School Counseling Is A Profession With Diverse Perceptions About The Identity Of A School Counselor

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School counseling is a profession with diverse perceptions about the identity of a school counselor. Therefore, this confusion inhibits establishing a unified definition of a school counselor. Imprecise information such as, the term guidance counselor, assumed job duties and history play a role in the failure to discover a coherent description of a school counselor.
Counselor’s Identity The term, guidance contributes to the misunderstanding in distinguishing the difference between a guidance counselor and a school counselor. People that are unfamiliar with the profession tend to use the term guidance and school counseling interchangeably. In spite of this, “ guidance is a generic term covering all functions in which professional school…show more content…
One outcome was that guidance counselors became responsive to day-to-day wishes of their school administration and were more likely to be identified with them” (p. 21). The identity of a guidance counselor was unclear before the identity of a school counselor. The guidance counselor profession was not a specialized occupation, but fell under the profession of administration. Because of the baby boom in the 1960s, education in counseling began. The American School Counseling Association (ASCA) and Association for Counselors Education and Supervision (ACES) initiated developing and promoting standards for training school counselors that emphasized counseling theory and practicum training (Baker & Gerler, p. 22). The training consists of learning skills in one-to one counseling relationship. The decade of the 1960s, attempted to educate people in school counseling, but was unsuccessful to form a clear uniqueness of a school counselor. Without the transparent knowledge that guidance is under the umbrella of a school counselor profession, the perception of a unified identify of a school counselor is difficult to achieve. The struggles in history about understanding the occupation of a school counselor continue in modern day. In modern day, a school counselor wears many hats. Due to the varies
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