Stereotyping In Counselling Training Report

Showing the impact of Stereotyping:

Rationale for training session: The hope for this training session is to help counselors in training understand their biases and beliefs and how those biases and beliefs may effect how they help their clients. By participating in these activities and discussing them participants should be able to better see how harmful stereotyping can be and how prevalent it is.

Objectives:
-Understand the impact of stereotyping
- Recognize generally held stereotypes about groups in America
- Discuss how these stereotypes play in to the institutionalized structures of society as we have talked about in class

Material:

Large pieces of paper
Markers
Chairs (classroom setting is best)
Pens/Pencils
Paper

This training exercise (40-50 min) is based off an exercise I was a part of a few years back. Before starting the exercise I would first ask the group if they could define certain words such as bias, stereotypes, privilege, and prejudice. This will help me gauge the group and their knowledge coming into the training. Since the topic can be difficult to discuss I may include an icebreaker where members of the group go around and tell a little about themselves and their experience with diversity. This will also give me information and get people feeling more comfortable talking. I am hoping to be able to get a group of peers in the counseling program to agree to participate around 6-10 people I feel smaller groups work better in allowing people to feel comfortable to discuss these sensitive topics.
The exercise will consist of around 6 sheets tapes around the room. Each sheet will have a group written on it. I believe I will choose African/American, Caucasian, Lower Class, upper class, Straight and Gay/lesbian as the groups for this