Preparing Entry‐Level Counselors for Collaboration

Abstract

Over a period of 5 years, faculty members from the North Carolina State University's Counselor Education Program have integrated a curriculum enhancement to promote collaboration behaviors among program graduates across the master's degree options for training school, college, and community counselors. The School-College-Community Collaboration (SC3) idea was integrated into a 48-credit master's degree curriculum accredited by the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs. The authors present the rationale for the training program, historical background, program enhancement content, evaluation findings and faculty responses, and future plans for the SC3 enhancement program.Approximately 7 years ago, 33% of the tenure-track faculty members of the Counselor Education Program left North Carolina State University to retire and move elsewhere. The dean challenged the remaining faculty members to present a rationale for the program that would justify replacing the missing faculty members. The dean's challenge provided an opportunity for the remaining faculty members to review the existing program and consider new ideas. The primary product of the effort was to integrate a training program enhancement into the master's-level program that was related to a theme initially identified as school-community collaboration and then changed to School-College-Community Collaboration (SC3).The training program is located in a southeastern Research I land grant university. The university has master's and doctoral programs accredited by the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs in counselor education with entry-level (master's degree) options in school, college, and community counseling. The SC3 thematic training program enhancement was integrated into the three entry-level options. Presented in this article are the rationale for the training program, historical background, program enhancement content, evaluation findings and faculty responses, and future plans for the SC3 enhancement program.

Preparing School Counselors to Promote Academic Development

“…The formal evaluation consisted of a student course evaluation that included both quantitative ratings and qualitative student comments. Course evaluations have been a common way of evaluating innovative methods in counselor education (e.g., Baker et al, 2009; Villalba & Redmond, 2008). The informal evaluation involved supervisor and other practicing school counselors’ responses to invitations to attend sessions of the course during the second year in which it is being taught.…”