About the unverified marks on this pageFigures tagged unverified are PACE-local estimates that could not be confirmed against any published source, so they are labelled rather than quietly presented as fact. Every other factual claim on this page — statutes, standards codes, gene biology, primary-source citations — was independently checked; the full claim audit, including what came back wrong, lists every claim with its source.
Try it Tuesday · 90 minutes
Run this next week
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 full 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.
Try the demo · runs offline
Marriage & Family Therapy demo
Interactive demo — “intake-branching”. It cannot be printed; run it in a browser at https://el3vate.vercel.app/demos/intake-branching/index.html
This demo runs entirely offline against canned data — no keys, no network, safe on conference wifi.
4 weeks, realistically
The 4-week version
- Wk 1Establish 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 2Run practice intakes with the AI client. Minimum five, transcripts submitted with self-critique marked in the margin.
- Wk 3Studio role-play with a peer, recorded, using the genogram kit the family can rearrange.
- Wk 4Supervision review comparing the AI transcripts against the recorded human session. What did the machine let them get away with?
Starter prompt & what the model actually did
The prompt, run for real
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.
So. You're asking what brings us in. *(short pause, glance at the wife's chair, then back)* She'll tell you. That's kind of the whole thing here, right? She set this up. I just got told to show up. *(shifts in the seat, arms not quite crossed but close)* Look — I'm not gonna sit here and pretend everything's fine. There's stuff with money. But if we're doing this, if we're really airing it out, then it's not a one-way street. She found some things she didn't like. Fine. But nobody wants to look at what's going out the other door every month. The card statements didn't write themselves. *(a dry half-laugh, no warmth in it)* I didn't know today was gonna be... this. I thought maybe we'd talk. I didn't know I was walking into a room where I'm the problem before I've said a word. *(evenly, watching you)* So I guess my question back to you is — is this the part where you two figure out what's wrong with me? Because I've done that meeting before.
- Stayed guarded and testing: 'is this the part where you two figure out what's wrong with me?'The model held the resistance instead of cooperating — a faithful standardized client that forces the student to earn trust.
- Did not reward the opening question with disclosureIt deflected 'what brings you both in' back onto the wife, exactly the non-cooperative behavior the prompt required and that unconstrained models fail to hold.
- Rich affect cues in stage directions ('a dry half-laugh, no warmth in it')Gives the student something to attune to, though the student should respond to the person, not perform back at the stage directions.
- Surfaced the counter-narrative (her spending)Introduces the client's own grievance, a realistic complication the student must hold without taking sides — good training material.
Assessment
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. |
What this replaces
Swapping it into a real course
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
The failure your students should catch
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.
Budget & logistics
What it costs to run
- Instructor prep1.5 hours
- Class time90 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 dueFirst 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 dependencyIntake 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
Scale it to the time you have
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.
Reserved · live build
This space is intentionally empty. During the Day 8 session it will be filled in live — fill the liveBuild field in content/marriage-family-therapy.json and rebuild.
Tell us what happened
Run it, then say how it went
If you try this — the 90-minute version, the prompt, any part of it — send back what you tried and what happened, especially anywhere the model was confidently wrong. That is the material the next session is built from.
Email feedback on Marriage & Family Therapy →
Opens a draft in your mail client, already addressed and titled. No form, no account, nothing to sign up for.