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THE LEARNING LIBRARY

Build knowledge you can put to work.

Follow the reasoning in a worked case. Test it in a different situation. Know what to read next.

125 lessons24 course paths4–5 case questions per lesson

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76 lessons · Written lessons and case practice are free
Culture

Spirituality without imposing your worldview

Explore spiritual meaning through the client’s frame of reference.

10 min readingOpen lesson
Development

Attachment, relationships & developmental hypotheses

Use attachment concepts without diagnosing from a single interaction.

10 min readingOpen lesson
Career

Holland, Super & social cognitive career theory

Choose a career lens that fits the actual question.

10 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

Person-centered work is more than being nice

Connect empathy, acceptance, and congruence to the therapeutic relationship.

10 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

Build a cognitive-behavioral formulation

Separate a situation, an interpretation, an emotion, and a response.

10 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

Motivational interviewing & ambivalence

Distinguish evoking motivation from arguing for change.

10 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

Think in family interaction patterns

Distinguish a relational cycle from blaming one family member.

10 min readingOpen lesson
Groups

Cohesion, universality & interpersonal learning

Identify what a group experience is doing, not only what it looks like.

10 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

Trauma-informed care & trauma treatment

Distinguish an approach to service delivery from a treatment protocol.

10 min readingOpen lesson
Assessment

Medication literacy within counseling scope

Discuss medications without assuming a prescribing role.

10 min readingOpen lesson
Assessment

Substance use, function & recovery context

Build an assessment question without moral judgment.

10 min readingOpen lesson
Culture

Power, access & collaborative advocacy

Connect an access barrier to an action chosen with the person affected.

10 min readingOpen lesson
Development

Sexuality, relationships & aging across the lifespan

Discuss sexual wellness and later-life change without imposing assumptions.

10 min readingOpen lesson
Development

Developmentally responsive work with children & adolescents

Adapt a learning formulation to developmental capacities and family context.

10 min readingOpen lesson
Development

Biology, disability & adaptation in context

Connect biological and contextual explanations without reducing a person to either.

10 min readingOpen lesson
Career

Career information, readiness & program design

Turn career exploration into an accessible plan with measurable outcomes.

10 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

Psychodynamic and Adlerian lenses

Compare relational patterns with purposeful striving and belonging.

10 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

Existential and Gestalt perspectives

Distinguish meaning and choice from awareness and contact.

10 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

Solution-focused and narrative approaches

Separate exceptions and preferred futures from externalizing a problem story.

10 min readingOpen lesson
Groups

Designing, screening & evaluating a counseling group

Match group structure to purpose, participants, and delivery setting.

10 min readingOpen lesson
Assessment

Intake, mental status & differential reasoning

Organize assessment information before deciding what it supports.

10 min readingOpen lesson
Research

Qualitative, quantitative & mixed methods

Choose a research design that can answer the actual question.

10 min readingOpen lesson
Research

Choosing a statistical test & reading its result

Connect an analysis to the design, measurement, and assumptions.

10 min readingOpen lesson
Development

Grief, loss & major transitions

Distinguish individual meaning from a prescribed timetable for adjustment.

10 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

Reality therapy: wants, evaluation & workable action

Use WDEP to evaluate a controllable action against a client-defined want.

24 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

Feminist therapy: power, context & chosen agency

Formulate distress across personal, relational, and institutional power.

24 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

REBT: rigid demands, flexible beliefs & action

Distinguish an activating event, inference, evaluative belief, and consequence.

24 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

ACT: psychological flexibility & valued action

Formulate behavior by function rather than thought content alone.

24 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

DBT: target hierarchy, chains & skills

Prioritize targets and analyze a behavioral chain.

24 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

Bowen family systems: triangles & differentiation

Map a triangle and coach a differentiated position.

24 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

Structural family therapy: maps & enactments

Develop a structural map from observed interaction.

24 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

Strategic family work: interrupting attempted solutions

Identify how attempted solutions maintain a concrete problem.

24 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

Gottman couple work: connection, conflict & meaning

Differentiate friendship, conflict, and shared-meaning targets.

24 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

Emotion-focused therapy: process, needs & transformation

Differentiate emotional process hypotheses using context and sequence.

24 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

Psychodynamic practice: protection, patterns & relationship

Formulate a wish, feared response, defense, and recurring cost.

24 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

Adlerian practice: belonging, encouragement & reorientation

Construct a tentative lifestyle hypothesis from patterns and meaning.

24 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

Existential practice: meaning & constrained choice

Formulate avoidance of an existential dilemma without pathologizing ordinary anxiety.

24 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

Gestalt practice: awareness, contact & experiments

Describe present experience without claiming its meaning in advance.

24 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

Solution-focused practice: preferred futures & useful differences

Build a concrete preferred future and examine a useful exception.

24 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

Narrative practice: externalizing & re-authoring

Develop an externalizing conversation into a preferred identity account.

24 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

Responding to a return to use without shame or abandonment

Sequence immediate safety, engagement, and a functional review after renewed substance use.

24 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

Talking about medication experiences within the counselor role

Elicit benefit, burden, meaning, and access in a medication conversation.

24 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

Coordinating with a prescriber: observations, consent, and follow-up

Prepare an attributed, time-specific medication-related handoff.

24 min readingOpen lesson
Development

Ambiguous loss and disenfranchised grief

Distinguish uncertainty about a loss from lack of social recognition.

24 min readingOpen lesson
Development

Continuing bonds: making room for remembrance and change

Assess what a remembrance practice means and does for a particular person.

24 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

Repairing a rupture after the counselor gets it wrong

Recognize a possible strain in the working relationship without treating disagreement or silence as a client defect.

18 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

Circular questions: seeing a relationship pattern differently

Turn a one-person explanation into a testable interaction sequence.

18 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

A first genogram: patterns, questions, and limits

Construct a first family map that separates known information, attributed reports, and open questions.

18 min readingOpen lesson
Development

Developmentally responsive counseling: adapting language and activities

Choose an adaptation from observed communication and learning needs rather than age alone.

18 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

Opening the first session: a short demonstration

Open a first meeting with clear roles, usable privacy information, and an invitation to the client’s priorities.

18 min readingOpen lesson
Assessment

Building a differential: what information is still missing?

Build a differential table with supporting, contrary, and missing evidence.

25 min readingOpen lesson
Assessment

Cultural context and impairment in a diagnostic formulation

Integrate the client's explanatory model with clinical and functional evidence.

25 min readingOpen lesson
Assessment

Explaining an assessment score and its uncertainty to a client

Calculate and explain a fictional score's measurement interval under stated assumptions.

25 min readingOpen lesson
Assessment

Choosing a measure: population, purpose, language, and accessibility

Defend a measure choice using purpose, population, precision, validity, and feasibility.

25 min readingOpen lesson
Groups

Working with silence and unequal participation in a group

Distinguish several possible functions of silence using group-process evidence.

25 min readingOpen lesson
Groups

Group endings: helping members consolidate what changed

Plan an ending that reviews evidence of change, relationship meaning, unfinished work, and future support.

25 min readingOpen lesson
Career

A career interview when the client has several competing priorities

Conduct a focused career interview that separates interests, values, capabilities, constraints, and unknowns.

25 min readingOpen lesson
Career

Using labor-market information without making promises

Distinguish projected growth, annual openings, current vacancies, and wage distributions.

25 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

One fictional case through three counseling theories

Formulate the same family sequence through three distinct but overlapping systemic lenses.

22 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

Choosing an intervention that actually follows your theory

Write a mechanism-to-intervention rationale using concrete case evidence.

22 min readingOpen lesson
Ethics

Counseling, psychology, and social work: understanding professional roles

Compare professional preparation without turning broad tendencies into exclusive scopes.

22 min readingOpen lesson
Ethics

Reading a licensure pathway without confusing degree, exam, and license

Separate degree, accreditation, examination, certification, and licensure.

22 min readingOpen lesson
Research

Turning a clinical curiosity into an answerable research question

Translate a clinical curiosity into a bounded question and estimand.

22 min readingOpen lesson
Research

Reading a qualitative study: credibility, context, and transferability

Trace a qualitative claim from excerpts through analysis to interpretation.

22 min readingOpen lesson
Research

Confidence intervals explained with a counseling example

Calculate an interval from a mean, standard deviation, sample size, and supplied critical value.

22 min readingOpen lesson
Research

Statistical significance versus practical importance

Interpret a p value in relation to the specified model.

22 min readingOpen lesson
Research

Building a simple logic model for a counseling program

Build a logic model whose arrows contain explicit assumptions.

22 min readingOpen lesson
Research

Process versus outcome evaluation: choosing useful measures

Select measures that answer distinct delivery and outcome questions.

22 min readingOpen lesson
Culture

See the person and the system

Identify barriers without reducing a client to those barriers.

8 min readingOpen lesson
Development

Learning and behavior change

Distinguish reinforcement from punishment and extinction.

8 min readingOpen lesson
Career

Use career assessments collaboratively

Explain results without turning them into prescriptions.

8 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

Compare counseling theories

Link a theory’s explanation of change to its interventions.

8 min readingOpen lesson
Helping relationships

Build a collaborative learning case plan

Distinguish a broad goal from a measurable objective.

8 min readingOpen lesson
Groups

Facilitate participation with care

Choose a response that fits the group’s purpose and process.

8 min readingOpen lesson
Assessment

Interpret scores in context

Compare norm-referenced and criterion-referenced interpretations.

8 min readingOpen lesson
Research

Ask a useful program-evaluation question

Distinguish delivery, outcomes, and impact.

8 min readingOpen lesson

Independent study support alongside coursework and supervision. Course paths are editorial reading lists, not complete university courses. Find your program’s reading map →