Confused

Don't know why I'm posting this, but just wanted it on the record that I made another post and 1 comment the other day and now I can't see them for some reason on this blog and was wondering if anyone else was having the same issue.

Rewards and Challenges

The most rewarding thing for a guidance counselor would probably be to graduate all the students that they come in contact with and also get them in to college followed by a job that they love. I'm sure students return to thank their counselors all the time. I think the most challeging thing for a GC to do would be to help a student that didn't take school seriously early on. Students tend to realize their gifts too late. It would frustrate me if it was my job to keep kids on track that do not want to be kept on track. Then if you add no parent support, I'm sure a counselors task could get difficult.

Rewards and Challenges

I get the opportunity to work with some at-risk students being a CTAE teacher where historically some "challenged students" typically are funneled to in a course like construction. It's from this experience that I think I can draw some insights that a counselor may face.

I think counselors could find great satisfaction if they can have a hand in assisting and student and/or their parents turning that students academic career, and ultimately their life into a positive direction. With students living in such a immediate gratification society filled with a wide choice of multi-media distractions presenting new challenges for today's students. It's because of these distractions that our counselors fill such a key role, and it's also easy to understand the reward they must feel when they teach students how to balance and prioritize the academic demands of our high school curriculum.

It's my opinion that it much be very challenging for counselors when they can't ultimately reach a student and/or their family is such a way that yields the type of positive results the counselor hoped for. Our counselors likely chose the profession because they take an insterest in investing into other people's lives and I think it would especially be challenging to invest their efforts into an individual onlyto have it not payoff. The challenge would only get bigger when they are forced to move on from, or move beyond the failure of helping certain individuals reach certain goals.

Changed Impressions

I wrote in my first post about being fortunate enough to already have a working relationship with my counseling department. That allowed me to have some insights into their day to day activities and role in our school.

However, after studying the 5 different websites I was enlightened to just how deep of a background our counselors have. Each apparently being required to hold at least a masters degree to be considered to be considered a professional high school counselor. It was also surprising to see just how wide of an array of services that a counseling department can provide.

Personally I knew of some of the personal support systems that they provided the parent and the student, but when I dug deeper I discovered new information about career guidance, and student intervention that I did not know about.

I'd also file any and all history of counceling under new information for me because I admittedly knew literally nothing about this part of the subject before reading the link discussing the history.

Perceived Roles

From my experience, guidance counselors perform a great deal of duties to get students ready to leave high school and move to the next level. GC's have to make sure students are completeing a schedule of work that prepares them for college. They make sure that students are aware of deadlines and also important test dates. (SAT, ACT) GC's also set up college tours so students can visit and get a feel for college. GC's help with the college application process from beginning to end. They also give advice as to which schools to pick, which careers may be good for you and they may also help find funding. (scholarships) They may do a lot more but this is what I have witnessed guidance counselors helping out with.

Changed Impressions

My impression of a guidance counselor has not changed. Our students spend a great deal of time talking about what the counselor has not done. Our counselor does a great job. Our kids are afforded so many oppurtunities that there are too many to name. Their college acceptance letters line the walls. The students probably won't realize how importnat their counselor is until they are long gone. I was impressed with the history of the guidance counselor and where they evolved from. It's kind of hard to imagine school before counselors. That responsibility was on the teachers. Teachers had to serve dual roles. In this day and age, I don't know how many teachers would be willing to add the role of counselor to their plate.

Rewards and Challenges

The role of school counselors being visible to administrators, teachers, students, and parents. It is important for school counselors to promote their comprehensive developmental guidance programs. That is the only way their role and function will be understood by administrators and teachers. Understanding of the professional school counselor role will gain support of administrators when school counselors are viewed as educators instead of counselors. Moreover, it is extremely important for school counselors to know their role and be able to define it. Being knowledgeable of the roles of the profession as set forth by the ASCA national model, school counselors will lessen their chances of having non-counseling duties which will yield higher student achievement. Helping to close the achievement gap will show counselors as having a central role in schools.

Changed Impressions

The profession of school counseling began in the early 1900’s devoting most of its time to career development of students. Throughout the development of the school counseling profession, it has been greatly influenced by global educational and social trends. With that being said, the role of school counselors is always changing in response to these trends through federal legislation, state initiatives, and changes within the profession itself. Therefore, the school counseling profession has evolved into a data-driven comprehensive developmental program that meet the needs of all students in the areas of academic, career, and personal/social. Additionally, these global events led to the development of the American School Counselor Association (ASCA) national model which laid the foundation for school counselors to carefully design and deliver strategic interventions aimed at increasing academic achievement. Considering the pressures that are placed on today’s educators since the inception of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), school counselors are in a position of having to make sure they can show their contribution toward student achievement, hence the purpose of the study.

Perceived Roles

The role of guidance counselors is very ambiguous in most schools but it mainly depends on the administrator. Guidance counselors should serve as a support to assist students, parents, faculty, administrators, and community stakeholders. Guidance counselors help students through individual and small/large group guidance to grow academically and socially. Additionally, guidance counselors assist students with career exploration. Ultimately, guidance counselors wear many hats in schools' today. However, with growing accountability placed on schools' guidance counselors have become more academically focused. This is critical because it shows the influence in helping students achieve success, academically, and it helps others' view counselors differently that can lead to less non-counseling duties that are so often given to school counselors because of our role not totally being understood.

Rewards and Challenges

I believe that the rewards for our counselors is trying to get the underclassman to become successful and productive seniors. It always amazes me in the beginning of the school year to see the seniors happy to finally reach this milestone. Most seniors always start the year with a positive attitude, until they realize that the counselors are only there to guide them with their life's transition. Most seniors think that it is the responsibility of the counselors to make sure they remember deadlines. I think this would be a challenge because as juniors it seemed as if the counselors were always helping the seniors. I've seen the attitudes of the senior students change and become very negative during this period. It seemed that once the seniors had a better understanding and understood their responsibility in their life's transition; you would notice a better attitude. Students would then have ownership for their educational accomplishments.I believe that the counselors rewards are seeing all of the acceptance letters and scholarships that the students received with the counselors guidance assistance :)

Changed Impressions

After perusing the several articles, I was impressed on the history of documented counselors from as far back as the 1800's. I was also intrigued by the dynamics of guidance counselors and their career responsibilities with clarity on the functions of the elementary counselors compared to the middle and high school counselors. I agreed with the process of" prevention versus remediation" because of the state of our society. I call our students the "Microwave " generation because they want everything right now and tend to make bad choices and have to deal with the ramifications later. The guidance counselors are charged with assisting in the prevention of bad choices. I see now why our counselors do an awesome job with providing our students the opportunity to be involved with outside organizations and mentor programs. This will hopefully give the students incite for the individual growth and exposure to various elements.

Guidance and Counseling

Since I'm in my third year teaching, I've had an opportunity to work with counseling in many different settings. I've had LD students in my class and even got to serve in special ed last school year where I seemingly dealt with counseling on a weekly basis.

I'm have an interview set up with my lead guidance counseler tomorrow, which should be interesting since Dr. Sansing has been in the profession for 20+ years. She should be able to shed a lot of light on the different topics we are to discuss.

Prior to this meeting, and as it stands today, if I had to choose a single word that described the guidance and counseling department it would be supportive. My understanding is that they are in place to provide support for the learning institution by serving administration, teacher, students, and students' parents. The administer services that help students find a place or set of circumstances that allow them to learn their best while being fair to all parties involved.

Guidance and counseling have the difficult job of balancing the ever increasing demands in the classroom with the current learning progress and challenges of students with a wide array of backgrounds, experience, and family circumstances. They try leverage what resources they have available to them to help a student maximize their learning potential while also keeping the welfare of the overall school's mission in sight as well.

Perceived Roles

I assume that the guidance counselors play a very pivotal role with all students. Their job can be very challenging and demanding on a daily basis. I feel that a good counselor has the responsibility of guiding, maintaining and keeping the students on task with their education, personal and financial goals. I believe that they have to have excellent communication and organizational skills to keep themselves and their students on track. The counselors at our school have the responsibility of creating student schedules that must be on the pathway of graduating.each grade level. They must assist with making sure students are tested when required by the state,summer programs,ACT/SAT testing,financial aid, add/drop class changes, new student enrollment and recovery classes/packets just to name a few.  There list can go on and on. I also understand that if a student expresses' suicidal or homicidal ideations that a counselor has to be made aware of this situation along with the administrators to assist the student emotionally. My perception of the counselors roles and responsibility means that you need to be a very special person and have a desire to help others. I believe that this person has to be dedicated to education and the well being of all the students that they come in contact.

Rewards and Challenges

At our school, alumni students return every year toward the end of the fall semester for a special occasion. The occasion is known as Youth Motivation Day where the entire school attends an assembly and listen to the the challenges and rewards that former students have encountered after graduation. The alumni are then broken into groups and rotate to different advisories and share more personal experiences about their college experience and the road they travelled to get there. Counselors at our school have commented that this day is eye opening and sometimes daunting because they have to face the post secondary success and failures of our students. I think that experience above all else is both rewarding and challenging for our counselors.

Rewards and Challenges

As others in the class have said, I also believe that the rewards to the counselor is seeing the students they work with succeed.
I think the biggest challenge would be the large number of students that they have to deal with throughout the year. They all have problems and issues that the counselor may have to deal with.

Changed Impressions

After the reading assignment my opinion of what the role of the guidance counselor hasn't changed that much, although I did find interesting the history of counseling and how it got started. It was interesting to see that it some of the early foundations of the modern counselor can be traced back to the ancient Greeks and the middle age Catholic priests. It was also interesting to read that counseling was used in the late 1800's and early 1900's to help people escape poverty, and that the military used counseling to assess draftees to position them in a correct role.
The role of the counselor has changed throughout the decades, but the one thing that seems to remain constant is the work they do with evaluation. Whether they are busy with CRCT, SAT, ACT, ASVAB or graduation tests, they spend much of their time with evaluation or assesments. I had always thought that guidance counselers was to help students to figure what kind of college or career that they were interrested in, but I was un-aware of the amount of assesment that they are involved in in helping the students make the decisions.

Rewards and Challenges

I think the most rewarding part of a guidance counselor’s work is student success.  I believe little successes make a big difference too, because it would be extremely difficult to wait until year’s end for a celebration. 

I also think a major challenge in the profession would be handling the emotional toll.  Our society is moving so fast that the issues of students ten years ago seem ancient when compared to current student issues.  Even with a strong personality, I imagine it a takes a great amount of balance to not take students problems personally.  

Changed Impressions

After completing the required reading my impressions of a guidance counselor’s roles and responsibilities did not drastically change.  However, two aspects of the research did make an impression.  One facet that captured my attention was the historical changes that occurred and dictated the changes in the counselor’s responsibilities. Probably, what resonates the loudest were teachers being appointed counselors as an additional duty.  This sounds very familiar to me because at my school teachers are being trained as advisers to assist counselors with overwhelming workloads.  Another, aspect that I found interesting was the counselor’s role in analyzing and correlating data to AYP.  This factor alone emphasizes the multi- disciplinary backgrounds of counselors.

Changed Impressions

After reading the website articles I felt good that my perceived roles of counselors were quite accurate. However the articles did provide some better insight into the field of counseling. In the article titled "A Brief History of School Guidance and Counseling in the United States" it was interesting to find out that guidance counseling began with vocational advising and not mental health counseling. The most informative article was entitled "Why secondary school counseling" where it discussed in detail the challenges faced by the 21st century school counselor. It discussed the role of counselors in the "design, development, implementation and evaluation of a comprehensive, developmental and systematic school-counseling program". Based on the recent pressures of high-stakes test scores, guidance counselors now have the tremendous responsibility to use data to influence academic success, a role that previously did not exist.