Blog 4

            The readings for this week were interesting. I think that the primary thing that I would take away from Chapter Five is that the ASCA National Model is somewhat of a paradox. I feel this way because it seems incredibly complex at the core. I mean designating the differences between values, beliefs and assumptions and how they translate into philosophy is certainly going to be something I struggle with in every single day of my professional career regardless of how much I study and review it. However, on the opposite side of this coin I feel that while complex the Model itself can also be very simple and basic. I say this because, despite what the opening vignette of the chapter said I feel like most of the aspects of “The Themes” and “The Elements” are known to us at this point in our ventures into school counseling. But despite what the opening vignette said I’d even go as far as to say a significant amount of people would understand some of these concepts and how they relate to the job of a school counselor such as the themes of leadership and advocacy and the elements of  various ways on how to deliver services. However, my viewpoint here is based on having seen both great and terrible school counselors and seeing the discrepancy between them so I know why the former was successful and the latter was not. Regardless, I think the key thing that hammers home my idea that this is a complex yet very simple paradox is ^®The ASCA National Model Graphic. It takes all of those constructs and places it into a simple graphic that can help me remember all of the little nuances while still remembering the common sense aspects.

            As far as the Galassi, Griffin, & Akos (2008) article I found it to be interesting if not a bit confusing. I agree with Julia in that Strengths-Based School Counseling is very much synonymous with Solution-Focused Counseling. In my confusion I looked up Strengths-Based School Counseling and found that other graduate programs use it as it’s  theoretical orientation with implementation of other theories the same way we do Solution-Focused counseling here. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say I walked away confused. This might be because of my time spent as a TSS. While my time as a TSS is going to serve to help me in some aspects as a school counselor it is also going to hamper me sometimes with this being one of those. As a TSS you teach replacing negative behaviors with strengths in a similar fashion but the root core of focus is still the negative behaviors which you are working on. In that vein I have the feeling that while I want to focus on strengths I also very much want to work with deficits to minimize them both proactively and responsively but I don’t know if SBSC allows for that based on the article. Another concern I had was that SBSC is supposed to be based on empirical evidence and in a cultural context one has to consider the demographical constructs of the neighborhood such as race, financial, etc composition in this empirical evidence to focus on strengths for the comprehensive aspect. However, I want to know how one can gather empirical evidence on such an abstract construct and use it to focus on strengths of individuals. Not everybody adheres to the demographical constructs and strengths of their neighborhood. I am a perfect example of this for when I was in West Philadelphia during Middle School. I certainly had a different outlook on my peers in the neighborhood because I wasn’t raised their entire life.

In order to not crap on the article I will say it gave me some tremendous things like character trait education and peer mentoring which I had planned on utilizing in my program wherever I get placed.

Dollarhide, C.T., & Saginak, K.A. (2012). Comprehensive school counseling programs (2nd

            Ed.). New York:   Pearson, Inc.

Galassi, J. P., Griffin, D., & Akos, P. (2008). Strengths-Based School Counseling and the ASCA

National Model®. Professional School Counseling, 12(2), 176-181.

doi:10.5330/PSC.n.2010-12.176