unique is its central focus on applying these theories to guide analysis, decision making, and action in the field -- effectively moving counselors-in-training smoothly from comprehension to application to evaluation.

 

Since research suggests that procedural knowledge is best acquired through practice accompanied by feedback, author Richard D. Parsons keeps this pair of techniques in mind throughoutA Guide to Thinking and Acting Like an Expert. Each chapter contains case illustrations, directed practice activities, and case presentations with counselor analysis — all making the theories and methods covered in the book easier for students to synthesize and internalize.