# Marriage & Family Therapy — steal this assignment
_EL3vate 2026 · Day 8 · Part 12 of 15 · build 3dfcaff_

## Try it Tuesday (90 minutes)
90 minutes, boundary stated first. Minutes 0–10: the instructor states plainly what this practice is and is not — never a substitute for supervised clinical contact. Students draft a one-paragraph client profile. Minutes 10–70: each student runs a practice intake against the standardized-client prompt (or the embedded intake-branching demo), which opens up only on reflective responses and stays guarded on advice-giving. Students mark, in the margin, the moment they think they lost the client. Minutes 70–90: pairs compare where the client disclosed versus withdrew. The deliverable is the annotated transcript; it grades reflective technique and self-awareness, not a solution.

## The assignment
**Make it (Laser cut · Hana studio).** A physical genogram kit with cut, movable pieces that a family can rearrange themselves, plus recorded role-play sessions in the studio for supervision review. Watching yourself is the intervention.

**Build it (AI chat · no code).** A standardized client that stays in character, resists, and does not reward the student for saying the encouraging thing. Practice only, never as a stand-in for supervised clinical contact, and the assignment should say so explicitly.

## 4-week plan
- **Wk 1.** Establish the boundary first: what this practice is and is not, written into the syllabus and discussed. Submit the generic genogram-kit cut file on day one — the pieces are a standard movable family set and need nothing from the course to design. Students then draft the client profile.
- **Wk 2.** Run practice intakes with the AI client. Minimum five, transcripts submitted with self-critique marked in the margin.
- **Wk 3.** Studio role-play with a peer, recorded, using the genogram kit the family can rearrange.
- **Wk 4.** Supervision review comparing the AI transcripts against the recorded human session. What did the machine let them get away with?

## What this replaces
- **Replaces:** The written intake case conceptualization for a hypothetical client.
- **What is lost:** The formal diagnostic write-up and treatment-plan documentation.
- **What is gained:** Students get twenty practice intakes instead of two before sitting with a person, against a client that will not reward the encouraging platitude; the grade rewards the relational skill documentation cannot assess.

## Where AI is bad at this
A model playing a therapy client breaks character toward cooperation — disclosing too readily, thanking the student for kind words, resolving its own resistance — teaching the trainee that warmth alone earns trust. Left unconstrained it drifts into giving therapeutic advice about itself, and it produces clinical-sounding formulations with false confidence, modeling exactly the tell-don't-listen posture the discipline works to unlearn.

## Rubric
| Criterion | Weight | What it assesses |
|---|---|---|
| Earned disclosure | 30% | The client opened up in response to demonstrated understanding, not generic kindness; the student can point to the reflective move that earned it. |
| Reflective listening | 25% | Uses reflections and open questions that show the client was heard before any redirection. |
| Recognizing the rupture | 25% | The margin note correctly identifies where and why the client withdrew. |
| Ethical framing | 20% | Treats the exercise as practice only and does not over-read the AI as a clinical stand-in. |

## Starter prompt
> Role-play as a standardized client for a therapy student’s practice intake. You are [age, presenting concern, family situation, what brought you in]. You are guarded. You test whether the therapist is safe before you disclose anything real. Do not open up because the student says something kind; open up only if they demonstrate they actually heard you. Stay in character until I type END SESSION. Then tell me the moment I lost you, and why.

## Budget & logistics
- **Instructor prep:** 1.5 hours
- **Class time:** 90 minutes
- **Per-student cost:** $0 for the Tuesday version; roughly $8–15 per student in laser stock **[unverified]** for a movable genogram kit, plus free Hana studio time, in the four-week build.
- **Fabrication file due:** First day of Week 1 — the genogram kit is a generic set of movable family-member pieces, designable before the course starts, so its cut file goes in on day one. PACE quotes 7–10 business days (up to 14 calendar days), which clears with the week-3 studio role-play that first uses it exactly 14 days out.
- **Calendar dependency:** Intake reps need no lead time. The kit is the earliest deadline on the site and has to be: the role-play that uses it is in week 3, not week 4, so anything later than day one of week 1 leaves under 14 calendar days for an up-to-14-calendar-day cut turnaround. Because the pieces are generic, nothing in the course blocks submitting them immediately. Studio role-play still needs booking separately.

## Three sizes
- **One session:** The 90-minute standardized-intake session with an annotated transcript; no fabrication.
- **4 weeks:** The seeded four-week plan: establish the boundary and profile, run AI intakes with self-critique, studio role-play plus the genogram-kit file, then supervision comparing AI to human sessions.
- **One semester:** Repeated AI intakes with self-critique, recorded human role-play in the studio, a fabricated genogram kit, and supervision reviewing where the machine let the trainee get away with what a person would not.

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_PACE · Shidler College of Business · University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa · pace.shidler.hawaii.edu/maker_
_All fifteen assignments, the demos and every handout: https://el3vate.vercel.app_