Chapter 8 - Counseling

                In reading the first section of this chapter, I feel as though my first year of counseling is going to be a major uphill battle.  The part of the job when I will get to work with students individually, in a group, and as whole classroom sounds really appealing to me.  I am concerned that I will not be able to spend the majority of my time on that as I wish I will be able to do.  I am in a school and I have been working in this building for three full years.  I feel as though it has been a constant fight as a special education teacher to get the students what the need and deserve.  While reading this chapter today I have this awful feeling that I am going to have to do more fighting to be able to work with students and provide the necessary counseling that I should be doing and not all of this secretarial work.  If the precedence has already been set that the school counselors complete the 504 plans is it possible to not complete those and have a regular education teacher be a case manager?  Is that a battle that is worth fighting in the first few years of being a new school counselor in a district or not until years down the road?  I feel as though if I wait for a few years to address a paperwork issue then it is set in stone even more and it is expected that you will complete it every year in the future.

                While reading the second portion of the chapter on group counseling I feel tremendously motivated and I want to be able to have a job to put into practice all of these neat ideas.  I am very hopeful to be able to use group counseling with the students in the building that I work in.  The one limitation/worry that I have deals with the students being confidential and not using any piece of information against a student a later point in time.  Bullying is a huge problem in middle schools today and in some situations I feel as though the members of the group would need to be handpicked and limit the number of students that could possibly be the culprit of a bullying situation.  That individual would need to be in a group to reap the benefits of the topic that is being taught but with different individuals.  I would try my best to make sure that no one takes information they hear in the sessions and uses it in a negative situation where one student is overpowering another one. 

Dollarhide, C. & Saginak, K. (2012). Comprehensive School Counseling Programs: K-12 Delivery Systems in Action (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.