School Counseling Practicum: Psychology CED 631 SOAP Note Example

This assignment presents a SOAP note from a school counseling practicum, focusing on a community college student and employing a person-centered approach. The subjective section (S) captures the student's feelings of dissatisfaction despite achieving his dream, while the objective section (O) details the counselor's observations and the student's demeanor. The assessment (A) highlights the counselor's humanistic approach, aiming to uncover unconscious conflicts and facilitate self-discovery. The plan (P) includes homework assignments for self-reflection, muscle relaxation techniques, and thought record maintenance. The session demonstrates the application of person-centered psychotherapy to understand and address the student's issues, emphasizing empathy, non-judgment, and the student's autonomy in the therapeutic process. Desklib offers a wide range of solved assignments and past papers for students.

Running head: PSYCHOLOGY
CED 631 - School Counseling Practicum
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Introduction- SOAP note contain information about a particular patient that is
commonly presented or written in specific order that contains a set of components. The
primary purpose of a SOAP notes is for recording the patient admission, medical history, and
other relevant documents that are present in the patient chart (Barnett et al., 2014). This
assignment will contain a SOAP note about a community college student with the use of a
person-centred approach.
S= Subjective
“It’s not really an incident just something I would like pondering for a while and like just
kind of in terms of general happiness..”
“…like I don’t know like whenever you’re striving towards dream or something yeah and
you like achieve a certain extent…”
“.. but then you feel that it’s not enough and you have this like insatiable desire to keep
wanting more and more…”
“.. obviously confused like I don’t know if that’s normal or if it’s just like a inability…”
“my dream was to be a professional soccer player and I ended up getting to play Spain as a
professional team… I felt terrible for some reason I don’t know why… I’ve always
wanted this now that I have it I feel miserable..”
“..wanted to feel good about myself..”
“…like what if I acted too much on emotion rather than logic…”
“… they finish in the bottom three.. and they go down the division..”
O= Objective
The counsellor feels that the student is describing a general experience regarding an idea
what the student wants to accomplish
The counsellor demonstrates an interest in knowing specific facts about the student’s
journey and asks for some examples. She delves deeper into the underlying factors that

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made the student look forward to the experience of playing with Spain, thus demonstrating
a person-centred approach
Student was sitting in a relaxed position, head upright, initially apprehensive of disclosing
the problems that he had been facing, later on became well acquainted with the counsellor
and revealed the problems that he faced.
Legs were crossed displaying confidence, leaning at times to demonstrate interest in what
the counsellor was stating
A= Assessment
The counsellor adopts a humanistic approach while counselling the student and tries to
interpret the ways by which the student perceived himself consciously or subconsciously.
The model of non-authoritative approach was used by the counsellor during the assessment
whereby she allowed the student to take lead in the discussions, with the aim of assisting
him to discover new solution.
Counsellor tried to resolve and reveal unconscious conflicts in the student that governed
his symptoms
The basic approach of this counselling session was based on the belief that there was some
kind of maladaptive functioning in progress and it was principally unconscious.
The assessment involved display of skills of a compassionate facilitator where the student
was paid attention and listened without any judgement and all his experiences were
acknowledged without shifting the conversation in another domain.
The working hypothesis was person-centred therapy where the student was allowed to talk
more, followed by restating the words in an attempt to allow the student gain a sound
understanding of his feelings and thoughts
P= Plan
Homework assignments where the student will reflect on the past experiences and why he

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chose to behave in a specified way
Practicing muscle relaxation thrice a day for recording and monitoring the negative
automatic thoughts
Therapy over the phone
Maintaining thought records and/or diaries that allow examination of the cognitive
distortions and unconstructive thoughts
Arriving at new alternatives that could have fitted the past situations
Giving presentations in front of a wider audience for analysing the emotional feelings and
their intensities
Table 1- SOAP format
Conclusion- To conclude, the video demonstrate a practice counselling session where
the counsellor adopted person-centred psychotherapy approach for understanding the issues
that were faced by the student.

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References
Barnett, S. G., Gallimore, C., Kopacek, K. J., & Porter, A. L. (2014). Evaluation of electronic
SOAP note grading and feedback. Currents in Pharmacy Teaching and
Learning, 6(4), 516-526.
Youtube.com. (2015). Practicum Counseling Session - College Student. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrBEE5eM_As

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Bibliography
Freeth, R. (2017). Humanising psychiatry and mental health care: the challenge of the
person-centred approach. CRC Press.
Helmeke, K. B., & Sori, C. F. (2014). The therapist's notebook for integrating spirituality in
counseling II: More homework, handouts, and activities for use in psychotherapy.
Routledge.
Tolan, J., & Cameron, R. (2016). Skills in person-centred counselling & psychotherapy.
Sage.