Students unfamiliar with their counseling program's professional performance assessment policies may consider such policies pejorative. Moreover, student beliefs about the primacy of ethical service to clients may be confounded when faculty members are reluctant or fail to formally address concerns about deficient professional performance of students. The authors propose a framework intended to promote openness and transparency in professional performance assessment and believe this framework is critical to students' accurate perceptions of the assessment process, their trust in faculty members, and their future investment in safeguarding public welfare and the ethical integrity of the counseling profession through gatekeeping.
Counselor educators today are faced with a difficult dilemma. They are mandated to dismiss students they judged to be unfit and irremediable, yet they risk legal action whenever executing a student dismissal decision. Their duty to protect the public must be weighed against the liabilities of costly litigation to institutions, programs, and themselves. This article describes 1 counselor education program's decision to dismiss a student and endure a lengthy, although unsuccessful, lawsuit and jury trial in federal court. The strengths and weaknesses of the program's remediation and dismissal protocol are examined as they emerged under court scrutiny.
Ethical standards for counselor training require remediation of students with professional performance deficiencies. However, standards fail to specify the type or extent of remediation necessary to safeguard students' legal rights or justify dismissal if remediation is unsuccessful. Critical assessment of remedial practices in counselor preparation has occurred primarily in the courts when the constitutionality of specific practices was challenged. Prompted by a recent court challenge and its implications for curricular and policy change (C. R. McAdams, V. A. Foster, & T. J. Ward, 2007), this article examines court-tested methods of student remediation and presents them as a guide for developing just and fair student remediation policies.A counseling student was dismissed from a public university (at which the authors are faculty members) on the grounds of deficient professional performance after engaging in unethical behavior during a clinical practicum and then failing to satisfy the requirements of a remedial program implemented by the counseling program faculty. Following the dismissal, the student brought a lawsuit against members of the counselor education program and the university. Among the charges was that the program and the university had violated the student's constitutional right to due process, which prohibits deprivation of individual freedom (in this case, freedom to continue in the program) without due process of law. In a federal jury trial, the court ruled in favor of the university and counseling program, upholding the dismissal decision. The court cited as evidence of due process that the counseling program had followed appropriate criteria and procedure including the remedial efforts it had executed in an attempt to correct the performance deficiencies prior to the dismissal
Counseling licensure boards report emerging needs to regulate technologyassisted distance counseling and supervision. An analysis of published regulations and telephone interviews with board administrators nationwide suggests that boards agree generally on 7 aspects of technology-assisted distance practice that need to be regulated. Nevertheless, boards are disparate and often polarized in their views regarding the extent and type of regulation needed for each aspect. Current trends may have important implications for counselor education, supervision, and practice.
The impact of client suicide on student counselors has potentially severe and long‐term consequences. This article presents recommendations for addressing the needs of students and discusses implications for counselor education.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.