blog #2 social institutions

                At times when I am reading our text I feel like I’m on a bit of a rollercoaster. Much of the content is familiar to me and many of the issues I see daily in my job. While reading I sometimes feel empowered to make a differences because the text is very insightful about what successful school counselors do and what can be done in schools, and the next I feel a wave of  frustration because I see the break down happen when not everyone in a school is completely onboard.  As I work to be an effective teacher and run an effective classroom I have found that a reasonable about of delegation of responsibility is needed. In connection to the text, school counselors who try to do it all on their own may find themselves actually accomplishing very little. This of course is when the need for a supportive administration team really comes in handy.

                School counselors need to, above all, know their school. The more informed a counselor is about the climate, demographics, and achievement of their school, the better they can address its needs. In the text Dollarhide and Saginak (2012) state “school counselors must be able to weave literature-based practices with qualitative and quantitative data in order to fully understand the impact of their programs” (pg.28).  This is only possible if the school counselor knows where their school is socially, academically, and emotionally as a whole. This way, the counselor can find programs that are linear in design with the weaknesses that a school has, and then comes the job of getting staff on board.  School counselors need to be able to speak freely and intelligibly about all of these things to both administration and staff regularly. The text asks several times if we think that we can change schools, if we can do the above mentioned task (which is a HUGE task when done well), we can make informed decisions about what needs to be done to move our students, which will then make huge changes and growth in our schools.

                Although this idea of gathering data, getting to know the students, finding programs, and closing the gap is a huge task as I mentioned above, I also believe that it gets easier. Just like when I started teaching eight years ago, I believe the harder you work in the beginning the more manageable the work is as the time passes. I wouldn’t say that the job is easier, it’s still very difficult, but it makes more sense, it takes a little less effort in the planning stages because the pieces come together with less difficulty. The hard work is placed somewhere new, instead of being in the before stages and the planning stages, it is in the doing stage when working with kids, where the real changes are happening.