School counseling for the 21st Century: challenges and opportunities

Professional School Counseling, Dec, 2001 by Pamela O. Paisley, George McMahon

Site-based accountability will require that school counselors, in collaboration with other stakeholders

* Clearly understand the needs of students within the school through review of qualitative and quantitative data

* Design the school counseling program based on those needs, the mission of the school, and student competencies

* Determine relevant factors (e.g., test scores, grades, attendance, course-taking patterns, satisfactions survey results, etc.) to be monitored

* Implement the program as intentionally designed

* Evaluate the program based on targeted factors

* Revise the program as needed based on review of appropriate data

As noted by Baker (2000), accountability involves evaluating programs and demonstrating that something worthwhile is happening. At the state or national level, a clearinghouse for site-based program evaluation results could provide stronger support, through metaanalysis, for school counseling programs and school counselor positions. More significantly, intentionally designing and evaluating programs and using those results to improve programming will likely improve the quality of experiences and outcomes for students.

A Snapshot of the Ideal School Counselor: Personal Reflections

As former practicing school counselors who are now involved in graduate preparation, we have an ideal vision of the professional who will lead school counseling in the next stage of development. If we had a magic wand (something we wished for often as school counselors and still wish we had as counselor educators!), the description that follows would be the school counselors that would work with the children we love; in fact, all children.

They would have completed an extended program accredited by the Council for the Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs and be well versed in the foundations of the field of counseling and the specialty of school counseling. They would also be familiar with content from the larger school community (e.g., educational leadership, motivation, learning styles). They would be committed to lifelong learning including personal and professional development. This commitment would be based on the understanding that graduate education is only a beginning to the professional journey. They would be employed in systems that encourage and provide opportunities for specific skill development and supervision.

They would be equally grounded in the three domains of student development: academic, career, and personal/social. In addition, they would resist the temptation to make one more important than the others. They would, in fact, reject false dichotomies in which attending to academic development means abandonment of personal/social. Or caring about personal issues means ignoring systemic issues. These ideal counselors would have strong clinical skills as they are often the first experience the general public has with counselors of any description and the only one in the school setting with this type of expertise. They would understand both normal development and pathology.