Article: Who Taught You to Teach? by Mandy Atkinson and Patrick Brook

First published in The Transactional Analyst, the magazine of UKATA, Autumn 2026 (pp. 40–41). Republished here with thanks.

Introduction

When we sat down to talk about writing a certificate course in teaching for those teaching psychotherapy and psychotherapeutic counselling, it was exciting on a personal level: we have been colleagues and friends for many years, and this was something we could build together. Our starting point was to look back at the feedback we have had from the courses we have taught. People are consistently generous, and often kind and enthusiastic about us as people. They comment on the quality and strength of our teaching and training, and often ask some great questions: how did this course come about and how did you arrange that content over those days? Why did certain things come in the order they did and a question that comes up time and again: “So, who taught you to teach?”

On one level, this question has a fairly straightforward answer. We could point to qualifications, to previous roles, to the institutions in which we trained and worked. They have all played their part and yet, none of them, quite answer the question fully. This is what this article is about.

We should say at the outset that there is a real distinction between teaching and training and which is the domain of another article; in this piece, for ease, we use the words interchangeably. Either way, trainees are not the only ones who ask the types of questions as written above. Anyone who trains transactional analysts, in whatever field, has at some point to say what they think teaching is for, and to say it formally. The TSTA examination handbooks of both the ITAA and EATA require candidates to describe their philosophy of training and the values and principles guiding their choice of programme and methods, and the European handbook asks for a referenced understanding of adult learning and curriculum theory (EATA, 2025; IBOC, 2024). That seems to us entirely reasonable. Someone entering into this role really should hold a considered position about what they are doing and why, rather than relying on a collection of habits they might have absorbed or acquired.

In TA, becoming a trainer proceeds largely through a type of mentoring. Candidates work alongside a sponsoring TSTA trainer, observe and are observed, and are examined by peers, as both of us were. It is a generous, robust apprenticeship, and much of what is best in our field has passed down through it, but what is transmitted depends considerably on who transmits it and how it is taught.

When each of us came to set out a philosophy of teaching of our own, we were fortunate in that we both could lean into other professional roles we had occupied. Both of us had spent many years as educators in the tertiary sector, and both of us had been formally and structurally trained to teach. We could therefore draw on a body of thinking about teaching and learning that we had not acquired through transactional analysis alone, and we are conscious that this is, in many ways, not the usual route.

It is also where we think there is both an odd gap and a great opportunity. Diplomas and certificates in supervision have proliferated across our field over the last twenty years, and rightly so. Formally taught courses in how to teach psychotherapy and psychotherapeutic counselling have not. That absence is what prompts this article. Teaching psychotherapy and psychotherapeutic counselling is, we think, a distinct professional practice, and not simply an extension of being able to practise. And, what it asks of a teacher can be described, examined and chosen, which means it can also be taught.

Two philosophies

It seems worth saying where each of us starts. Our philosophies of teaching are not the same, and comparing them has been one of the most productive things we did when we came to plan our course together.

Mandy’s philosophy begins from relationship. She understands teaching, like psychotherapy and supervision, as a relational practice, different in purpose but alike in requiring a balance of support, challenge, accountability and attention to the learner’s development. Contracting is central to it (Sills, 2006): a clearly defined relationship with open communication and agreed expectations, understood as an ongoing practice rather than as something settled once at the outset. Her attention falls on the relational needs of learners, including security, validation, acceptance and protection (Erskine & Trautmann, 1996; Perret, 2025), on embracing difference in the learning environment, and on a psychological safety that does not mean the absence of challenge but makes challenge possible.

Patrick’s philosophy, on the other hand, begins from the Adult ego state. For him, psychological growth and change operate through the Adult ego state, which is both cognitive and affective and credits the learner with the capacity to reflect on their own experience and to organise teaching around it. Trainees concentrate on the task and on the role of becoming a sound clinician, and are encouraged to take regressive personal material to their own therapy rather than bring it into the training room. Learning then involves a process of apperception, breaking down assumptions previously held narratives and forging links not seen before, until values are examined, owned and more fully integrated instead of borrowed.

Set side by side, our emphases are clearly different, and yet they have a great deal in common. Both of us believe that people do not develop in isolation, nor grow in atmospheres of anxiety or fear and so, learning requires scaffolding, safety, support, encouragement and appropriately pitched challenge. It also needs clarity, since demystifying what is happening and saying plainly what is expected removes the confusion in which trust is hardest to build. And, moreover, it needs a teacher/trainer who is confident, visibly interested in the subject and unafraid to have fun with it.

Pedagogy and andragogy: what changes when the learner is an adult

Where we coalesce particularly strongly is on principles of method: on how adults learn, and on what the teaching of psychotherapy and psychotherapeutic counselling therefore needs to look like. This common ground is most usefully described as andragogy.

For those that aren’t aware of the term, andragogy is the method and practice of teaching adults. It is usually set against pedagogy, which is literally the leading of children, and which remains the model most of us absorbed from our own schooling. The difference is not one of rigour. Pedagogy is teacher-led: the teacher (as agent often of a wider system) decides what is needed, in what order, and when it has been learned. Andragogy takes account of what the learner already brings. Malcolm Knowles (1988), who did most to bring the term into general use in English, characterised adult learners as needing to know why they are being asked to learn something, as more self-directing, and as bringing a reservoir of experience that is itself a resource for the learning. This is something we have talked about between us for years, and we long ago borrowed Alison King’s formulation (King, 1993): the job is to be a ‘guide on the side rather than a sage on the stage’, though we recognise that there are times where our roles require different functions according to contexts that present themselves.

These principles look like common sense until they are applied to a psychotherapy and psychotherapeutic counselling training room context. When taken seriously, they alter a number of things, for example, who sets the agenda, what counts as a productive session, and what the teacher is understood to be for. Adults tend to learn what their role currently requires of them, so that material arriving too early is seldom retained, while material arriving when a trainee has recently met the difficulty in practice is rarely forgotten. They come with problems rather than subjects, and with a legitimate wish to know what to do in the consulting room when faced with clients.

The difference shows less in what is taught than in how a room feels. In a pedagogic environment the agenda belongs to the teacher. Questions travel one way, towards the front, and answers travel back. The signs are small and easy to miss: a group waiting to be told; a question put to the trainer that three people present could have answered between them; a trainee prefacing a sharp observation with the words “this is probably silly, but”. The atmosphere may be perfectly friendly, and usually is, but the transactions underneath are Parent–Child, and at their most entrenched a symbiosis (Schiff, 1975): one party holds the knowledge and confers approval, the other receives and complies.

An andragogic environment is arranged to invite something else. Learners are told at the outset why the material matters and are asked what they already bring to it. Questions travel in several directions. Disagreement is expected rather than tolerated, and the trainer’s account is one contribution among others rather than the verdict. The aim is not informality. It is Adult–Adult: two people thinking, each with something to bring, neither waiting for permission.

We should be careful about the claim underneath this. It is not that adults learn by different cognitive processes from children. Nebel (2022) makes the point well, arguing that Knowles’s principles benefit learners of any age, and that the honest difference is choice. What changes with adults is the situation rather than the machinery. They arrive by choice, with a professional role to fill and a wealth of experience to draw on, and a room arranged without regard to those facts will produce Parent–Child transactions whether or not anyone intends it.

We feel that what guards against it is not goodwill but skill and precision. In practice, andragogy is made up of small, yet concrete things. We tell learners at the outset what will be covered, why it matters and how it will be assessed, and we ask them at the same time what they hope the training will help them address. Contracting is done openly and revisited when circumstances change, rather than assumed. We ask what learners make of the material before we tell them what to make of it, and we are willing to say “I don’t know – how shall we find out?” and mean it. Criticism of the theory being taught is welcome, including criticism of the theory we are personally attached to. And we close sessions by asking what was useful and what was not.

All of that is what andragogy asks of any teacher of adults. The teaching of psychotherapy and psychotherapeutic counselling, in our estimation, needs to go a little further, partly because of what the material evokes in the people learning it, and it is to this, we now turn.

Dimensions of Learning

Our pathways into teaching psychotherapy and psychotherapeutic counselling have led us to understand learning as multidimensional. The earlier discussion of our philosophies and of andragogy makes clear that adult learners do not arrive as passive recipients of expert knowledge. They bring professional and personal histories, established ways of making meaning, hopes, anxieties and prior experiences of learning. In psychotherapy and psychotherapeutic counselling education, these dimensions are particularly entwined: learners are acquiring knowledge about therapeutic work while simultaneously being affected by the content that the work raises in relation to themselves and their relationships with others.

Cognitive dimension

The cognitive dimension concerns how learners make sense of new knowledge: how they think, process information, form concepts and move from theoretical understanding towards application in practice. This includes engaging with complex ideas, comparing theoretical perspectives and learning how to use theory thoughtfully in practice. Adult learners’ expectations of learning are also shaped by their earlier educational, professional and personal life experiences. These experiences may provide a rich foundation, but they can also influence their confidence, expectations of power and authority, and preferred ways of engaging with learning.

We have found that learners do not think, attend, process or demonstrate understanding in the same ways. Our experience suggests that learners’ preferences and needs are not fixed. We aim to offer varied and accessible routes into learning: for example, structured explanation, group discussion, visual material, creativity, practical demonstration, reflection and experiential activity. It is essential to embrace difference among learners, including neurodiversity. We must consider how teaching, assessment, communication and the learning environment can enable different learners to participate and flourish, rather than expecting all learners to adapt to one dominant norm. The learning environment created by us as teachers providing clarity, pacing, accessibility, psychological safety and openness to questions, therefore directly shapes the learner’s capacity to engage with what comes next.

Experiential dimension

In psychotherapy and psychotherapeutic counselling education, we take the experiential dimension to be central. Much of the significant learning comes through doing. Skills practice, role play, observation, reflective exercises, group discussion and work with clinical material enable learners to move beyond intellectual understanding and begin to develop therapeutic presence, perspective and confidence. Experiential learning invites much more from the learner. It asks learners to participate, be observed, receive feedback and encounter the gap between what they know in theory and what they can do in relationship. The teacher’s role, as we see it, is therefore to provide sufficient structure, preparation, containment and protection for learners to take these risks and learn actively.

Experiential learning of this kind is planned, structured and purposeful. It is not the same as the unstructured process group, in which trainees sit together with minimal direction and personal material is processed in the training room. One of us has argued elsewhere that such groups risk confusing the roles of trainer and therapist and can discount the very adult learning principles they claim to serve (Brook & Tudor, 2025). The experiential work we describe is anchored in an explicit learning task, held and carefully facilitated by the teacher, and directed towards professional competence. Personal material belongs in the trainee’s own personal therapy.

Emotional dimension

Teaching in this field also has a distinctive psychological and emotional dimension. The subject matter concerns trauma, loss, attachment, conflict, patterns of behaviour and other profound aspects of human life. It is likely to evoke strong feelings, personal memories and transferential responses among learners and within the group. We do not think psychotherapy and psychotherapeutic counselling can be taught as purely academic subjects; teaching requires sensitivity, plus an appreciation and awareness of emotional process.

Sensitivity of this kind is not the same as treatment. What the material evokes belongs in the room, since it is often the clearest evidence of what is being learned; what belongs to a trainee’s own history, and calls for therapeutic work, belongs in their own therapy. Holding that distinction while remaining warm and attentive is among the more demanding things a teacher in this field has to learn, and it is learned rather than intuited.

Relational dimension

The relational dimension is inseparable from both content and method. Learners are developing capacities that will be central to their work with clients: listening, empathy, reflection, ethical awareness and the ability to remain present with complexity. Relationships with trainers, teachers and fellow learners provide an important context in which these capacities can be experienced, practised and understood. It is our responsibility as teachers to provide a safe and well-managed learning environment. This makes it possible for learners to engage with challenge, uncertainty and difference without becoming overwhelmed. In this sense, how teaching is conducted matters as much, we think, as what is being taught.

Taken together, these dimensions suggest that the process of learning cannot be separated from the content being learned. Students are learning not only about relationship, emotion, trauma, reflection and ethical practice; they are also encountering these processes within the learning environment itself. This is, in part, learning through being. Our task as the teacher is therefore not simply to communicate knowledge or assess competence, but to create and maintain a sufficiently safe, inclusive and appropriately challenging space in which theory, experience and relationship can be integrated.

Conclusion

If learning in this field is cognitive, experiential, emotional and relational at once, and if adults learn best when they keep hold of their own learning, then teaching psychotherapy and psychotherapeutic counselling cannot be organised around the transmission of content. It has to be organised around the conditions in which those dimensions can be worked with: an explicit task, an open contract, a boundary that distinguishes professional development from personal therapy, and a teacher who holds the frame mindfully and deliberately whilst leaving the thinking to the learner. That, in short, is what an andragogical approach asks of us.

None of which, we would say again, is intuitive, and almost none of it is acquired simply by having been taught well oneself. Lesson planning, classroom management, the design of assessment, the giving of verbal and written feedback, and the making of materials that are essential for some learners and helpful for all: these are craft skills, with their own disciplines and their own literature. This is the gap we began with. Practitioners may or may not be able to teach. It is an assumption that is sometimes made, and it is not necessarily a safe one.

The Certificate in Teaching for Psychotherapists and Psychotherapeutic Counsellors, which we have developed together, begins from a different assumption. Its six days are organised around the questions set out here: how people learn, what the trainer's role is in a psychotherapy and psychotherapeutic counselling context, and how teaching, assessment and evaluation might be designed to serve them. We would welcome conversations with anyone who recognises these questions, whether or not they wish to join us when we start next year. Find out more about the Certificate in Teaching.

References

Brook, P., & Tudor, K. (2025). Unstructured process groups in transactional analysis psychotherapy training: A critical review and an educational alternative. Transactional Analysis Journal, 55(4), 330–348.

Erskine, R. G., & Trautmann, R. L. (1996). Methods of an integrative psychotherapy. Transactional Analysis Journal, 26(4), 316–328.

European Association for Transactional Analysis. (2025). Training and examinations handbook.

International Board of Certification. (2024). ITAA training and examinations handbook, Section 11: The TSTA examination. International Transactional Analysis Association.

King, A. (1993). From sage on the stage to guide on the side. College Teaching, 41(1), 30–35.

Knowles, M. S. (1988). The modern practice of adult education: From pedagogy to andragogy (Rev. ed.). Cambridge Adult Education.

Nebel, C. (2022, March 17). Pedagogy vs. andragogy: What’s the difference? The Learning Scientists.

Perret, V. (2025). Shame: The bane of supervision. Transactional Analysis Journal, 55(2), 126–137.

Schiff, J. L. (Ed.). (1975). Cathexis reader: Transactional analysis treatment of psychosis. Harper & Row.

Sills, C. (Ed.). (2006). Contracting in counselling and psychotherapy (2nd ed.). Sage.

About the authors

Mandy Atkinson

Mandy Atkinson TSTA (P), CTA (P), MA, Cert Ed is a UKCP registered psychotherapist, Supervisor and teacher, trainer, based in South Walsham, near Norwich. Mandy came to transactional analysis after over 25 years of teaching experience, working for over 12 years as a Senior Lecturer in Higher Education. She is passionate about how people learn and the student experience of learning. Mandy can be contacted at mandy.atkinson@mattersofthemind.org.uk

Patrick Brook TSTA (P), CTA (P), MA, DELTA is Academic Director and a founding director of Connexus Institute, and a UKCP registered psychotherapist and supervisor in Brighton and Hove. He trained as a psychotherapist alongside a twenty-five year career in UK higher education, where he taught, trained teachers and ran departments, and has never quite stopped being interested in how people learn. Patrick can be contacted at patrick@connexusinstitute.com.