This study aims to investigate how satisfied teachers are with a school counseling teacher's counseling activities in school. For this purpose, the following research questions are addressed:
1. What do teachers think about a counseling teacher's work...
This study aims to investigate how satisfied teachers are with a school counseling teacher's counseling activities in school. For this purpose, the following research questions are addressed:
1. What do teachers think about a counseling teacher's work?
2. What do teachers think about a counseling teacher's working environment?
3. What improvements should be made in order to improve a counseling teacher's working environment?
Ten middle and high schools in Jeollabukdo in which counseling teachers work, were selected for a survey. A total of 153 survey sheets were collected out of 170 sheets that were distributed. 18 responses were ruled out because of concerns about reliability of data, due to the lack of the answers.
The survey questions were adopted from the study of Hong (2007) and then revised with the help of the supervisor. The survey is comprised of 43 items divided into seven parts as shown in Table Ⅲ-2:
Part one: seven questions about general information regarding the teachers who participated in the survey
Part two: twenty-two questions about what teachers think about a counseling teacher's work
Part three: twelve questions about the working environment of a counseling teacher
Part four: two questions about how a counseling teacher can improve himself or herself.
The Cronbach α is .942 which indicates high reliability. The statistical analysis of the data was done with SPSS(Statistical Package for Social Science) 15.0 such as data coding, data cleaning.
The specific analyses are as follows:
1. In order to investigate the participants' background information, a Chi-square test was administered.
2. In order to investigate the difference between counseling activities among counseling teachers, crosstabs were calculated.
3. In order to investigate if there is any difference in students' welfare before and after the counseling activities, a t-test and one-way ANOVA were performed.
The findings are shown as below:
1. Regardless of gender, teachers' satisfaction with a counseling teacher's work was not high. The teachers above 40 showed more satisfaction than the teachers below 40. Middle school teachers were more satisfied than the teachers who were working in academic high schools. Based on the positions of the teachers, chief teachers were more satisfied, followed by homeroom teachers and non-homeroom teachers.
2. The results indicated that counseling was not considered as a main agenda for a teachers' meeting, which caused counseling teachers to be less outspoken during the meeting. This was caused by the teachers' lack of awareness of professional counseling. When it comes to school budget planning, counseling was not appropriately included. All of these contributed to counseling teachers's poor pay and undesirable working environment.
3. In order to facilitate active counseling activities, teachers' awareness of professional counseling should be improved and school administration should also be improved.