As many of you know, the Council of Program Directors in Community Research and Action (CPDCRA) is represented on APA’s Council of Chairs of Training Councils (CCTC). This year, in response to the concerns of many CPDCRA program directors, our representative drafted a statement that advocates an increased emphasis on community-oriented training in graduate programs and internships. The statement was subsequently approved by the CCTC and mailed to the directors of all APA-Accredited programs and internships, signed by the Chair of CCTC, Emil Rodolfa.

This statement, presented below, should be helpful in allowing graduate students to count community-training as practicum hours and faculty to advocate for the importance of community graduate programs. Please share it with your graduate students and colleagues.

Cliff O’Donnell
cliffo@hawaii.edu

“On behalf of the Council of Chairs of Training Councils (CCTC) I am writing to you to provide a statement of concern about the training of psychologists. As you may know, CCTC is comprised of all major national psychology doctoral training associations. The CCTC membership includes ACCTA, ADPTC, AMSP, APPIC, CHPTP, CCPTP, CDSPP, CPDCRA, CUDCP, NCSPP.  CCTC represents over 1000 training and internship programs.

As our membership discussed at our March meeting, the future employment of psychologists will include less emphasis on direct clinical services. Therefore, CCTC encourages graduate programs and internship settings to provide a balance of supervised experience in a variety of training activities including program evaluation, prevention, consultation, supervision, program development, public policy, broad-based assessment and intervention, etc.  When students are engaged in these experiences at practicum sites, we believe that these activities should count as practicum hours.  Due to the changing market place, the emphasis of our training must be on quality and diversity of experience, rather than quantity of clinical hours.  However, we are concerned that not all training programs currently provide breadth in their training experiences. Some programs continue to over-emphasize direct clinical services and do not include education and training in these other areas listed above.

The Committee On Accreditation (CoA) has developed accreditation guidelines based on the value that “education and training for entry-level practice in professional psychology should be broad and professional in its orientation rather than narrow and technical.” We strongly agree with this CoA value and principle.

We encourage you, as Director of Training, to review the educational components of your program to ensure that breath of experience is provided. We believe your review and guidance in this matter is vital to the future employment of your students.”