While
reading what I would like to call the “Snapshot of School Counseling” chapter
from Dollarhide and Saginak (2012) this week, several topics of discussion
stuck out to me. The first topic was how
to deal with the misconceptions that many people hold about school
counseling. Dollarhide and Saginak
suggest sending “letters to parents and teachers at the beginning of each year
to help introduce the nature and scope of the comprehensive school counseling
program” (2012, p. 123), as well as follow-up communication throughout the year
to various stakeholders in the community.
When reading this, I was reminded of the elementary school counselor who
I recently shadowed. This year, he has
made communication a primary goal. One
thing that he has done is to create a blog (which is listed on the building
blog list) for the school counseling program at his school. On the blog, he posts announcements about
upcoming events such as parent training classes, tips on how parents can ease
their child’s transition back to school, a description of what he as the school
counselor does, a list of various programs offered through the counseling
department, his biography and contact information. He has also linked his blog to Facebook and
Twitter accounts, so that updating one interface affects all the others. He therefore gives parents and community
members a variety of options when it comes to choosing a preferred form of
communication. I was quite impressed
with this set-up, and as I thought more about it, it seemed like something that
might initially take some time to set up but not as much time to keep updated.
One
topic that was somewhat new to me was that of group counseling (only because I
have not yet taken the Group Counseling class).
I was surprised to learn it has been “suggested that group counseling is
more effective than individual counseling to address the needs of students,
most especially at-risk students” (Keys, Bermak, and Lockhart, as cited in
Dollarhide & Saginak, 2012, p. 132).
Similarly, it was interesting to learn about the different types and
functions of groups. I must admit that
running groups is something that I am really looking forward to. I am also hoping that one of the groups I
might be able to run would be a group for peer facilitators, which is another topic
discussed by Dollarhide and Saginak. I
worked as a Counselor-in-Training Director for 3 summers at a camp in Lebanon
and it was probably one of my favorite jobs ever. I got to work with student leaders in a
group and meet with them individually every day. I would say that our group meetings were
usually structured, although there were also times when they were not as
structured, and I enjoyed the combination of both.
In
thinking about my future as a school counselor, I recognize that running groups
is not without its challenges. Dollarhide
and Saginak mention a couple: breaches of confidentiality and scheduling
difficulties. However, the school
counselors who I interviewed were able to find ways around these challenges,
such as running lunch or study hall groups.
In fact, the middle school counselor who I interviewed was adamant that
running groups allowed her to reach more students more effectively, and that
sounds like a winning scenario to me.
References
Dollarhide, C.T., & Saginak, K. A. (2012). Comprehensive school counseling programs:
K-12 delivery systems in action.
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.
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