School Counselors' Participation in Continuing Education Activities

All certified school counselors in Wisconsin were surveyed in regard to their participation in a variety of professional development activities during a 12-month period. Results reveal that while many counselors were actively involved in such activities, others were only minimally so and some completely uninvolved. The latter tended to be older males with several years of counseling experience. Implications for maintaining counselor effectiveness in a changing society are discussed.     

Effectiveness Ratings of Counselors without Teaching Experience

Counselors without teaching experience were compared with counselors from the same graduate counselor education program with teaching experience and with other first-year counselors raters had known. Ratings were made in school employment settings by supervisors, principals, and associates of the rated counselors by indicating their relative effectiveness on each of five dimensions. On the first three, counselors without teaching experience were rated as effective or more so than other first-year counselors the raters had known. On the fifth—overall performance—two-thirds of the nonteaching counselors were rated as more effective. It was concluded that teaching experience does not seem to be necessary for the preparation of competent school counselors. It is recommended that biases and requirements against the employment of counselors without teaching experience be eliminated.     

A Long Distance Approach to Evaluating Counselor Communication

This article describes an instrument, Recorded Counselee Narratives, used to collect counselor responses over the telephone and an instrument, Counselor Preference Survey, developed to evaluate such responses. Data is presented to show that nonprofessional, untrained raters can achieve sufficient reliability to make the instruments useful in studying nonprofessional evaluations of counselors. Possible uses of the instruments in evaluation of applicants for graduate counselor education programs, lay counselors, and telephone counselors are described.     

Continuing Education for School Counselors

Recently, changes have occurred in American society and in the focus of education. Women's liberation, career education, and single-parent families are three important examples. Each example presents the counselor with expectations and problems that were not present in earlier times. Counselors who received their training 20, 10, 5, and even 3 years ago are probably not meeting present challenges as effectively as they might. Counselors need to learn new skills to meet changing conditions or run the risk of becoming ineffective or irrelevant. One model for the continuing education of counselors was described by Pulvino and Perrone (1973). This article reports on seven years of experience with that model at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.     

Applications of Jungian Type Theory to Counselor Education

Carl Jung's theory of psychologocal type is described as is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), an instrument used to assess Jungian type. Sources of information on the research and application of the theory and the MBTI are cited. How knowledge of type theory, especially of type characteristics, differences, and development can be useful to counselor educators is explored.