What Is The Purpose Of School Counseling?
School counselors handle a wide variety of tasks that are designed to help students, teachers, parents, and school administrators.
School counselors handle a wide variety of tasks that are designed to help students, teachers, parents, and school administrators. Since different factors are at play, a school counselor’s role is ever-changing.
Today, apart from manually handling their duties and responsibilities, some school counselors also use online school counselor automated tool in the United States to deal with some of their allotted or essential tasks in an easier and more efficient way.
Here’s an overview of the purpose of school counseling and the role the counselors play.
1- Promote student advocacy
At the heart of every counselor’s decisions and actions is what the students’ needs are and what’s beneficial for them. One of the key purposes of school counseling is to help students with their emotional, social, and intellectual growth.
Some of these would require the direct intervention of the counselor, say when they have to stop bullying (including cyberbullying that’s prevalent in several educational systems today).
Others would need the students to be good self-advocates and speak up about what their problem is or what support they seek. But self-advocacy needs to be developed. It’s where the school counselor can help.
They can let the students understand their specific needs, realize what type of help or support will address those needs, and communicate such needs to their teachers, counselors, or others. For instance, if a student foresees or faces problems while taking notes during the online classes, he/she could ask the teacher for a note-taking app or other relevant solution. If the teacher addresses it, the problem is solved. Else, the student may realize the need to talk to someone else, such as the school counselor or special education case manager.
By promoting self-advocacy among students, school counselors can help them develop independence and find solutions to problems that their parents may not even be aware of. This way, they can let their students become self-confident by taking control of their learning and feel self-empowered.
Emotional, social, personal, family, peer, behavioral, and intellectual difficulties and challenges often interfere with the personal and educational growth of students. School counselors can schedule and organize events, virtual meet-ups, Q&As, etc. either in one-on-one or group settings by using a suitable online school counselor automated tool in the United States to address such challenges and promote student advocacy.
2- Help in students’ self-discovery
- What are my strengths and weaknesses? Is it possible to turn some of my weaknesses eventually into strengths?
- What are the things that interest me a lot or about which I’m passionate?
- What are my inherent skills?
- What’s my aptitude? Which career path would align with it well?
- Will this course or the majors interest me in the long run? Or would I feel bored and drop out?
- Which college and courses would suit my inherent traits and personality?
These are some of the common questions that students often try to find answers to. But there isn’t any “one-size-fits-all” solution to such questions. Since every student is unique, answers to these questions too would differ from one student to another. But how to find these answers and in the process, know one better?
The solution could be given by a reliable online school counselor automated tool in the United States like CounselHero.
School counselors should encourage their students to take these tests as the results could have a life-changing impact on their career path and career success.
CounselHero — the automated online tool, uses a pioneering and carefully designed specific algorithm along with a unique logic and result scale to let the students know more about themselves. Once the students take the tests, the results are tabulated in a report that interprets these results and offers clarity about a lot of things. From getting to know more about their skill sets, value perceptions, interests, and personality traits to understanding their emotional and social quotient, these top-level, quality-proven tests can help students understand what their true potential is.
This empowers them to decide which specific career path, college, course load, and majors would match their intrinsic abilities, aptitude, and interests to embark on an exciting, fulfilling, and successful career journey.
3- Offer referral resources and other help/support to students and parents
Searching for the right college, courses, majors, etc. is a daunting task for many. Students can feel baffled, especially when they don’t know the right way to do these searches. It’s an important job for school counselors to teach them the right way, such as using college search engines and sorting the results based on multiple criteria like the college’s location, size, course fee, facilities on campus, student activities, SAT/ACT score requirements, career services, etc.
Even when the students have short-listed a few colleges from their search results, they may need additional resources and guidance to take their final pick. Counselors can share files or resources via an online school counselor automated tool in the United States like CounselHero to help them. They may even direct them to libraries offered by some online counseling tools that pack a lot of information related to college profiles, course fees, majors on offer, student/career services, and much more.
From time to time, school counselors may facilitate one-on-one parent consultations and discussions or those between parent-teacher and/or parent-parent.
Scheduling and keeping track of such sessions could be made easier via a reliable online school counselor automated tool in the United States.
With such consultations and discussions, counselors can ensure everyone agrees on the actions and decisions taken or about to be implemented regarding students’ issues. These issues may involve academic progress, particular educational materials, social provocations, or disciplinary decisions, among others.
Parents troubled with child-related problems or having questions about their child’s education and career could also get help through the education provided and resources shared by the school counselors. The latter may even help parents understand the importance of services offered by the school’s other staff, such as psychologists, nurses, and resource teachers, especially when the students have special abilities or needs. In case the parents seek additional support, the school counselors can help them find and access it, which could be either within the school’s system or the extended community.
4- Teacher support
Today, teachers are increasingly facing several challenges in different areas. Some of the key areas are related to their student’s academic progress, psychological well-being, and behavioral problems. Studies have found that teachers can effectively guide and help students in these and some other areas when they are adequately supported by well-trained and experienced school counselors.
When it comes to addressing the educational goals, aspirations, and needs of students, school counselors can offer a lot of support to teachers by acting as a team. Be it scheduling group activities, meet-ups, or events that can be effective in meeting the students’ needs, they can do them all.
Counselors could even collect and share resources with teachers to help them develop their classroom management skills and teaching efficiency.
They could also be silent observers in virtual classes to observe students and provide teachers with notes and other assistance to help them perform their roles better. School counselors may even assist with parent-teacher conferences and help with systemic and holistic interventions (school-based) for students facing behavioral, family, peer, mental, and emotional problems or those having difficulty in coping with changing family dynamics, illness, and grief and loss, among others.
They can also analyze student test results and records to ensure their implications are understood the right way by teachers. Instead of doing all these manually, they can automate some of these tasks through the use of an online school counselor automated tool in the United States.
5- Administrative support
School administrators are in charge of running all school operations, right from taking academic decisions, managing budgets, and hiring and supervising staff to setting educational goals and standards, and crafting policies and procedures. Thus, they have a lot on their plates to handle. School counselors play an integral role in supporting the administrators in some of these duties and responsibilities. However, it’s important to note that though a “fair share” of such duties and responsibilities are part of any school counselor’s role, burdening them with tasks or duties irrespective of their professional fit or which eats into their time that should have been spent interacting with and guiding students could blur their role.
Not sure how counselors can offer administrative support? Let’s have a quick look. To begin with, they can ensure there’s proper alignment between the school’s academic mission and its counseling programs to support student success.
Counselors are also in charge of creating a system that can help them manage the program and even suggest ways to use their services for administrative tasks effectively to enhance student learning and development.
They can evaluate the program periodically and analyze the related data to make improvements to the system and update or adjust its objectives to make them align with their responsibilities. They may even provide the administrators with useful data received from the program to help them apply for funding and grants. Quite a few of these tasks can be automated by an online school counselor automated tool in the United States, thus making the counselors function more effectively.
