The transformed school counselor in action

Theory Into Practice, Summer, 2002 by Sue Musheno, Mary Talbert

SCHOOL COUNSELORS CONFRONT many different challenges every day. Some challenges are student-related, such as chronic absenteeism, family violence and child abuse, conflicting values between home and school, angry and disruptive students, substance abuse, and underachieving students. Staff-related challenges include working with teachers who may not believe all children can learn, staff who are experiencing high levels of stress in situations they view as overwhelming, or principals who do not know how to best utilize their counselors' skills and instead use them as disciplinarians, substitute teachers, or administrative assistants. Counselors also face challenges that include trying to involve parents in their children's learning, or locating adequate community resources to help students and their families. Finally, counselors working in large urban school systems often fight stifling bureaucracies or red tape.

The number of students who come to school with social or emotional problems has increased over the last decade. Counselors could spend their time counseling these children, but this would allow them to see only 30-35 students a week. Some school counselors do carry a caseload of students with serious problems and often see the same students repeatedly. Yet counselors were not placed in schools to provide counseling services to only a handful of students. When the number of school counselors increased in the 1950s, the expectation was that counselors would work with all students, not just a few. Certainly counselors need to provide individual counseling to some students, but they must refer those with more serious problems to agencies within their surrounding communities. And as pointed out previously in this issue of TIP, the mental health model of school counseling has not been effective in increasing students' academic achievement.

Frequently, teachers do not see school counselors as relevant to the school's mission. To be effective in their schools, counselors need to (a) team and consult with teachers to improve student achievement; (b) provide in-service for teachers on children's developmental needs; (c) create mentoring and peer counseling programs to provide support for all students; (d) assess barriers to student learning; (e) collect and interpret student data for use in helping educators engage in needed reforms; (f) advocate for rigorous academic preparation and experiences that will broaden all students' educational and career options; and (g) link with agencies in their communities to provide the widest range of resources for students and their families. The skills counselors need to be effective include teaming and collaboration, leadership, assessment and use of data to bring about change, advocacy, and counseling and coordination (Education Trust, 1997).

The Transforming School Counseling Initiative (TSCI) has focused on developing the five skills listed above. The six TSCI counselor education programs have strived to prepare prospective counselors who will be able to use these skills to make a difference in the schools in which they are hired. A series of scenarios demonstrating how transformed school counselors would function using these skills follows.

Scenario 1: Teaming and collaboration (with other educators)

Beth Hardy, the school counselor at Brown Elementary, a large urban elementary school, arrives early to prepare for an Intervention Assistance Team meeting (IAT) scheduled for 7:45 a.m. The meeting will focus on generating strategies to help a student, John, improve his academic achievement. Other educators, such as John's teacher, the school nurse, the reading teacher, the school psychologist (in certain situations), and a counselor from a local mental health agency join Beth. When Beth started counseling at Brown, no structure for staffing students with achievement or behavior problems existed. Teachers referred students to her, but there was no systematic discussion of children's problems. Beth found herself trying to track down teachers individually, often at recess, just to talk to them about the student they had referred. These conversations were brief and didn't give the teacher and counselor time to collaborate on possible strategies for improving the situation for which the student was referred. Feeling frustrated about the lack of coherent interventions to help children, Beth talked to the school principal about starting Intervention Assistance Teams. Beth believed that bringing together the student's teacher and other members of the student services team would help them understand all aspects of a student's situation as they tried to generate an action plan to deal with whatever issues were involved.

After only a few weeks, the IAT approach was widely accepted by the teachers as they began to see the benefits of more planned interventions. They were trying out new strategies in the classroom that they had learned from other members of the IAT. They also reported that they felt more support in dealing with classroom-related problems.