By: Nashetta Rowell
Ethics in Counselor Education and Supervision
June 25, 2011
School counseling is a complex and demanding component of the counseling profession. With an increase of social and emotional stressors, children and youth of today face numerous challenges. These challenges ultimately affect children in school. With an increase of suicides, drug abuse, gang involvement, and violence amongst youth, a high demand for school counseling supervision is needed (Henderson, 1994). Parents and teachers often turn to school counselors for guidance in helping troubled youth. Effective supervision is a benefit for novice as well as experienced school counselors. However, there is a lack of supervision in school counseling in comparison to clinical counseling (Wood & Rayle, 2006). Duties of school counselors have increasingly become much more vast due to cost reduction in education, retirement, increase in student enrollment, and an increase in societal issues such as the economic recession. Many novice and experienced school counselors are facing many more problems in the schools today than ever before. The lack of qualified supervision provided to school counselors force those in the profession to rely on self judgment, consultation, and having ethical knowledge about certain situations that may arise (Henderson, 1994). A study conducted by Wiggins (1993) found "more than 28% of the total group of experienced counselor participants were independently rated as low in effectiveness, 10 years previously, they were still rated in that manner and still employed as counselors" (p. 382). This study reinforced the urgency in the need for supervision for school counselors. If an effective supervision model was put in place, surely after 10 years, an improvement in performance by these experienced counselors would have been documented. According Herlihy and Corey
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