What is School Counseling? Understanding School Counselor Duties

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

School counseling careers involve creating a healthy and productive community for students, faculty, staff, and parents at their schools. 

Because school counselors have the tall-order of creating and maintaining the school community, school counselor duties are highly wide-ranging.

Answering the question “what is school counseling?” can include answers such as mental health counseling, academic planning, and goal planning.

However, these roles are only the tip of the iceberg among school counselor duties. 

School counseling jobs also involve a lot of responsibility.

Therefore, success as a school counselor depends on knowing your specific tasks and duties and how to perform optimally in them. 

Specific Tasks and School Counselor Duties

Being dependable, resourceful, and knowledgeable for students, teachers, and school staff members is the duty of a school counselor.

However, operating solely on this general idea is insufficient to practice as a school counselor.

Instead, school counselors must have a strong sense of their tasks and duties.

Here are the top tasks and duties that school counselors are responsible for:

Academic Planning

Preparing students for further education is the primary goal of academic planning.

Because school counselors work at all education levels, at each of these levels, there are transitional phases that students need to be prepared for.

During elementary school, for example, specialized schools exist that counselors may recommend to high-performing students.

In that case, a counselor would help the student gather study materials for that exam and application materials.

In middle school, identical principles apply when counselors prepare students for high school. In addition, some specialized high school students can take tests to obtain admission.

Similar ideas are at work when school counselors assist high school students with planning for college and a career. Ideally, in these cases, school counselors consult students about what they are interested in doing with their life and make suggestions based on that input. Unfortunately, not all students will thrive in college. One of the most crucial school counselor's duties is guiding students toward alternatives, such as vocational school or entrepreneurship.

Some of this is conducted one-on-one – especially in high school settings. However, school counselor duties also involve instructing classrooms on how to plan academically, set goals, emotional regulation skills, and aiding teachers with implementing core-curriculum standards.

Short-term and Long-term Counseling

Kids are like adults in one crucial aspect: they’ve got problems, and they need to talk about them.

Additionally, children are often unwilling to talk about their problems to other children – and this gets increasingly accurate in the case of teenagers.

At school, at practically every stage, school counselors are there for students to speak with about their problems in confidentiality. Part of counseling includes helping students with emotional regulation. Middle school students are especially in need of this, as they are highly prone to emotional dysregulation –i.e., the inability to regulate their own emotions, leading to mood swings.

Being young is a difficult time in all of our lives. Young people are vulnerable and without experience. Guidance counseling is, therefore, an indispensable resource for young students especially.

Counseling provides students with ongoing one-on-one guidance and healthy communication on issues they feel are necessary, including working on life goals or discussing problems at home.

Collaborating with Faculty and Staff Members

The students who need counseling the most are often the ones who are the least likely to seek it out. Yet, everyone that works in any given school has, in some capacity, a responsibility toward the student body.

Counselors cannot be in the hallway and classrooms at all times. For example, suppose a school counselor spends less time directly monitoring student behavior. In that case, they will not have time to guide students one-on-one, meet with parents, or do much else.

That is why teacher-counselor communication is crucial for successful guidance counseling.

Counselors do not and, by law, cannot divulge the private information of students’ lives to teachers. However, teachers and counselors can inform one another of how students behave inside the classroom.

The same principle applies to varying degrees with all school staff. All adults inside a school are collectively responsible for children's well-being and academic success. The only way to ensure this is through an open communication network between staff, teachers, and counselors.

Such public information is highly relevant to school counselors for two reasons:

●  It can help in their efforts to guide students they are already helping one-on-one.

●  It can help counselors identify students who may need one-on-one counseling.

Student Advocacy

Schools often consist of intricate administrative systems. And within these systems, complications and dysfunctional areas are bound to arise.

School counselors must root these issues out and attempt to address them to the best of their abilities. They may range from a lack of resources to systemic inequities. In addition, school counselors must have a strong desire to support students of diverse backgrounds and needs if they are to succeed in carrying out their duties.

In other words, school counselors must be student advocates who work diligently to root out unfair problems in school administrations and elsewhere. School counselors must have a wide breadth of knowledge on each of these matters:

●  Existence of gaps in resources available to students, teachers, and the school.

●  Knowledge of resources (including among staff members and faculty).

●  The effects of social, economic, and cultural systemic issues that can affect child welfare.

Additionally, awareness of and sensitivity to different cultures and ways of living are essential to effective student advocacy as a school counselor. Therefore, part of student advocacy entails ensuring that the school you work at is an environment of tolerance and equity.

It is only possible to cultivate such an environment if students feel fundamentally understood. It is also unacceptable for counselors to be the only ones at school that understand students from diverse backgrounds. Counselors must advocate on behalf of such students, so they are understood and respected by staff, teachers, and the student body.

Of course, we shouldn't expect school counselors to be experts on every cultural nuance. But nevertheless, they should be sensitive enough to accommodate differences. 

To help navigate this, school counselors must also complement their cultural sensitivities with practical communication skills. Experts understand this as the ability to understand others from different personal and cultural backgrounds and to make those students feel heard.

Finally, student advocacy requires that school counselors have a general sense of social advocacy. They should care about the world's issues to the extent that they take actual actions to facilitate some of them.

Being an advocate of people means you need to care about people. An advocate is an individual who is naturally disposed to seek out the disaffected purely for the sake of helping them solve their issues.

Does Grade Level Change School Counselor Duties?

Some aspects of school counseling change depending on the grade level of the students being counseled. This change consists of the content of the guidance given. Academically, the direction for transitional changes varies from grade to grade.

Apart from these considerations, the main change is how school counselors communicate with students.

School counselors need to appreciate that students undergo immense physiological and psychological changes throughout their time in school. To best prepare for this, school counselors must carry a pronounced knowledge base in child psychology.

School Counselor Careers

School counseling duties range from counseling students one-on-one to teaching students seminar-like courses on academic planning, goal setting, and emotional regulation.

They are essential staff at schools. Students of all ages have problems, but few have the intellectual or emotional tools to handle them alone.

Education requirements for school counselors are rigorous, and for a good reason. Suppose there is anything you should take away from this article. In that case, school counselors must be highly educated to do their job correctly.

School counselors need to know how to communicate appropriately. In connection with that, they need to understand human psychology sufficiently enough to engage with a wide variety of students across various ages.

An ideal way of getting this education is by getting a degree in school counseling. Indeed, it would help if you earned a degree in school counseling to obtain a career in school counseling.

Graduate-level education in school counseling or fields closely related to it, such as social work or psychology, in particular, is what is necessary for a career as a school counselor.

Finding the right degree program for your purposes can be challenging. Unfortunately, not everyone has the time or resources to pursue a full-time master's degree in school counseling or social work.

Each path toward obtaining the necessary educational requirements for school counseling needn't be the same, but that does not make finding one's way any less challenging.

If you want a school counseling career, click here to check out a helpful article on school counseling degrees.