Our education model begins in 1949—a full three decades before The Chicago School was founded—at the Boulder Conference on Graduate Education in Clinical Psychology. At this forum, the tenets of a training model emerged—or at least were documented for the first time.
Referred to by some as the Boulder Model, by others as the Scientist-Practitioner Model, it was rooted in a classic academic research style. To become a practicing psychologist, one first became a research scientist, usually with a specialty—psychology, counseling, clinical, etc.—and then went into the field, typically through on-the-job training.
Seventy years later, the Boulder approach is still recognized. At hundreds of colleges and universities across the nation, students follow a similar course. They walk side-by-side in academic halls, not with practitioner faculty, but with research scientists. The psychology vocation, however, has evolved.
The subject is also as popular as ever. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the field of psychology is the fourth most popular college major, but a growing number of students seek more training devoted to the practitioner end of the spectrum.
A shift in focus from research to practice
Colorado is again the setting for the next chapter of our story. The year is 1973, fitting as The Bob Newhart Show is just reaching the airwaves, featuring television’s most recognizable fictional psychologist.
At the Vail Conference on Professional Training in Psychology, a new approach to training emerges: the Practitioner–Scholar Model. In this model, scientific research gives way to practice as the model’s nucleus. It was the beginning of a chain of events that reverberates today.
The creation of the National Council of Schools and Programs of Professional Psychology (NCSPP) would follow, and with it, a recognized approach to professional psychology education. By the end of the decade, professional graduate schools committed to granting the practitioner-based Psy.D. degree were becoming more common, including The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, which launched in 1979.
The Chicago School was founded on training principles set forth by the NCSPP, inspired by Vail, but psychologists have a more assorted range of career options than in the 1970s. Therefore, The Chicago School has taken great effort to stay on the forefront of these transformations with a focus on innovation. The result has created new ways to meet the growing demand for psychology professionals to provide services for individuals, organizations, and the community.
A new model of education takes shape
During its first quarter-century, one seeking insight into The Chicago School’s approach to psychology training likely looked to its mission statement; in particular, the language that spoke of The Chicago School’s pioneering curriculum, which emphasized diversity and multiculturalism. While central to an institution’s DNA, a mission statement, by design, is not overly detailed.
So, nearly 30 years after its founding, The Chicago School’s 2006–2011 strategic plan articulated a vision to be the “school of choice” in professional psychology. This included formalized documentation of a teaching philosophy and a learning assessment model centered on scholarship, diversity, professional behavior, professional practice, and a more detailed “Commitment to Diversity” statement.
What began as a one-sentence mission soon became the foundation for a new, distinct education model. Former President Michael Horowitz issued an Institutional Goal for 2008–2009 to officially articulate The Chicago School Model of Education.
The idea was to create a roadmap that showed not just how The Chicago School community pursues education, but also why they take this path and exactly how it can be measured. The plan’s gestation would span the course of a year, and in fall 2009 implementation of the new model formally began: The Engaged-Practitioner Model.
This model of education has come to represent a newly defined approach to professional education. It is an approach that builds upon, yet differentiates itself from, the two earlier training models of education—Scientist-Practitioner (Boulder) and Practitioner-Scholar (Vail)—and was created to prepare psychologists.
Defining the Engaged-Professional Model
In response to increasingly diverse and complex societal needs, this model incorporates a commitment to community engagement and social change at the systems-level.
It innovatively expands the application of—and reaches beyond—psychology to other professions that can play integral roles in transforming lives, organizations, and communities. It combines an emphasis on preparing professionally competent and culturally sophisticated practitioners whose work is supported by empirical validation, with a responsibility for achieving significant and lasting change.
Activities and Integration
The Engaged-Professional Model is built on The Chicago School’s four institutional values—Education, Innovation, Service, and Community. Each of these values corresponds to domains of practice within the profession. The model emphasizes particular forms of activity within each domain, as well as the interrelationship between those activities.
Whatever our scope of practice—teaching, training, research and development, service to specific populations, or community-psychology oriented advocacy, outreach, and policy work—it quickly becomes apparent that the work is interrelated.
Therefore, an engaged practitioner is someone who seeks a deep level of integration across domains, thereby improving personal effectiveness while joining others to collectively have a larger impact.
The Reflective-Responsive Approach
As engaged-practitioners go about their work, this model of education specifies a systematic, ongoing reflection on how well current practices are working. This results in a response to that analysis with an evolved practice.
As this circular relationship between self-reflection, problem-solving, and action-oriented research unfolds, best practices are improved and honed. By routinely and systematically reflecting on one’s current practice in a given area, comparing it to the ideal, and responding to that discrepancy by advancing continual initiatives to achieve that ideal, this approach becomes the engine driving the orbiting practices of your activities and the integration thereof.
As engaged practitioners immerse themselves in activities prescribed by our model, integrated across domains to produce synergy, community connection, and real-world impact, the Reflective-Responsive Approach becomes an engine for growth.
As peak performance is attained, those lessons become valuable not only for the individual practice but for sharing with the field through formal research. Thus, this approach is an engine driving progress within any domain of activity, and when that produces strong enough approaches to justify it, these can be subjected to more formal research and evaluation.
Sharing through research and evaluation
The EngagedPractitioner Model, just as it is an amalgamation and extension of prior practice models, also needs an evolved and amalgamated definition of research.
The Chicago School’s research model provides a framework that not only promotes interest but is also feasible for the school’s faculty, staff, and students, given the range and nature of the professional activities in which they are engaged. Specifically, many members of The Chicago School’s community are typically involved in primarily educating students or developing and providing innovative service within the communities they work in. Therefore, while they may benefit from and produce some basic research, they benefit most from a research model that advances their ability to evaluate efforts and learn lessons.
Three principles form the foundation of this approach:
- Purpose: To promote immediate impact with action-oriented research methods that directly improve our four domains of practice: scholarship of teaching and learning, innovation of new approaches, identifications of better ways to serve key populations, and to extend the reach of our efforts to facilitate transformed communities.
- Criteria: Research quality is not only based on validity and scientific rigor, but also use, impact, and immediate change brought about both by the research process and the
- Process: We espouse the Reflective-Responsive Approach as a research approach in and of itself, and one that can be employed by all members of our community, regardless of their interest in more formal research At the core of our commitment to being innovators, we continually reflect on what we do and use those reflections to respond in new ways with innovated efforts.
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