Techniques in Counseling carries 5 quarter credits and asks you to perform basic counseling skills, then write about what you performed. Walden's catalog entry tells students to have a video recording device, a tripod and an audio recording device on hand for the first week of class, which is a fair signal of how quickly the demonstration work starts. This page is about the graded writing wrapped around it.
What COUN 6316 actually grades
Two streams of work move together. One is the recorded practice where you use the skills on a person. The other is a written layer built on top of it: transcripts of your own session with each move identified, self-evaluations that judge the work rather than defend it, documentation written the way a case note is written, and discussion threads working the same material. Rubric rows in a skills course keep asking three questions in different clothes. Did you use the skill. Can you name it correctly. Do you see accurately what it did to the moment that came next.
Walden is unusually specific about which skills it means, and that list is the vocabulary your analysis should be written in rather than whatever words come naturally. The catalog names microskills and mesoskills, verbal and nonverbal behavior, listening and observation, facilitative and influencing skills, multisensory technique, movement through the stages of a session, and documentation. Every item on that list except the last one shows up somewhere inside your recording and can be pointed at turn by turn. Documentation is graded on the page itself, which is why a session that went well can still shed rows when the write-up is careless.
The catalog description also puts your attitudes, values and beliefs into the scored material, because whether a technique is used ethically depends on who is using it. Expect at least one graded piece asking where your own reactions could get in the way, and expect that piece to score poorly if the answer is a general declaration of open mindedness. Specific outperforms admirable. One paragraph about the client remark that made you tighten up, and what you said in the seconds afterward, is worth more than a page of reassurance.
How we help in this course
We work the writing, never the recording. Nobody from this desk appears on your video, and no draft we send will pretend to be a session you did not run. What we take on is turning your transcript or your notes into the analysis the rows are asking for, with each skill named in the vocabulary your course uses and every claim anchored to an exact line of your own talk.
Terms are the ones the rest of the site runs on. Drafts land inside 24 to 48 hours, each one aimed at the top band of every row, checked by one reviewer against the rubric and a second against APA and originality, with revisions free until the target is reached. Send the scoring guide along with the prompt, because in a skills course those two documents rarely stress the same thing.
Weekly manuals for this course
Per-week manuals for this course publish as each week is confirmed, and until then this page prints no week grid it cannot stand behind. Walden keeps course syllabi inside the classroom rather than on the public site. The term you are sitting in runs on a quarter or a semester schedule depending on which counseling program admitted you, so the count of graded weeks in front of you is set by your own plan of study, not by us. Your student portal and your classroom hold the authoritative dates. Send the week you are actually in through chat and the desk will tell you what exists today.
Working on 6316 right now?
Paste the assignment instructions and the scoring guide, and add your transcript if you already have one. The first sample costs nothing.
How to actually write COUN 6316: begin at the tape, not the prompt
Transcribe before you analyze anything. Put the recording on with a timer visible and type what was said, not what you remember saying: the false start, the moment you both spoke at once, the pause you sat through and roughly how long it lasted. Tidying at this stage is the injury students in this course keep inflicting on themselves, because a smoothed transcript has quietly deleted the evidence half the rows are hunting for. Number every turn as you go. Numbered talk lets you cite yourself the way you would cite an author, and a grader can then verify any claim you make in about four seconds.
Then choose your excerpt on purpose. The stretch worth analyzing is not the one where you sounded most competent, it is the one where the direction of the conversation changed, or refused to. Two or three minutes is usually enough if something happens inside them. Once the excerpt is fixed, write your controlling claim in a single sentence before you draft a paragraph: a verdict on your own performance across those minutes, along the lines of reflection carrying the opening and closed questions narrowing the middle. Everything after that exists to prove or qualify that one sentence. Papers in this course sprawl when the writer never decided what the session showed.
Take your section order from the scoring guide and keep the guide's own labels rather than inventing tidier ones, since a grader working down the rows should never have to hunt for where you answered each. Beside each label note the weight it carries, then spend your length accordingly. Skill identification usually outweighs the closing reflection by some distance, and reflection is the easier thing to write, which is precisely why the reflection section swells and the identification section stays thin.
Fill each heading with evidence before you write any prose. In a transcript analysis, the evidence is your own lines, quoted with a line number or a timestamp, followed by the name of the skill and by what the client did in the very next turn. That last piece is the part graders hunt for and the part drafts skip. A reflection of feeling does not earn its row because you produced one. It earns the row when you can show the client going further afterward, or when you admit plainly that the client did not.
Connective prose comes last, and its only job is to carry the reader from evidence to judgment: here is what I said, here is the skill it belongs to, here is what it opened or shut, here is the line I would use instead. Write the self-evaluation in the voice a supervisor would use with you, level and unhurried, without defensiveness and without performed guilt. If a paragraph could sit inside anybody else's paper about anybody else's session, it is not yet doing work.
Where the sources go in a skills paper
APA 7 shows up here as formatting and as habit. Formatting means the title page Walden expects, heading levels used consistently down the document, and a reference list matching your in text citations one for one. Habit means starting your reading inside the Walden Library instead of a browser tab, since the counseling databases behind that login are what these rows quietly assume you searched.
Two sources on the same technique are worth more than six on six different ones, provided you put them in the same paragraph and let them differ. Writers on microskills do not agree about everything: how long a silence should run before it stops being useful, whether reflecting feeling early builds trust or outpaces the client, how much structure a first session can carry without becoming an interview. Set two positions beside each other, then decide which one your own transcript supports, and say why. That final move is the difference between a paragraph that reports reading and a paragraph that reasons. A section built one article at a time, each politely taking its turn, is a summary no matter how many citations it carries.
A skills paper does not need many sources. It needs two or three doing jobs you could name out loud. One defines the technique you are claiming, so your label carries the meaning the course gives it. One supports whatever you say about your own reactions or about working across difference. Where the work touches a minor, a mandated report or a limit on confidentiality, the ethics code your program uses is the citation, and you point at the standard itself instead of summarizing the whole document. Any source you cannot justify in a short phrase should come out. The Writing Center keeps Walden's own templates, and copying their formatting is quicker than arguing your version past a grader.
| Section | What goes in it | Where it goes wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Session context | The presenting concern, the setting, where in the session your excerpt sits, and the role play conditions. | Dialogue arrives with no frame, so the reader cannot judge whether the skill suited the moment. |
| Transcript excerpt | Your words and the other person's, numbered or timestamped, long enough to show a real exchange. | The excerpt is trimmed to the lines you liked, which deletes the evidence for the rows about missed openings. |
| Skill identification | The name of each technique used, tied to the exact line where it appears. | A list of skills parked at the end of the paper with nothing anchoring any of them to the transcript. |
| Effect on the client | What the client said or did in the next turn, described plainly before it is interpreted. | A claim that the skill deepened the work while the transcript shows the client changing the subject. |
| Self-evaluation | What held up, what you would replace, and the alternative wording written out in full. | Promises to improve in general, with no rewritten line a grader can set beside the original. |
| Ethical and cultural awareness | Your own reactions, the values in play, and any limit you noticed while the session ran. | A closing paragraph of good intentions in place of one named moment examined honestly. |
Discussion posts in a skills course
A discussion in this course usually hands you a short exchange, a clip or a scenario and asks what you would say next. Write the actual words. A post describing an intervention in the abstract scores under a post that gives the sentence you would speak, names the technique it belongs to and explains what you are trying to open with it. Two quoted attempts with reasoning attached beat a paragraph about the importance of rapport every time.
On timing, the university's own policy sets three conditions on a post before it counts: steady, substantive, delivered when it was due. Its guidance then puts a floor under how often you appear, naming two separate days as a bare minimum and four as the better habit. In a skills course that floor does real work rather than administrative work. Nobody can react to your wording if it lands an hour before the thread closes, and you cannot react to theirs either. Walden also requires a login and a posted assignment or discussion inside the first week of the term, so opening week is not a settling-in period.
Replies earn their row by doing something to the wording in front of them. Offer a different response and say what it would open. Point out where a colleague's paraphrase quietly added content the client never said. Ask what they would try if the client answered in a way they did not plan for. How many replies count and which days they close are set inside your own classroom, and Walden states plainly that posting requirements vary across courses and within them, so read this week's instructions instead of reusing last term's rhythm. The cutoff itself does not move: 10:59 p.m. Central, an hour later for anyone on Eastern time.
The mistakes that cost points in COUN 6316
- Techniques labeled from memory instead of from the course's own list, so a summary gets called a reflection and the whole row unravels.
- A transcript tidied before it is analyzed, with the pauses and the interruptions edited out, which removes exactly the material the rows want examined.
- Advice handed out inside the excerpt and then defended in the analysis, when the assignment was practicing something else entirely.
- A self-evaluation written as apology, several paragraphs of regret with no alternative wording ever offered.
- Recording equipment left until the night before, in a course whose catalog entry warns you about it before the first week.
- Identifying details about a real person left inside a document that is about to be posted into a classroom.
COUN 6316 questions students actually ask
Do you record the counseling session for me?
No, and anyone offering to should worry you. The recorded demonstration is you practicing a skill on camera, and it is the one part of this course that cannot be handed to somebody else without the whole exercise collapsing. What we take on is the writing built around the recording: the transcript analysis, the self-evaluation, the reflection on values, the case documentation and the graded threads. Send us your own transcript and we will show you where each skill sits in it.
How do I label a skill when I am not sure which one I used?
Work backwards from what your sentence did rather than forwards from what you meant. Read the client line before yours, read yours, then read the client line after. If your words gave back the content in fewer words, that is a paraphrase. If they gave back an emotion the client had not yet named out loud, that is a reflection of feeling. If they invited more without steering, that is an open question. Match the label to the effect on the page, and when two labels genuinely fit, say so and defend the one you picked. Graders accept a defended call far more readily than a confident wrong one.
How much of my own reaction belongs in the self-evaluation?
Enough to show one reaction affecting one decision, and no further. This course asks you to weigh your attitudes, values and beliefs against the ethical use of a skill, so the useful material is the moment your own discomfort changed what you said next. Name the moment, name the choice it pushed you toward, and say what you will do differently when it happens again. What does not score is autobiography, and what scores worst is a paragraph declaring yourself free of bias. The rows reward noticing, not innocence.