Association for Coaching conference at UEL

The School of Psychology at UEL and the Association for Coaching hosted one of the UK's largest coaching conferences at our Docklands Campus. Around 400 people attended the conference which was a highlight of the coaching calendar. UEL's School of Psychology hosts some of the world's leading postgraduate coaching and positive psychology programmes. 

There is a short film about the conference here -
http://associationforcoaching.com/videos/video/time-develop-uk-conference-2013/

Christian van Nieuwerburgh

The Freedoms of the New

UK universities exist in an ecology characterized by a number of stresses.   Resources are thinner on the ground than they once were.  Whilst students can claim funds in the form of loans, this changes their perceptions, which in turn affects recruitment and retention behaviours within universities.  Research Council funding is reduced, and that which is left has been reorganized such that new methods of extraction need to be acquired.  Universities themselves are increasingly seen as resources also, and are endlessly compared in league tables in order to discern where the richest pickings are.  And the fruits of scholarly activity are sporadically and stringently audited for their quality and (now) socioeconomic impact by protean panels.

 

As one would predict universities are in competition with one another to extract the most utility within this ecology.  Each university has its own plans but it is also the case that cooperative strategies have emerged; notably the Russell Group formed in 1994 in order to maintain the best research and teaching within the changing landscape.  A key element of this cooperative venture has been to brand 24 universities as leading.  Leading can mean guiding others, helping them to develop, a potentially beneficent act.  But, of course, it can also simply mean superior.  From our discussions with many colleagues they are all clear that the intention is firmly to brand this list as superior, and this is affirmed by the reliance on league tables and audit outcomes.  The Russell Group will lead students to opportunities, as was our own experience when graduate students, but there is little indication that they are acting to improve the circumstances of other universities.  We suspect this social norm has emerged not least because of the unfortunate use of that term – leading - for it establishes an expectation in the same breath as dashing it.  Why would we expect to be led?  What does this say about us?

 

The putative elitism that the Russell Group embodies often colours interpretations of the division between old and new universities, because old universities are seen as the stock from which they draw members, old universities are part way to that elite club by dint of their age and traditions.  We have encountered the view that life in the old university sector must be better – their access to resources greater, enabling more time to be spent on research, and their students must be more engaged and, perhaps, a little more like us in their weird intellectual fetishes.  This view needs thinking about, and more than a little excoriation.

 

It is clearly the case that the Russell Group does well on all the measures by which universities are judged.  The probability of a top UK-based scholar in any field being employed by a Russell Group university is high, but not 1.0.  If we broaden this to old university membership then the figure gets closer to perfection.  This situation can be interpreted in at least two ways.  On the one hand, the Russell Group earns its right to superiority because by all measures it is.  This will attract excellent scholars.  On the other, some see the Russell Group as setting the measurement agenda to favour themselves.  Where is the accounting for the costs of true widening participation, some might ask?  The Russell Group and the older universities do not have to deal with the same issues as the new, it is assumed.  Those issues are obstacles to enhanced performance on the league tables and new university scholars have their scholarship diluted.

 

Given that league tables are inherently limited, and therefore biased, we imagine these negative complaints can be defended statistically.  But all they amount to is a statement that there are differences: differences can present problems, but also opportunities.

 

We both work in psychology departments in new universities in London.  In this part of the world we have many close neighbours including a number of Russell Group departments.  Indeed, if we go into town for a beer we stand a high chance of seeing such colleagues and walking past their ivory laboratories.  They are hard to miss.  Not that we want to miss them, because we benefit hugely from being in a crowded niche, as we get an opportunity to hear new ideas and debate them with the leading thinkers in our field.  And here we use leading in both senses – they are doing well but they also turn up in London to teach us.  We are lucky to live here: we know it.

 

But when we come to think about life in one of those top-ranked departments we have another view.  These are places where staff are set publication and grant capture targets that are often unrealistic given the diminished resources and increasing numbers of scientists clamouring for them.  Yet those targets, when unmet, negatively impact on career progression and limit creative growth, for that is what academic hierarchies are designed to reflect and enable.

 

In order to increase the odds in the competitive market, these departments become markedly specialized, favouring only very specific subdisciplinary areas of the entire field and thereby making a decision about their net contribution to the overall development of knowledge.  This is a heinous bureaucratization of science, one that is philosophically a little hard to justify if one maintains the view that leading might mean guiding enquiry and knowledge.  Certainly, a lot of excellent, specialized work is done in these institutions but it is paradigm bound.  In the terms of our discipline, these departments are rarely places of behavioural science but instead places of specific methods and questions.  Other perspectives need not apply.

 

Old universities, not yet in the Russell Group but keen to compete, can act as if they have no choice other than to mimic this strategy.  To some extent it works and they get to join, but at the expense of their diversity we fear.  It is certainly the case that we have seen young colleagues leave our sector to take up a role, slightly more junior that their previous one, in an old, ambitious university.  Their experiences are not always happy ones.  The policies they encounter are rigid, and a handful of staff are favoured at the expense of others, as they are more likely to meet the necessary criterion to push the department and university up the tables.  In many ways, these institutions can be much tougher than those in the Russell Group.

 

Meanwhile, in the new university sector we are beset by ambitions and competition also, but the research agenda is looser: on average the strategy is to do some.  We are both involved in research management – we are concerned with REF returns, impact agendas, grants capture and increasing our departmental knowledge exchange activities etc.; all terms used across the university ecosystem.  But our experience is that we shape our policies to the interests of our colleagues.  We want to know what they want to know and then we figure out how to facilitate that in the current situation.  It has never occurred to us to create a department that is a certain flavour in order to increase our standing on a particular table.  This makes us fundamentally uncompetitive under the Russell Group rules and it gives us a freedom that is most closely associated with the concept of a university.  We are permitted to think our thoughts and follow our ideas.

 

Ideas lead to hypotheses, lead to experiments and there are costs here.  Some of the things we dream we cannot afford to follow up – but we doubt that this limitation is peculiar to our sector alone; it is just differently scaled.  We do apply for grants, and occasionally they are won and well spent.  However, a trick that we are missing is that of thrift.  Where our Russell Group neighbours might develop work around high-end technology, admittedly extending a narrow field usefully, we must learn to experiment within the limits of our extant facilities.  One of us is often heard talking with great admiration about Niko Tinbergen and his innovative ways of testing ideas in ethology, indeed he really won his Nobel Prize for this rather than for a lasting theoretical contribution.  His painted eggs and model gull heads got to the heart of some fascinating behaviours.  We believe that the current climate and our specific ecological niche will encourage this order of creativity.  There is certainly nothing hindering this other than an obsessive tendency to assess the greenness of our neighbours’ lawns.

 

So, when we hear a colleague bemoaning her lot in the new university sector and expressing a heartfelt desire to join a leading institution we will ask “why throw away your freedom and your opportunity to innovate?” 

 

Authors: Tom Dickins & Derek Moore

 

Originally published on http://tomsnonacademicwork.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/the-freedoms-of-new.html?m=1

Conference: Therapeutic Interventions: Actions not Words, 23rd October BPS London Offices

http://www.bps.org.uk/events/therapeutic-interventions-actions-not-words
 
This conference aims to be a refreshing, innovative and thought provoking conference that aims to highlight and enhance knowledge around culture, and black and ethnic minority issues for those involved in applied psychology.
Applied Psychologists have organised this conference. A range of speakers will address a wide range of topical issues. In addition, there will be a number of workshops. Please come along, listen, network, and contribute to the discussions of the day.
 
Dr Laura Cockburn, Educational Psychologist, working on the Doctoral Programme for Educational and Child Psychology in UEL is leading a workshop together with Ken Greaves, Educational Psychologist (and a student at UEL) and Paula Spencer, Counselling Psychologist. This workshop is about: The use of Narrative methods when trying to improve our engagement with culturally diverse populations: a workshop

Debating diagnosis and rethinking the way we teach about mental health

The recent publication of the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (or DSM5) has led to a fierce debate both in the academic literature and in the wider media about how best to conceptualise psychological distress.  For example, an article in the Observer about the recent BPS Division of Clinical Psychology’s position statement (which makes the case for a paradigm shift away from diagnosis) has already received over 1,000 comments from readers.  An ipetition about DSM5 has over 14,000 signatures. 

Whilst in some media outlets this debate is being seen as a turf war between psychologists and psychiatrists in fact many psychiatrists have problems with DSM5 too.  Indeed, one of the most prolific critics of DSM5 is Dr Allen Frances who led the task force which produced the previous edition of the DSM.  In the UK, the Critical Psychiatry Network (a grouping of psychiatrists critical of biomedical reductionism) recently published a statement critical of the DSM.

The problems with psychiatric diagnostic systems like the DSM were discussed in a series of open access articles in a special issue of the Psychologist which I co-edited with John Cromby (University of Loughborough) and Paula Reavey (London South Bank University) in 2007.  They are also summarised in a recent open access article in the journal Evidence-Based Mental Health (EBMH) by three professors of clinical psychology (Peter Kinderman, John Read and Richard Bentall) and psychiatrist and researcher Dr Joanna Moncrieff.  They note that “diagnostic systems in psychiatry have always been criticised for their poor reliability, validity, utility, epistemology and humanity”. 

Many people appear to think that problems with the reliability of psychiatric diagnosis lie in the past but a recent editorial in the American Journal of Psychiatry reporting the results of field trials of DSM5 criteria reveal they are not.  Of 20 adult disorders only three had kappa reliability values over 0.6 (even schizophrenia only had a kappa of 0.46).  Even worse, Allen Frances noted that the definition of acceptable reliability had been lowered:  “When DSM 5 failed to achieve acceptable reliability by historical standards, the DSM 5 leadership arbitrarily decided to move the goal posts in and lower the bar in defining what is 'acceptable'.”

Given the longstanding problems with psychiatric diagnostic systems it is surprising that the contents of most psychology textbooks on mental health (also titled ‘abnormal psychology’, ‘clinical psychology’ or ‘psychopathology’) are almost entirely structured by classificatory frameworks like the DSM – a point noted recently by psychologist and broadcaster Claudia Hammond on BBC Radio 4’s All in the Mind in an interview with psychiatrist Simon Wessely about DSM5.  It is quite unusual within psychology for its approach to a phenomenon to be predetermined by another discipline’s framework.  Usually, in psychology, phenomena are operationally defined and understood using psychological theory.  Indeed, Kinderman et al note that this approach can be adopted in mental health too:  “it is relatively straightforward to generate a simple list of problems that can be reliably and validly defined; for example, depressed mood, auditory hallucinations and intrusive thoughts. There is no reason to assume that these phenomena cluster into discrete categories or other simple taxonomic structure”

In a survey of psychology mental health modules in the UK a few years back John Cromby, Paula Reavey and I discovered that current teaching about mental health in the psychology undergraduate curriculum was a little dated.  For example, critiques of diagnosis tended to refer only to critics from the 1960s like Laing and Szasz rather than the more modern critiques noted above.  Moreover, teachers wished to have more involvement from clinical psychologists and other practitioners.  Perhaps because of this more recent developments within clinical psychology of psychotherapies for psychosis and alternatives to diagnosis like formulation do not seem to get as much coverage as they might in mental health modules on undergraduate psychology programmes.  The survey also found that although the mental health service user movement has become increasingly important in mental health practice, service users were barely involved with the teaching of students.

In an article in the Psychologist on the teaching of mental health to psychology undergraduates John, Paula, Anne Cooke, Jill Anderson and I questioned the tendency for psychology educators to “jump ship” by giving psychiatric rather than consistently psychological explanations of mental distress and we suggested there was a need to consider the implications of recent developments in psychological theory and practice.   This raises the question of how we might teach differently about mental health.

In a recently published textbook entitled Psychology, Mental Health & Distress, John, Paula and I plus a range of additional contributors argue that a truly psychological approach to distress should be experience-based rather than diagnostic category-based.  By this we mean to focus on broad commonalities in experience.  The book is in two parts.  The first part deals with a number of conceptual issues which are often skipped over in many textbooks but which are crucial if we are to think clearly about distress.  The second part deals with five broad forms of distress.

To understand why we have the ideas we do today it is vital to look at how those ideas were developed, so in our chapter on history in Part 1 we provide a survey of the different ways that distress has been understood and treated over the centuries. History shows how there have always been competing strands of explanation and treatment for distress, some primarily implicating the body and its organs and some primarily implicating experiences, meanings, thoughts and feelings. 

Our chapter on culture looks at how distress differs between societies. It discusses some of the great variability in the forms of distress, the variability in the ways that it gets linked to other aspects of experience, and the variability in the outcomes associated with it. As we have already suggested, distress is thoroughly bound up with culture and this chapter illustrates the extent and consequences of this.

Our approach to biology treats it as an essential part of distress, but does not make the unfounded psychiatric assumption that it is always the ultimate source of people’s difficulties. In the chapter on biology in part 1, we explain why there are problems with ‘biopsychosocial’ accounts of distress, and in their place offer an alternative view of the role of biology based upon biologist Steven Rose’s notion of lifelines. We then summarise evidence that supports this approach, drawing upon studies of attachment as well as upon recent work in psychology and neuroscience.

In the chapter on classification Lucy Johnstone examines how psychiatric diagnosis is both similar to, and different from, diagnosis in general medicine and she discusses how adequate formulation is as an alternative to psychiatric diagnosis.  The issue of causality is extremely important and we devote a whole chapter to it in Part 1, exploring not only how we might understand the ways that different causal influences upon distress interact with each other but also the extent to which research into the causes of distress is helpful to clinicians.  The next  chapter is written by leading British mental health survivors Peter Campbell, Jacqui Dillon and Eleanor Longden who describe what the service user/survivor movement is and why it is important including a discussion of the approach taken by the Hearing Voices Network.  The last chapter in Part 1 examines three main mental health interventions:  medication, psychological therapies and community psychology.  Many mental health textbooks adopt a somewhat uncritical approach to the use of psychiatric medication but this section, authored by psychiatrist and researcher Joanna Moncrieff gives a clear explanation of research on the efficacy of medication and argues for a more pragmatic approach to understanding its effects.  Paul Kelly and Paul Moloney discuss psychological therapies whilst Rae Cox, Guy Holmes, Paul Moloney, Paul Kelly, Penny Priest and Mike Ridley-Dash examine key issues associated with community psychology interventions.

In the second part of the book we focus in detail on five main forms of distress-related experience formulated in everyday language:  sadness and worry; sexuality and gender; madness (authored by John Read and Richard Bentall); distressing bodies and eating; and personality disorder.  We have structured these chapters into broad classes of forms of distress where there is a commonality in the underlying phenomenology of an experience.  Thus the chapter on sadness and worry deliberately treats together aspects (e.g. ‘anxiety’ and ‘depression’) that would usually be treated separately in other books, because of their DSM classification.  Similarly the chapter on madness includes elements that, in other texts, would be treated separately like ‘schizophrenia’ and ‘bipolar disorder’.  Although the number of different kinds of distress we discuss is smaller than other texts, on average these difficulties will account for the majority of the referrals received by mental health services.

Each of these chapters follows a similar structure, building on the insights of the first part of the book.  Given our wish to focus on experience, each chapter begins with a fictional case story describing key aspects of that particular form of distress.  Section headings in the chapters cover historical and cultural context; contemporary Western forms of distress (including prevalence and psychiatric diagnosis); causal processes  (social, psychological, biological and genetic) drawing on a lifelines approach; and the efficacy of a variety of mental health interventions including psychological therapies.  Personality disorder is a much contested category and it could be argued that many people receive this diagnosis not because of their distress but because of the reactions of others to their behaviour.  As a result a key question in this chapter is whether the notion of personality disorder is a helpful way of making sense of people’s difficulties in relating to others.

We see the book as an important step in teaching mental health differently but we appreciate that changing the content of teaching can feel challenging for many lecturers.  As a result, we aim to provide as much support as possible to lecturers wishing to take a different approach and, on the lecturer’s section of the publisher’s website for the book we’ve included an 18 page handbook answering key questions lecturers are likely to ask as well as powerpoint slides for each chapter.  The publisher’s website includes a range of other resources including a sample of the introductory chapter.

The debates about psychiatric diagnosis in the wake of the publication of DSM5 suggest this is a good time to rethink the way we teach about mental health.  Indeed, one enterprising teacher has even used the regular revision of the DSM as a way of imparting insights about the history of psychology.  Joshua Clegg (City University of New York) suggests that the revision process of DSM can be used in teaching to ‘demonstrate the evolving ways in which mental health and illness are conceptualized and can reveal the cultural, political, and economic forces that shape this process’.

David Harper

Bringing Coaching Psychology to Nursing

Workshop Report

Coaching 360 – preceptorship and leadership development for registered nurses in Hong Kong, 19th December 2012

135 registered nurses from different hospitals and Universities attended the above workshop, which was arranged by the Hong Kong College of Education and Research in Nursing. This was one of the direct outcomes from my keynote at the 3rd International Orthopaedic Nursing Conference in Malta last October, where I was invited to give a talk/workshop at The United Christian Hospital in Hong Kong (See the previous conference report). My aims were twofold: to promote coaching psychology (UEL MSc Programme in particular) in Hong Kong and in the health sector which forms part of a wider initiative of promoting coaching psychology for nursing. From the hospital’s perspective, the workshop aims to show how coaching psychology can be used to 1) train and develop preceptors to become more effective in coaching the preceptees in the preceptorship programme; 2) develop leadership quality in both junior and senior nurses so that they can readily implement new nursing initiatives.

Knowledge transfer - Opportunities for nurses to develop coaching skills

The preceptorship and leadership development were the two major aspects identified as potential coaching applications. Preceptors are registered nurses (with minimum two years of clinical experience) who are responsible to guide, teach and coach the preceptees ( nurses who have just graduated from the institute and is not familiar to the clinical environment). In this preceptor-preceptee relationship, different approaches may be used in coaching and mentoring the preceptee. Coaching psychology can also help junior staff to facilitate new nursing initiatives which may be applicable to their clinical area.

Outcome

1. Evaluation: User satisfaction survey – 135 evaluation forms were distributed after the workshop and 68 were returned. All participants (100%) agreed that the workshop had been run in a well organized manner; 97% agreed that materials in the workshop were presented clearly. Over 90% of participants agreed that the objectives of the workshop had been made clear. 91% of participants agreed that the overall subjects in the workshop were easy to understand and the workshop was practical for use in the workplace.

2. UEL student recruitment – 200 leaflets for the MSc Coaching Psychology Distance Learning (DL) Programme were distributed to the participating hospitals. After the workshop, one participant – Dr Iren Wong, Head of School of Nursing, The Hong Kong Sanatorium and Hospital (the former Associate Professor at City University of Hong Kong) came and thanked me for the workshop. She subsequently applied and enrolled onto the MSc Coaching Psychology (DL) Programme, just in time to start in Semester B. There were a number of enquiries shortly after the workshop. It is expected the number of applications will follow for Semester A this September. Overall for Semester B, 13 new applicants have enrolled onto the MSc Coaching Psychology (DL) Programme (in comparison with Semester B last year, when there were 6) – this represents an overall increase by more than 100% in the number of DL students (well above the School’s target)! Together with the existing DL students, this brings the total number to 48.

Wider impact and future initiatives

1. Publication – the paper based on the Keynote at the Maltese conference was accepted and published by the International Coaching Psychology Review this Spring.

2. Esencija Sestrinstva First Nursing Symposium – I was invited to be a member of the Scientific Committee of the Symposium, and present a Keynote at the Symposium on 12 – 14 April 2013 at Marija Bistrica, Croatia.

3. The creative use of Moodle and the development of online learning project – In response to the above call, I have drafted two bids and sent them to the Subject Leader on Developing an online VLE Management System (VLE- MS) and Creation of a new Coaching Psychology short course for CPD to further advance the DL provision on Coaching Psychology and improve students’ learning experience. Further comments and support to take these forward are welcome.

4. Student Testimonials and future marketing - I have now received two testimonials from our former MSc students about the experience of their studies with UEL. I would welcome further advice from colleagues about how to take these forward and capitalise on this marketing opportunity.

Dr Ho Law PhD CPsychol CSci CMgr MISCP(Accred) AFBPsS; FCMI; FHEA

School of Psychology

Email: law2@uel.ac.uk

Date of the report: 09 February 2013

Collaboration, impact and media training event

I applied to attend an Open Central event named COLLABORATION, IMPACT AND MEDIA TRAINING at Senate House and was thrilled when I was allocated a place. I was less thrilled when I received the programme. The programme implied that the day would be mostly interactive with participants having to find partners to collaborate with and then form larger groups by marketing their ideas. This seemed quite a scary undertaking and I was nervous when I arrived at the event. However, the other participants, from a range of different universities, were all very friendly and warm. We soon got to know each other over the welcome coffee and I became less anxious. The first activity was to find a partner with whom we could develop a study idea. Initially there was a faint hint of desperation in the air as the chatting became more frantic but as most of the participants were social scientists it soon became apparent that we were all able to collaborate with the people sitting next to us. After spending some time expanding on our idea we then had to try and increase our group size from two to four. Although it sounded daunting it was in fact a really fun activity and a good insight as to how best to approach others when trying to build collaborative partnerships.

Following on from that we then had to complete different pathways to show the impact of our prospective study. This was a very informative exercise and I certainly considered lots of other pathways to impact that would not have occurred to me before. Lastly, we were shown how to create a podcast which was the chosen type of digital media because of the ease of which you can create a professional sounding product quickly and cheaply.  Podcasts are now becoming popular with lecturers who are able to record their sessions for students but, in addition, it was explained to us how podcasts can be put onto the internet to allow a much wider audience access to our work which is an important aspect when trying to increase impact by engaging the public with academic work. This activity was really enjoyable and we finished the afternoon by listening to each group’s podcast.  The ideas were wide ranging and fascinating, the podcasts humorous and lots of hilarity ensued. It was a great way to end a Friday afternoon.

I will remember this course as not only was it very informative and interesting but because it was a nice way to meet fellow PhD and Postdoc students from other institutions. Lunchtime was spent swapping experiences and ideas as well as admiring the unique interior of Senate House. Furthermore, this was one of the most fun courses that I have attended.

 Paula Booth

The impact of nicotine on cognitive functions

Within the field of smoking research, there is debate on the impact of nicotine on cognitive functions such as memory and attention. The most intricate part of the cognitive system is the 'executive functions' which generally co-ordinate a host of other functions and standard behaviour. The executive functions are the last to develop in adolescence and the first to start deteriorating in healthy ageing; they are also implicated in a range of other disorders such as Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Since 2004, we have been developing and refining a new test of executive functions using the School's virtual reality expertise (aka Tony Leadbetter). This new test known as JEF (the Jansari assessment of Executive Functions), looks like a computer game with the participant moving around an office environment completing tasks that an office temp might be asked to perform. These tasks have been designed to tap various aspects of the executive system and provide a profile of abilities that currently available clinical tests are unable to provide. In a collaborative study with an MSc student Dan Froggatt and two experts in smoking research, our own Lynne Dawkins and Trudi Edginton from Westminster University, we used JEF to look at smokers and nonsmokers who were either given a nicotine gum or a placebo gum to see the impact on their executive functions. The results demonstrated quite categorically, that without the nicotine, smokers perform relatively poorly and that with the nicotine gum, there is an improvement in performance which is generally to the level of non-smokers on a placebo gum. The effects were particularly marked for 'prospective memory' which is the ability to remember to do things in the future (e.g. turning the oven on in ten minutes time). This new paper will hopefully make a useful addition to our understanding of the impact of nicotine on cognitive functions. Further, the paper nicely adds to three other papers published by a collaborator, Cathy Montgomery at Liverpool John Moores University who has used JEF to look at the impact of ecstasy, alcohol and cannabis in three separate studies.

Ashok Jansari