ORIGINAL ARTICLE Pilot evaluation of the impacts of a personal practice informed undergraduate psychotherapy curriculum on student learning and wellbeing Kenneth I. Pakenham | Shelley Viskovich School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia Correspondence Kenneth I. Pakenham, School of Psychology, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland 4072, Australia. Email: kenp@psy.uq.edu.au Objectives: Addressing the challenges of teaching psychotherapy experientially in large undergraduate classes, this study evaluated a personal practice psychotherapy curriculum. A novel element of the third-year university psychotherapy course was the reflective self-practice psychotherapy techniques. Method: Primary outcomes were reflective learning, self-awareness, mental help- seeking, self-care, and wellbeing. Secondary outcomes were self-practice and psy- chological flexibility. One hundred and nineteen undergraduate psychology students completed an online survey at the start and end of a semester. Fifty-four students were enrolled in the psychotherapy course, and 65 students not enrolled in the course constituted the comparison group. Psychotherapy students also completed an end-of-course feedback survey. Results: Relative to the comparison group, psychotherapy students improved on all primary and secondary outcomes. Self-practice and psychological flexibility mediated improvements on primary outcomes. Students reported integrating psy- chotherapy strategies acquired through self-practice exercises into daily-living. Feedback indicated personal practice fostered: personal development, self-care, learning psychotherapies, managing stress, and career enhancement. Conclusion: These preliminary findings support a personal practice-informed undergraduate psychotherapy curriculum. KEYWORDS personal practice, psychotherapy curriculum, reflective learning, self-care, self- practice, wellbeing 1 | INTRODUCTION Psychotherapy is a core content area of clinical psychology training and is offered in most university psychology pro- grams at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Teaching psychotherapy typically involves intensive competency-based training involving individualised face-to-face coaching, expe- riential exercises and supervision at the postgraduate level. Teaching psychotherapy using these strategies at the under- graduate level is challenging because class sizes are usually large, which precludes the use of intensive training methods. Undergraduate psychotherapy courses therefore tend to be heavily content-based, with exposure to therapy techniques and processes limited to videos and role-plays. An alternative teaching and learning strategy is the use of a personal practice (PP) approach, which involves students applying psychother- apy techniques to themselves (Bennett-Levy & Finlay-Jones, 2018). PP is suited to teaching introductory level psychother- apy in large undergraduate classes, because it relies on guided self-directed and self-reflective experiential learning (Bennett-Levy et al., 2001). The PP approach involves trainee or qualified therapists applying psychological techniques to themselves. Using psy- chotherapy techniques on oneself offers nuanced experiential Received: 12 July 2018 Revised: 17 September 2018 Accepted: 3 October 2018 DOI: 10.1111/ap.12366 Australian Psychologist. 2018;1–13. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ap © 2018 The Australian Psychological Society 1