School Counseling Program Evaluation

Originally Written for the publisher Wiley’s client: https://www.school-counselor.org/

School counselors depend on specific programs of treatment and practice to implement in their work, but not all school counseling programs are alike. 

It is important that whatever school counseling program is implemented be up-to-date with the latest clinical research, which enables counselors to make the largest positive impact on school communities –especially students— as possible. 

Hence, school counseling program evaluations are essential to picking the correct program. These comprehensive evaluations entail determining program goals, to whom they are directed, and whether implementing them produces positive outcomes. 

In short, school counseling program evaluations aim to strategically plan how to conduct one’s practice as a school counselor. 

Such strategic planning in school counseling program evaluations is unique to a school counselor’s specific situation and community. It thus requires a good deal of self-questioning on the part of school counselors. 

Determine How Programs Effect School Community 

Even if a program is deemed of the highest quality according to the latest academic journals, school counselors need to heed the fact that programs are almost never effective when they are approached with a one-size-fits-all mindset. 

“How will this program affect the student body?” “Will this program enable our school counselors to better collaborate with faculty, staff, and parents?” “Is this program enabling school counselors to become increasingly knowledgeable and resourceful assets?” 

If a program is not benefitting students, faculty, staff, and the broader school community, it might be time to consider a new school counseling program to evaluate. 

There are several ways to approach determining the effects of a program on one’s school community, but they all center around the clash between the uniqueness of that community and the demands any given program will place upon it. 

Is the Program Meeting Counseling Goals?

By ideal standards, the core goals school counselors should aspire to for their community include collaboration, knowledgeability, and resourcefulness. 

Collaborativeness is, in part, an ideal goal because it spreads knowledgeability and resourcefulness throughout the school community, making it a better place for everyone in it. 

This is to say the key to successful school counseling is meeting the needs of the school community. 

If the needs of the school community (including specific individuals within it) are not being met, either the program must change or something part of it must. Where school communities have unique needs are where program inputs are likely to clash with its results on that community. 

Hence, tailoring school counseling programs to the uniqueness of one’s situation –i.e., one’s unique goals as a school counselor– is an alternative to doing away with a counseling program wholesale, which is only worthwhile when it is failing an entire school community. 

Modify School Counseling Programs Accordingly

School counseling programs will typically have their values, and bottom lines explicitly laid out, in addition to actionable steps toward specific situations that are thought to occur in all school settings generally. 

School counselors should list these values and points of importance in bullet point form, and they should do likewise with the goals of their school community. 

Next, a list should be made that enumerates school counseling strategies that have worked for your specific school community in the past.

Putting these three lists next to one another, school counselors can then modify the program to eliminate or improve ineffective aspects of it. 

In some cases, this will require school counselors to fully implement these programs as a test run in order to understand whether their standards cohere with the unique challenges of their community. 

Hard data can and should be collected to this end in a lot of relevant cases. 

For example, if improving exam scores is an imperative goal of school counselors, compiling test-score data from the beginning of a program’s implementation to its end is crucial for effective and accurate decision-making. 

In another instance, if improving student behavior is a salient goal, the data that can and should be collected consists of questionnaires from faculty, staff, students, and parents on their opinions regarding student behavior. 

In any of these examples, nevertheless, methods that have been tried and have succeeded should always take precedence over a new and uncertain strategy.

If, for instance, teaching cognitive behavioral therapy to clients has always worked, maybe don’t replace it with a new form simply on account of the fact that a recent study published has determined this new form of therapy’s effectiveness. 

Likewise, many school counseling programs are so broad-brush in their approach that they can fail to effectively differentiate between methods of school counseling for elementary school students, middle school students, and high school students. 

Evaluating Evidence

A good deal of the temptations to switch programs or program aspects is the existence of new data. 

Research in academia is always being conducted, including the clinical significance and practice of school counseling. 

However, not all studies or research reports are alike, and therefore, not all new pieces of research should be treated as the holy grail of knowledge. 

Instead, studies should be evaluated on account of their actual merit –that is, whether or not they have been replicated and, if not, whether they are replicable– and analyzed against the scientific hierarchy of evidence. 

The highest form of scientific evidence to rely on from academic literature are meta-analyses, or “studies of studies.” Meta-analyses are, in short, statistical analyses of all or many of the studies conducted on a specific topic for the sake of systematically proving or disproving a hypothesis. 

A meta-analysis, for example, on whether cognitive-behavioral therapy or dialectical-behavioral therapy is better for childhood depression can be sufficiently answered by comparing all or many of the studies which have attempted to answer that question. 

Hence, school counseling program evaluation should have a keen eye not just on the uniqueness of one’s school community in relation to the latest research, but it should also be conducted only by someone who is highly skilled at parsing data. 

A school counselor responsible for evaluating school counseling programs that are easily compelled by this or that study without deep inspection into it by proper methods will place their community at the whims of irrationality, which is patently antithetical to school counseling goals. 

Topic-Deriven School Counseling Program Evaluations

School counselors are not all aligned in their topic of specialty. Some school counselors, for example, are specialists in mental health, and others are expert community organizers.

Such differences may play a role in evaluating school counseling programs.

For instance, some school programs might assign all school counselors identical roles on the same topics, regardless of their topic of interest and specialty.

Whoever is responsible for school counseling program evaluations, therefore, is responsible for making sure that the program they pick is modified to the effect that specialists are working in their specialty and not as generalists –unless, of course, they are a generalist!

Perhaps you are a generalist school counselor that is interested in narrowing down your topic of specialty but without much knowledge of how to do that. Click this article to learn more about school counseling topics counselors can specialize in both at school and in practice.