Practicum Week 10 Journal CBT REBT Assignment Guide

The first question is a yes-or-no that most students answer as neither. *Has your therapeutic theory changed as a result of your practicum experiences* — and the honest answer is often "partly", but a journal that never commits leaves the rest of the entry with nothing to explain. Take a position in the first sentence and then account for it with something that actually happened in the placement: a client who did not respond to a technique you expected to work, a moment when the theory predicted one thing and the room delivered another, a supervision conversation that reframed something. Change and confirmation are both legitimate answers; "I have grown as a clinician" is not one. The question is about *theory*, not about confidence or competence, so the account has to name what you now believe differently about how change happens in therapy.

You named two theories in Week 1 — cognitive behavioural and rational emotive behavioural — and the fact that they are two rather than one is the most useful material in this journal. They are related traditions with a real difference: both work on cognition, but REBT targets evaluative beliefs and demandingness directly and disputes them philosophically, while CBT more commonly tests automatic thoughts against evidence and behavioural experiment. Saying which of the two you found yourself actually using, and with which presentations, is a far stronger reflection than treating them as interchangeable. If your practice drifted toward one of them, say which and why, because a drift you can explain is evidence of clinical judgement developing rather than of a theory being abandoned. Where you used something from neither tradition, say so, because a practitioner who noticed themselves reaching outside the model has learned something the reflection is meant to surface.

The second question asks how you *integrated* the therapeutic approaches in clinical practice and how that helped you achieve your Week 1 goals and objectives. Integration is a specific claim and it needs a specific example: a session where you used a technique from the approach, what you were trying to achieve with it, and what happened. Two worked examples will carry this section better than a general account of your practice. Then connect each to a goal — the brief's parenthetical permission to construct the goals means they should be plausible and measurable rather than aspirational, since a goal like "improve my therapeutic skills" cannot be shown to have been achieved. Write goals you could evidence: conducting a given number of structured sessions, using a specific technique with three clients, or being able to formulate a case in the model without supervision.

The social change question is Walden's own framing and it should be answered at the level the programme means it — beyond the individual client. Working effectively with one person is practice; social change is what changes when that practice is multiplied, advocated for, or extended to people who currently do not reach it. Concrete routes include improving access for an underserved population, reducing stigma through how services are delivered, contributing to workforce capacity, influencing policy or referral pathways, or addressing a disparity you observed in the placement itself. Anchor it in something you actually saw, because a social change paragraph written from the mission statement rather than from the placement is the most obviously generic part of any practicum journal. Naming the population and the barrier makes the paragraph concrete, since social change asserted without a specific group and a specific obstacle is indistinguishable from a statement of good intent.

The final requirement is short and easily skipped: *support your approach with evidence-based literature*. This is a reflective journal that still requires citations, and the natural place for them is the theory discussion — the comparative evidence on CBT and REBT, what each has been shown to work for, and where the evidence is thinner than the enthusiasm. A journal that reflects for two pages and cites nothing has missed a stated requirement, and one that cites only the course text has met it minimally. Choose sources that engage the specific claim you are making about your own practice, since a citation supporting the general effectiveness of CBT does not support a claim about why it worked with a particular presentation. Keep the citations inside the reflection rather than gathering them in a separate paragraph, because a journal with a literature section reads as two documents.

On format, the brief points at two attachments and emphasises them in capitals: a Practicum Journal Template and a sample containing a time log and journal entries. Use the template — a journal submitted as free prose when a structured template was supplied is the easiest possible loss of marks, and the time log is typically a separate requirement that students discover late. Follow the sample's level of detail rather than inventing your own. Check whether the time log has to be signed or verified by your preceptor before submission, since that is the one element you cannot complete at the last minute on your own. Read the sample entries before writing rather than after, since they show the expected register — practitioner notes rather than academic essay — and that is hard to correct once a draft exists.