Facilitating Experiential Training for Counselors using a Real-time Annotation Tool

Experiential training, where mental health professionals practice their learned skills, remains the most costly component of therapeutic training. We introduce Pin-MI, a video-call-based tool that supports experiential learning of counseling skills used in motivational interviewing (MI) through interactive role-play as client and counselor. In Pin-MI, counselors annotate, or "pin" the important moments in their role-play sessions in real-time. The pins are then used post-session to facilitate a reflective learning process, in which both client and counselor can provide feedback about what went well or poorly during each pinned moment. We discuss the design of Pin-MI and a qualitative evaluation with a set of healthcare professionals learning MI. Our evaluation suggests that Pin-MI helped users develop empathy, be more aware of their skill usage, guaranteed immediate and targeted feedback, and helped users correct misconceptions about their performance. We discuss implications for the design of experiential training tools for learning counseling skills.