Hello, Friends!
It has been a long time since I published a blog entry - September 25th, 2011. I have to admit that I was in a bit of a bad funk all throughout 2012. Now, it is January 2013 and I am ready to start fresh...once again. I considered whether or not it was appropriate to go back to this almost forgotten blog. I decided that it was and, that furthermore, "Springing Forward to a Brand New Me" was still an appropriate title for my work. This time, rather than being a record of my daily activity, I hope that my new blog posts will be more focused on my professional writing. Tonight, I want to start on a completely new topic - Administrators as Counsellors.
I have thought about the counselling skills that are required for someone to be a good administrator but I have NEVER considered that it would be an excellent research topic for me. It is one of the parts of the job that I truly enjoyed AND part of the job in which I felt highly successful. This fall, I had a student in my Introduction to Educational Administration class that wanted to write her essay about the administrator as counsellor. She had been observing the administrators in her school and noticed that they were dealing with a teacher whose marriage was ending, a student whose mother had passed away, and a parent who was troubled by the behaviour of her teenage son. As an Ed. Admin. student she was shocked by this observation that the administrators were actually called upon to do some fairly intense counselling sessions on a quite a regular basis. When she started to do a literature review for her paper, she was stumped. She couldn't find the literature. She called for my help and I agreed to try a library search in hopes that I could offer her some assistance with keywords or authors. Nope. The literature it seems revolves mainly around the development of good working relationships between administrators and counsellors. Although those are important, the counsellor in the school does not eliminate the need for administrators to have counselling skills. In fact, I would contend that counselling skills are not just a sideline virtue but actually an essential skill for success in administration!
I'm going to leave you with that thought tonight and I will be back tomorrow to explore my first thesis statement for my first paper about the administrator as counsellor.
Until then, I hope your world is one big classroom!
Jackie
Hey Jackie - welcome back (to blogging)!! This is a great area for research. This is an area that needs study and is rarely seen in professional learning for administrators. As a Principal I certainly did a lot of 'counselling', talking to a student on a discipline issue should not be about punishment, but an opportunity for learning and changing behaviour. Sometimes a school counsellor does not exist in a school and career and other types of counselling has to be dome by the Principal. I look forward to seeing your research idea develop. Let's chat over coffee :-)
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