Chapter 7 and article

After reading the chapter on accountability as well as the article, I am interested to learn more real life applications of accountability and how current school counselors are making sure that they are more accountable.  The book gave a solid outline of the different types of analyzing data that schools can conduct but I am interested to see how the schools are keeping track of all of the information.  Dollarhide and Saginak (2012) explain that as school counselors we have to be able to show that we are valuable and are having a positive effect on student development and academic achievement.  They also presented many different data drive accountability models on pages 116 and 117 that can be used and I would like to know more about these different models and if some are better than others.  How do you know which one to use?  As I said above, I am interested to get into schools and ask different counselors which accountability model they use, if any.

The article by Gysbers (2004) gave a very detailed history of accountability in school counseling that I did not realize dated all the way back to the 1920's.  I liked being able to see the decades broken down and be able to see the progression from then until now.  As I was reading the section of the article when Gysbers (2004) talks about the fear of accountability and wanting to avoid it I related that back to the case study that was presented in the book at the beginning of the chapter.  I understand why there may be some fear from counselors about being more accountable, but I think we need to remember why it is important to be accountable and that is for the sake of our jobs. As with any profession or any job that you do I think it is important that you justify why you are doing what you do and as school counselors we need to abide by these same standards.  I keep track of what I do as a coach and then if I see that something is not working then I either change my approach or try to figure out why the system is not working as it should be.  I think it is huge for us as future school counselors to be able to keep track of data and then be able to examine it and justify what we are doing in the schools.  I don't think it is something that we can be afraid of because whether we like it or not it is a part of our reality and we have to integrate it into the way we will be running our counseling programs.

Dollarhide, C.T., & Saginak, K.A. (2012). Comprehensive school counseling programs (2nd Ed.). New York:  Pearson, Inc,

Gysbers, N. (2004).  Comprehensive guidance and counseling programs: The evolution of accountability. Professional School Counseling, 8(1), 1-14.