Idaho State Analyzes Counseling Session Practices with Landro Play Analyzer

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 09/08/09

The Idaho State University Counselor Education Program in Pocatello has gone public with its addition of the Landro play analyzer to its technology toolkit to develop and enhance the skills of counselors. Using Landro, which has traditionally been applied to study athletic performance, supervisors, faculty, and staff are scrutinizing video to help students enhance counseling skills. Clinical sessions are digitally recorded, cataloged, and broken down by clinicians, doctoral students, or supervisors for analysis by the faculty, supervisors, and clinicians.

Rather than forcing the user to watch linear footage--a limitation of videotape and some DVDs--Landro allows session video to be tagged and then accessed by themes such as client issue, questioning skills, responses, and non-verbal skills.

"Supervisors and clinicians watch video because they learn by seeing and then doing," said Professor David Kleist. "Since there is no videotape or DVD to fumble around with, the supervisors and clinicians get to spend more time actually analyzing and studying their counseling session."

"It was difficult to watch sessions on tape before because it was so hard to get to the relevant information you needed to see; the constant rewinding and fast forwarding was laborious," added Department Chair Steven Feit. "Now we jump from segment to segment, session to session, quickly correcting performance [and] making better supervisors and clinicians. And because of the tagging capabilities in Landro we can get to those video segments based on a teaching subject or skill. Ultimately teaching first-class counselors using a thematic based approach to counselor training is what we have always strived for. Every faculty now sees Landro as an integral component to their teaching and skill development."

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

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