Developing and Managing Your School Guidance and Counseling Program

Norman C. Gysbers, Patricia Henderson

• Publisher: American Counseling Association
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781119026341
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Psicoterapia

The fifth edition of this bestseller expands and extends Gysbers and Henderson's acclaimed five-phase model of planning, designing, implementing, evaluating, and enhancing Pre-K–12 guidance and counseling programs. This enduring, influential textbook has been fully updated to reflect current theory and practice, including knowledge gained through various state and local adaptations of the model since publication of the last edition.

Exciting additions to this new edition are increased attention to diversity and the range of issues that students present, counselor accountability, and the roles and responsibilities of district- and building-level guidance and counseling leaders in an increasingly complex educational environment. An abundant array of examples, sample forms, job descriptions, evaluation surveys, flyers, letters, and procedures used by various states and school districts clearly illustrate each step of program development. At the end of each chapter, a new feature called "Your Progress Check" functions as a tracking tool for growth at each stage of the change process.

*Requests for digital versions from ACA can be found on www.wiley.com. *To purchase print copies, please visit the ACA website *Reproduction requests for material from books published by ACA should be directed to [email protected].

Part I

Planning

Chapter 1

Evolution of Comprehensive Guidance and Counseling Programs: From Position to Services to Program

Planning—Building a Foundation for Change

• Study the history of guidance and counseling in the schools.
• Learn about the people, events, and societal conditions that helped shape guidance and counseling in the schools.
• Understand the implications of the shift from position to services to program in the conceptualization and organization of guidance and counseling.

By the beginning of the 20th century, the United States was deeply involved in the Industrial Revolution. It was a period of rapid industrial growth, social protest, social reform, and utopian idealism. Social protest and social reform were being carried out under the banner of the Progressive Movement, a movement that sought to change negative social conditions associated with the Industrial Revolution.

These conditions were the unanticipated effects of industrial growth. They included the emergence of cities with slums and immigrant-filled ghettos, the decline of puritan morality, the eclipse of the individual by organizations, corrupt political bossism, and the demise of the apprenticeship method of learning a vocation. (Stephens, 1970, pp. 148–149)

Guidance and counseling was born in these turbulent times as vocational guidance during the height of the Progressive Movement and as “but one manifestation of the broader movement of progressive reform which occurred in this country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries” (Stephens, 1970, p. 5). The beginnings of vocational guidance can be traced to the work of a number of individuals and social institutions. People such as Charles Merrill, Frank Parsons, Meyer Bloomfield, Jessie B. Davis, Anna Reed, E. W. Weaver, and David Hill, working through a number of organizations and movements such as the settlement house movement, the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education, and schools in San Francisco, Boston, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Seattle, New York, and New Orleans, were all instrumental in formulating and implementing early conceptions of guidance and counseling.

Brewer (1942) stated that four conditions, acting together, led to the development of vocational guidance. He identified these conditions as the division of labor, the growth of technology, the extension of vocational education, and the spread of modern forms of democracy. He stated that none of these conditions alone were causative but all were necessary for the rise of vocational guidance during this time period. To these conditions, J. B. Davis (1956) added the introduction of commercial curriculums, the increase in enrollment in secondary schools leading to the introduction of coursework such as practical arts, manual training, and home economics and child labor problems.

This chapter traces the history of guidance and counseling in the schools from the beginning of the 20th century through the first decade of the 21st century. It opens with a review of guidance and counseling during the first two decades of the 1900s, focusing on the work of Frank Parsons and Jessie Davis, the early purposes of guidance and counseling, the appointment of teachers to the position of vocational counselor, the guidance and counseling work of administrators, the spread of guidance and counseling, and early concerns about the efficiency of the position model. The chapter continues with a discussion of the challenges and changes for guidance and counseling that occurred in the 1920s and 1930s. The changing purposes of guidance and counseling, as well as the emergence of the service model, are described. Then, two important federal laws from the 1940s and 1950s are presented and described. This discussion is followed by a focus on the 1960s, a time of new challenges and changes, a time when pupil personnel services provided a dominant organizational structure for guidance and counseling. It was also a time when elementary guidance and counseling emerged and a time when calls were heard about the need to change the then dominant organizational structure for guidance and counseling.

The next sections of the chapter focus on the emergence of comprehensive guidance and counseling programs in the 1960s and their implementation in the 1980s, 1990s, and the first decade of the 2000s across the United States. Attention is paid to the importance of federal and state legislation. The chapter continues with an emphasis on the promise of the 21st century: the full implementation of comprehensive guidance and counseling programs in every school district in the United States. The American School Counselor Association (ASCA) National Model is described, along with pertinent state and federal legislation. The chapter closes with a presentation of five foundation premises that undergird comprehensive guidance and counseling programs.

Beginnings of Guidance and Counseling in the Schools: The First Two Decades of the 1900s

Work of Frank Parsons

The implementation of one of the first systematic conceptions of guidance and counseling in the United States took place in Civic Service House, Boston, Massachusetts, when the Boston Vocation Bureau was established in January 1908 by Mrs. Quincy Agassiz Shaw, based on plans drawn up by Frank Parsons, an American educator and reformer. The establishment of the Vocation Bureau was an outgrowth of Parsons’s work with individuals at Civic Service House. Parsons issued his first report on the bureau on May 1, 1908, and according to H. V. Davis (1969, p. 113), “This was an important report because the term vocational guidance apparently appeared for the first time in print as the designation of an organized service.” It was also an important report because it emphasized that vocational guidance should be provided by trained experts and become part of every public school system.

Parsons’s conception of guidance stressed the scientific approach to choosing an occupation. The first paragraph in the first chapter of his book, Choosing a Vocation, illustrated his concern:

No step in life, unless it may be the choice of a husband or wife, is more important than the choice of a vocation. The wise selection of the business, profession, trade, or occupation to which one’s life is to be devoted and the development of full efficiency in the chosen field are matters of deepest movement to young men and to the public. These vital problems should be solved in a careful, scientific way, with due regard to each person’s aptitudes, abilities, ambitions, resources, and limitations, and the relations of these elements to the conditions of success in different industries. (Parsons, 1909, p. 3)

Work of Jessie B. Davis

When Jessie B. Davis moved from Detroit, Michigan, to Grand Rapids, Michigan, to assume the principalship of Central High School in 1907, he initiated a plan “to organize an entire school for systematic guidance” (J. B. Davis, 1956, p. 176). He used grade-level principals as counselors to about 300 students each. Interestingly, he did not see vocational guidance as a new profession. According to Krug (1964), he saw it as the work of school principals.

As part of Davis’s plan to provide systematic guidance to all students, he convinced his teachers of English to set aside the English period on Fridays to use oral and written composition as a vehicle to deliver vocational guidance. The details of his plan are described in his book Vocational and Moral Guidance (J. B. Davis, 1914) and are outlined briefly here. Note that vocational guidance through the English curriculum began in Grade 7 and continued through Grade 12. Note, too, the progression of topics covered at each grade level. School counselors today will understand and appreciate the nature and structure of Davis’s system.

• Grade 7: vocational ambition
• Grade 8: the value of education
• Grade 9: character self-analysis (character analysis through biography)
• Grade 10: the world’s work—a call to service (choosing a vocation)
• Grade 11: preparation for one’s vocation
• Grade 12: social ethics and civic ethics

Early Purposes of Guidance and Counseling

In the beginning, the early 1900s, school guidance and counseling were called vocational guidance. Vocational guidance had a singular purpose. It was seen as a response to the economic, educational, and social problems of those times and was concerned with the entrance of young people into the work world and the conditions they might find there. Economic concerns focused on the need to better prepare workers for the workplace, whereas educational concerns arose from a need to increase efforts in schools to help students find purpose for their education as well as their employment. Social concerns emphasized the need for changing school methods and organization as well as for exerting more control over conditions of labor in child-employing industries (U.S. Bureau of Education, 1914).

Two distinctly different perspectives concerning the initial purpose of vocational guidance were present from the very beginning. Wirth (1983) described one perspective, espoused by David Snedden and Charles Prosser, that followed the social efficiency philosophy. According to this perspective, “the task of education was to aid the economy to function as efficiently as possible” (Wirth, 1983, pp. 73–74). Schools were to be designed to prepare individuals for work, with vocational guidance being a way to sort individuals according to their various capacities, preparing them to obtain a job.

The other perspective of vocational guidance was based on principles of democratic philosophy that emphasized the need to change the conditions of industry as well as assist students to make educational and occupational choices. According to Wirth (1980), “The ‘Chicago school’—[George Hu...