Post #8 - Chapter 10 and Kahn article

One of the problems with the way many school support services are designed is that such services often only serve the population with the most intense needs.  This is a problem because with the focus on the high-needs population of students, the majority of students who fall somewhere in the middle of the continuum between high-needs and low-needs get missed (Adelman & Taylor, 1998, as cited in Drummond & Jones, 2012).  However, by collaborating with other educational professionals, families and the community, counselors can effectively multiply themselves and the support services that they can offer to students.  I appreciated Addelman and Taylor’s (as cited in Drummond & Jones, 2012, p. 166) comment that “school professionals often feel threatened by the intrusion of community professionals in the school setting, creating alienation from community resources and isolating school professionals and students.”  Collaboration is not an easy task, even if it can be more effective in providing more services to a greater amount of people.  Collaboration involves asking for help – it means admitting that you can’t do a certain task alone.  As a person who struggles to ask for help and to delegate tasks to others, collaboration may be hard for me.  While I really like the idea of teamwork and of multiplication of services to reach greater numbers of students, I also have a hard time allowing others to take over tasks or services that I want to see done in a certain way.  For me, collaborating with others will mean developing relationships with more adults both inside and outside of the school setting and trusting them to reach students who might otherwise get missed when it comes to having their needs met.

On an unrelated note, I found the Kahn (2000) article to provide much food for thought on the topic of Solution-Focused consultation.  The assumption that a small change on the part of the consultee (teacher or parent) will cause rippling effects throughout the entire system, including the students’ behavior, seemed to fit well with what I know about the RTII approach to intervention.  I could really see Solution-Focused Consultation as a pre-cursor to a Tier 2 targeted intervention.  I could also see it being better received by teachers who might otherwise be reluctant to come to a school counselor for consultation sessions.  The great thing about the Solution-Focused approach is that it empowers people to fix their own problems.  Working together, counselors and teachers and/or parents, can spend more time thinking about what does work for students rather than what keeps students stuck.  I could definitely see myself utilizing this approach in the future.

References

Dollarhide, C.T., & Saginak, K. A. (2012). Comprehensive school counseling programs: K-12 delivery systems in action. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson References

Kahn, B.B. (2000).  A model of solution-focused consultation for school counselors. Professional School Counseling, 3 (4), 249-254.