The Future of Counseling: Meeting the Challenges of the 21st Century
David L. Blustein
Boston College
This presentation will review new directions in theory, research, and practice in educational counseling, with a focus on the emerging paradigm shift that is reshaping counseling practice around the globe. The presentation will begin with an overview of the challenges that are powerfully affecting the entire nature of the educational enterprise in the 21st century. These changes are requiring that educational counselors shift their focus from remedial and therapeutic functions to more preventive and systemic functions.
The presentation begins with an overview of the major forces that are evoking a radical shift in educational counseling. Included in these issues are globalization, pressures to improve the quality of education for all students, the growing gap between the haves and have-nots, immigration, and multiculturalism. I also review the need for schools to provide support for the full gamut of student development, based on the notion that academic learning and psychosocial development are closely intertwined.
The need for school counselors to become more proactive and less reactive follows as one of the core assumptions of the transformation that is reshaping educational counseling. Key aspects of this move toward prevention and proactive engagement include the following: the need to focus on all students and not simply those students who present for counseling; the advantages of integrating the educational counseling process with the academic goals of the school; and the importance of focusing on the whole student and not just parts of the student’s experience.
Based on brief analysis of parallels in US and Israeli society, I then present selected aspects of the new counseling model proposed by the American School Counseling Association (ASCA), which I believe provides a coherent framework for the reinvention of the educational counseling enterprise. A key element of this change is that we now ask “How are students different because of the school counseling program?” as opposed to “What do counselors do?” The major academic, personal/social, and career development goals of school counseling are presented, which illustrate the broad and systemic objectives of the ASCA model.
The major change tools proposed by the ASCA model are then reviewed. The first set of tools that are presented is the Guidance Curriculum, which entails the use of psychoeducational curriculum to teach students skills that are integral to success in school and work. The second set of tools pertain to Individual Planning, which encompasses many of the traditional educational and career planning activities that have characterized traditional counseling in many schools. The third set of tools, Responsive Services, also is central to many current counseling programs in schools. Included in this set of tools is consultation, individual and small-group counseling, crisis counseling, referrals, and peer facilitation. (It is important to note that the current ASCA model recommends that responsive services become far less predominant in school counselor’s daily activities with the greater proportion of time devoted to preventive activities.) The final set of tools includes System Support, which entails the bulk of the counselor’s systemic change efforts. Included in this set of tasks are the following: professional development (for the staff and teachers of a school); consultation, collaboration and teaming; program management and operation; and leadership in career development education.
The importance of career development education in the professional lives of educational counselors is emphasized in the final portion of the presentation. I highlight the key ways in which career development education can serve as a powerful motivational tool for students, especially at-risk students, who have not had an opportunity to internalize the way in which success in school can empower students in their adult years.
The presentation concludes with a number of questions designed to help the participants consider some of the broader implications and dilemmas embedded in the transformed model of educational counseling that is presented.