Dream Adjusters: High School Counselors in a Low-Income School District

Abstract

Prior research has discussed high school counselors’ role in students’ experience, but counselors’ understandings of their work and of students has received little commentary. We interviewed counselors in a high-poverty, low-performing urban school district in which two structural elements shape how counselors make sense of their work. First, counselor “success” is contingent on convincing students to act in (what schools see as) students’ own best interest, and many students do not do so. Second, resource constraints severely limit planned one-on-one counseling. We find that counselors see students as both victims of crushing circumstances and as agents actively undermining their own opportunities, as holding ambitions misaligned with performance and as vulnerable to despair. Counselors’ strategies follow from these conceptions: building self-efficacy, emphasizing the importance of goals, and nudging plans toward realizability while maintaining hope. We discuss how counselors cope with the rarity with which they experience professional “success,” given student outcomes.

A Group Intervention for Prospective First-Generation College Students: Application With an Urban, African American Population

“…Considering who facilitates the group itself, researchers have shown the essential impact of actual school counselors engaging in college talk with students, enhancing students’ likelihood of attending college (Bryan et al, 2017; Cholewa et al, 2015). However, for those with large caseloads and administrative burdens, as is common, particularly in urban settings (Monaghan et al, 2019), school counselors could partner with outside organizations or recruit counseling students in regional programs to fulfill a facilitator role as part of an internship or group course requirement (Finnerty et al, 2019; Harsy, 2012).…”

“…Empirical evidence suggests groups as an effective modality for addressing a variety of issues with this population, including adolescent trauma and functioning (Hoover et al, 2018), psychosocial identity development (e.g., ethnic identity; Steen, 2009), and academic achievement (Bruce et al, 2009). As compared to individual work, groups enable school counselors to impact a greater number of students in a single intervention (Steen et al, 2014), which is important when considering the high caseloads often assigned to school counselors, particularly in urban settings (Monaghan et al, 2019).…”

Educational Counseling and Temporary Language Adaptation Classrooms: A Study through In-Depth Interviews

“…In recent years, the arrival of immigrant pupils in schools has been a major challenge for schools in general, and for counseling professionals in particular, since they must attend to, assist, and give advice to the students they encounter in their process of cultural adjustment and family reorganization [60].…”

“…In this sense, counselors are not primarily responsible for promoting knowledge of culture and managing multicultural processes [52,56,57]. The design and development of training programs that especially work on emotional competences and favor an inclusive climate takes on a special urgency [60].…”

“…In this line, an essential part of the counselor's job consists of helping students face social, psychological, linguistic, and academic difficulties they might encounter in their process of cultural adjustment and family reorganization. In this line, an essential part of the counselor's job consists of attending to the social, psychological, linguistic, and academic difficulties that students may encounter in their process of cultural adjustment and family reorganization [60].…”