The Mentoring Lab: A Small Group Approach for Managing Emotions from Multicultural Counselor Training

Abstract

In an attempt to enable counselors-in-training to work through the strong emotional reactions experienced during the multicultural counseling course, a small group approach called the Multicultural Mentoring Lab has been developed. The purpose of the Multicultural Mentoring Lab is to provide a supportive, nonjudgmental, small group environment for students to express thoughts, feelings, and experiences they may be reluctant to share in the larger classroom setting. Feedback from mentoring lab participants has been positive regarding the effects of the small group process for both processing emotions and enhancing multicultural competencies.

Keywords:

• Multicultural Counseling
• Counselor Education
• Mentoring
• Shame
• Group Process