School counseling for the 21st Century: challenges and opportunities

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

School counselors will need to be culturally competent and culturally responsive (Lee, 2001) to a wide range of students in order to effectively attend to their needs. Unfortunately, however, the wide adoption of multicultural counseling as a key part of school counselor preparation is fairly recent, and the effectiveness of the preparation is still being evaluated. The Multicultural Counseling Competencies and Standards (Sue, Arredondo, & McDairs, 1992), adopted by the Association for Multicultural Counseling and Development (AMCD), presents a model of a culturally skilled counselor in which three dimensions of counseling (belief, knowledge, and skill areas) are examined across three counselor characteristics (awareness of one's own assumptions, values, and biases; understanding the worldview of culturally different clients; and developing appropriate intervention strategies and techniques). While the competencies and standards seem to be a key piece in the preparation of many school counselors, many preparation programs offer only one semester of a cross-cultural counseling course with few if any opportunities for continued development of skills. This limited exposure may well be inadequate both in time and scope to develop culturally competent counselors. In addition, many school counselors who have been practicing in the field for some time may have had no formal cross-cultural preparation. Thus, school counselors may feel inadequate in meeting the needs of the full range of students in their schools.

Increasing Reliance on Technology

A third challenge for school counselors involves the increasing reliance on technology. Technological advances provide a wide array of opportunities to make the world of work operate more efficiently and effectively, and there is ample opportunity for school counseling to take advantage of technology in delivery of preventative and developmental school counseling programs as well (Baker & Gerler, 2001). Yet while computers and the Internet have the potential to be used to help a variety of counseling tasks, most counselors either have limited technology skills or, even with skills, only use their computers for basic duties such as recordkeeping, scheduling, and word processing (Owen & Weikel, 1999). Many practicing school counselors report a lack of comfort and expertise in working with computers and specifically the Internet (Owen & Weikel, 1999). In fact, preparation programs have only recently begun to require technology competence, and in-service programs are rarely available focused specifically on school counseling applications.

The financial investment required for technological advances presents an additional challenge for using technology in school settings. Many school counselors report that the computers or the software provided to them by their school systems are inadequate (Owen & Weikel, 1999). Considering the price of computer systems and the rate at which technology becomes obsolete, attempting to update systems throughout a school in order to maintain currency regarding technology is a significant expense, and one that many schools simply cannot afford. Likewise, becoming dependent on technology for counseling services may further differentiate the "digital divide" which already separates families who can afford computers and Internet access from those who cannot (Sampson & Bloom, 2001).