The purpose of this study is to show how professional school counselors, who have been working at schools since 2005, are applying their competences and abilities in schools and examine how school teachers and professional school counselors are expect...
The purpose of this study is to show how professional school counselors, who have been working at schools since 2005, are applying their competences and abilities in schools and examine how school teachers and professional school counselors are expecting from the importance and performance frequency of their duties, which can give opportunities for them to broaden understanding each other and offer meaningful resources to reinforce the school counseling system which have a lot of intricate problems to be solved.
The following are suggestions to achieve these purposes.
First, this study provides role models through theoretical research about the roles and duties of the professional school counselors.
Second, this study shows the different perception between school teachers and professional school counselors about the importance of professional school counselors's duties by analyzing different questionaries they answered.
Third, this study acknowledges and analyzes the gap between how the professional school counselors perceive of their duties and how they perform at school situations.
For this study, the questionaries were given to 250 school teachers and 150 professional school counselors in Gyeong-Gi province. 230 out of 250 school teachers(92%) and 43 out of 150 professional school counselors(29%) returned them.
The questionaries consist of five categories including the professional school counselors's scope and contents of their duties derived from previous research and from a guide book for professional school counselors issued by Ministry of Education, Science and Technology. Each category is classified into detailed questions, each of which has 5 sample answers that respondents rate their opinions on a scale of 1 to 5. It also includes questions that require a respondent to write down their opinions and questions about performance frequency only for the professional school counselors.
There is no difference between school teachers and professional school counselors in perception about the importance of professional school counselors's duties, such as preventive education, supports for school teachers, counseling environment and administration works, but they show different opinions about their roles in individual counseling and group counseling. It indicates that school teachers consider the roles of professional school counselors more importantly than professional school counselors evaluate their own duties. Also, the result from the questionaries shows that what professional school counselors are doing at schools are far behind their own expectations they think they should reach. As a result, professional school counselors feel that they are not providing enough counseling service to fulfill their own desire to give more effort and time in their works. This study presents meaningful results for future applications from what school teachers and professional school counselors perceive of professional school counselors's duties and roles, even though securing the satisfactory system for the professional school counselors is too slow to offer more help for students who cannot solve the problems by themselves. So, it is imperative that opportunities be given to them to intensify their abilities while preparing a much more effective counseling system. In addition, the government needs to make more efforts to give clear and specific guide lines on professional school counselors's duties