The School Counseling Career

The School Counseling or Guidance Counseling career is one that is constantly evolving at an increasing pace. The necessity of incorporating student psychology in curriculum development and in the design of all educational programs is becoming very evident.

As a result, the school counseling career is taking on more managerial roles in addition to the more typical counseling aspects of the job. This means more responsibility, but also better job security and consistently increasing salaries.

School Counselor Duties

School or guidance counselor duties are many and diverse in nature. However, all aspects of school counseling revolve around the mission of each school district, to increase overall student achievement.

School counseling duties that are directly associated with students are school guidance curriculum, individual student planning, and various types of responsive services.

School Counseling Guidance Curriculum

Guidance curriculum are structured lesson plans designed around student psychology principles and implemented in an effort to break down learning barriors and to help students acquire the necessary competencies for their particular age levels.

Developing productive guidance curriculum can be a highly complex and difficult task. Development of curriculum can vary depending on geographical regions, demographics, size of school, etc. Students develop differently based on the their environment and as a result, optimum student achievement can only be attained with guidance curriculum that is tailored for the particulars of individual schools.

Student Planning

Individual student planning incorporates a school counselor’s knowledge of the individual student, his/her personal goals and knowledge of the student’s future education and career landscape.

This may be the most rewarding part of the school counselor’s career. During individual student planning, school counselors are able to assess a particular student’s current situation and actively work to motivate and create options for the student in academic and/or career environments.

The student planning process can incorporate everything from making sure the student is taking the appropriate classes to creating psychological assessments to determine what emotional issues may be keeping the student from performing at his/her best.

Responsive Services

A school counselor’s responsive services consist of actions typically aimed at turning a troubled student into an individual with confidence in his/her abilities and motivation to improve their current performance both academically and socially.

The school counselor may offer these services in the form of individual or group counseling, consultation with parents or educators, career or academic information, development of peer support, and even referrals to better qualified professional services.

Management and Future School Counseling Services

As in any position with the ability to affect change within a system, there must be clearly communicated objectives and changes must be obvious in their meaning and evaluation procedures must be able to clearly represent the change’s affects on student achievement.

These processes are most likely the largest contributor to the changing work environment for school counselors. School counselors are needing greater management techniques when communicating new ideas and coordinating teams. They are also needing to become much more organized and grounded in the overall goals of their employing schools.

As our economy shifts into a more global marketplace, our system of education will need to be run more like a high performing corporation if Americans are to compete in the future.

The future of the school counseling career is one that is currently evolving; however, the future looks very bright with respect to job security and increasing salaries.

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