Chapter 11 and article

I really enjoyed reading Chapter 11 and the article about leadership, but I also have to admit that it was a little overwhelming.  It just seems like there is so much that we are responsible for as school counselors and that so many different parties are going to be depending on us to coordinate things.  I like the analogy that the school counselor is co-pilot that the authors used.  I think it is an accurate depiction of what our role is going to be as counselors.  As I was reading the chapter and it was discussing being the coordinator between parents and everybody else I just kept thinking to myself, “it sounds like we are the coordinators of chaos”.  We have to make sure that everybody is on the same page and knows what is going on and come up with a plan for something that we might not even fully understand.  

I also really liked the quote from Dollarhide and Saginak (2012) about leadership that says, “leaders arise not from maintaining the status quo but from finding new ways to address old problems” (p. 190).  I think this quote is spot on and something that we need to keep in mind as future school counselors. We are going to have to come up with new ways of thinking and doing things in order to be able to change anything.  We have talked a lot in class about how we are going to implement the comprehensive counseling program and the first things is to do what the quote says and find new solutions to what is not working in the school. 

I also found it interesting that Dollarhide and Saginak (2012) listed activities that take time away from the comprehensive school counseling program on page 202 and they are all activities that I observed current school counselors doing during the day.  Many secondary school counselors do a lot of scheduling, especially over the summer months after the students receive their class schedules.  The responsibility usually falls on the school counselor to change the schedules of the students if they are unhappy with what they are given.  It seems crazy to me that on days that the school counselor is in their office over the summer that their main focus is fixing schedules instead of doing something that would be more productive for the coming year.  

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