ritical Thinking Questions:
1. Do you think that when counselors are also determining academic success,
it goes beyond their roles and functions? Should it only be within the
expected boundaries of counseling? Defend your answer.
Answers
Explanation:
Normally a role of academic counsellor is to guide a student about the future options in terms of academic and career possibilities while opting a certain direction of academics. However it is also important to guide a student based on his potential or abilities. In order to judge that, a counsellor would need the academic success record of that student so that he can give him appropriate options based on his skills and interest
I disagree that determining academic success is beyond the scope of counsellors.
A counsellor’s role in the school set-up is to ensure the psychological well-being (directly) and academic success (indirectly) of the students, while a career counsellor’s responsibility is to help individuals achieve their professional goals through specific academic routes. (The question here refers to counselors and not career counselors.)
Generally speaking, academic performance is a very clear indicator of any underlying psychological issues that a child might be going through. Whether the child is facing a challenging family atmosphere or has learning disabilities or is an introvert, all these issues start showing up in the child’s behaviour in class, interaction with peers, assignments submitted and performance in tests. So, academics can reflect the turbulence going on in the mind of the child. It is this interconnectedness of academics and psychological state that brings academics within the scope of the school counselor.
Additionally, the counselor does not work on specifically one part of the child’s personality. Instead, the sessions aim at raising the child’s self esteem, sense of belonging, comfort levels at school, helping the child find solutions and so on. When all these aspects are taken care of, the child is less burdened by problems and can concentrate better on academics. With improvement in academics, a positive cycle comes into play. The aspects that the counselor was working on, begin to happen on their own. The child gets more recognition in class, feels more confident, interacts with peers in a more active manner and eventually the child is not sidelined anymore. The child becomes a part of the mainstream. It is rather difficult to measure the effectiveness of counselling. Academic performance serves as an indicator of how effective the counselling has been. Therefore, even if the counsellor does not directly focus on academic success, academics are still affected in an indirect way.
Finally, the pressure of academics today leads to many psychological problems in children. Lack of time, fierce competition and unending syllabi often take a toll on students. They end up with severe psychological issues including stress and depression. Here too, the counsellor needs to keep academic success in mind while guiding such students. Scoring below expectations can also trigger psychological problems, which makes it impossible for the counsellor to neglect academic performance.
All the reasons mentioned above indicate that the connection between psychological well-being and academic performance is too strong to be ignored and so counsellors have to focus on academic performance as well.