School Counseling, M.Ed.
Training Model
The M.Ed. program in School Counseling at the University of North Carolina is predicated on the Strengths-Based School Counseling (SBSC) model that asserts that the school counselor’s primary role is to promote and advocate for positive youth development for all students and for the environments that enhance and sustain that development.
The SBSC approach characterizes positive youth development as nurturing and enhancing empirically-identified student strengths or competencies rather than focusing on student weaknesses and problem areas.
SBSC provides a framework to guide the practice of school counseling in the 21st century that is both compatible with and operationalizes many of the features of the ASCA National Model for School Counseling Programs.
Strengths-based school counselors employ a variety of direct (e.g., counseling, classroom guidance) and systemic (e.g., consultation, advocacy) level interventions to promote culturally relevant student development in the academic, personal/social, and career domains. The strengths-based perspective identifies the counselor as a school leader who works with students, teachers, administrators, parents, and other members of the community and promotes strengths-enhancing environments for all students. SBSC is guided by six principles listed below.
The Six Guiding Principles of Strengths-Based School Counseling
Promote Context-Based Development for All Students
Contemporary developmental theorists and researchers emphasize the influential and interactive role that context (e.g., culture) and environment play in human development. Thus, school counselors should acknowledge and seek to incorporate contextual factors in their efforts to facilitate positive development for all students.
Promote Individual Student Strengths
Strengths-Based School Counseling focuses on helping students build on or further enhance their current culturally-relevant strengths and competencies as well as develop additional ones that have been shown to be associated with positive development.
Promote Strengths-Enhancing Environments
Strengths-enhancing environments are associated with positive youth development; therefore, an important function of the school counselor is to actively promote these types of environments through leadership, collaboration, advocacy and other system-level interventions.
Emphasize Strengths Promotion over Problem Reduction and Problem Prevention
Rather than placing the school counselor in a reactive mode of functioning by focusing on problem prevention and remediation, Strength-Based School Counseling focuses on promoting positive development which allows the school counselor to assume a more proactive role and serve a much larger number of students.
Emphasize Evidence-Based Interventions and Practice
Adhering to the premise that research knowledge provides the most reliable source of guidance in determining appropriate and effective interventions, the strengths-oriented school counselor is committed to evidence-based practice.
Emphasize Promotion-Oriented Developmental Advocacy at the School Level
In Strengths-Based School Counseling, school counselor’s advocacy efforts will focus primarily on lobbying for system policies and environments that enhance development for all students and secondarily on identifying and removing barriers. The school counselor’s advocacy is concerned with assuring access, equity, and educational justice for all students, with a primary focus on the school or school system.