Today's School Counselor
School counselors have undergone quite a transformation over the years. As with administrators, No Child Left Behind and other educational reforms have impacted both the administrator role and the school counselor role. Here are just a few areas:
- Much of school counseling professional development is learning how to collect, disaggregate, and analyze data to build an accountable data driven program. The school counseling data identifies achievement gaps to determine interventions to increase student achievement.
- By reframing traditional interventions to a broader systemic approach that contributes to improving areas such as student promotion, achievement and post secondary entry, we are moving from focusing on just one student at a time to entire groups.
- School counselors are also talking about educational leadership. In today's increased accountability, schools require the leadership skills of school counselors as well as administrators and faculty.
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- School counselors often know the "pulse" of the school, have training in problem solving, are aware of resources in the community, use data to make decisions, and are trained with specific skills in communicating and listening.
- Research indicates that, in most cases, the principal's perception of the school counselor role is most likely the single strongest influence on how school counselors really spend their time. Research also indicates there is often a gap in knowledge of what school counselors actually do and the administrator's perceptions of what a school counselor does. School counselor effectiveness is partly associated with his or her administrator.
- NCSCA believes that a strong relationship between a counselor and administrator is necessary in raising student achievement and meeting accountability goals.
