ERIC ED415932: The Role of Counseling in a Comprehensive Developmental Program for Post-Secondary Students.

26 Pages·1997·0.38 MB·English

by  ERIC

DOCUMENT RESUME
ED 415 932 JC 980 094
AUTHOR Maxwell, Martha
TITLE The Role of Counseling in a Comprehensive Developmental
Program for Post-Secondary Students.
PUB DATE 1997-00-00
NOTE 25p.
PUB TYPE Reports Evaluative (142)
EDRS PRICE MF01/PC01 Plus Postage.
DESCRIPTORS Academic Achievement; At Risk Persons; Basic Skills; Career
Counseling; Career Planning; Community Colleges; Counseling
Services; *Counselor Attitudes; Counselor Role;
*Developmental Studies Programs; *Educational Counseling;
Group Counseling; *High Risk Students; Higher Education;
Individual Counseling; Outreach Programs; *School
Counseling; Self Concept; *Self Efficacy; Self Motivation;
Student Motivation; Study Skills; Test Wiseness; Time
Management; Two Year Colleges
ABSTRACT
This document asserts that counselors in comprehensive
development programs for postsecondary students must provide personal,
academic, and career development guidance. Developmental students often
possess problems such as cultural conflict, skills deficiency, lack of
motivation, and unrealistic expectations. Due to negative educational
experiences in the past, many of them won't seek help. Successful programs
must integrate counseling with teaching, and must have a highly structured,
easily accessible, and preventative format. Counselors must work with faculty
and staff to provide mentoring programs, informal student "support" groups,
and credit courses in social, academic, and career planning. They should also
act as intermediaries between teachers and students and help provide a
nurturing environment where students can value themselves and feel confident
in their academic abilities. Contains 25 references. (YKH)
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The Role of Counseling in a Comprehensive
Developmental Program for Postsecondary Students
Martha Maxwell
MM Associates
EDOfUfUicC.eSA o.T fD IEOEdNuPcAAaLtRi oRTnMEalS ERONesUTeR aOrCcFhE ESanDIdNUFImCOpARrToMvIOeAmNTeInOtN "PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS
)(\ (ERIC) MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY
Trehcise idveodcu fmroeemnn ttt hhea sp ebreseonn roerporrogdaunciezadt iaosn M. Maxwell
originating it.
1:1 Minor changes have beenmade to
improve reproduction quality.
Points of view or opinions statedin this
document do not necessarilyrepresent TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES
official OERI position or policy. INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC)."
BEST COPY AVAILABLE
The Role of Counseling in a Comprehensive Developmental
Program for Post-Secondary Students
MARTHA MAXWELL, PH.D.
MM Associates
Box 2857
Kensington, MD 20891
Summary:
Counseling should be an integral part of a successful developmental
education program since developmental students typically harbor negative
emotional associations toward their earlier unsuccessful school
experiences. In addition, they need help in making realistic educational and
career decisions and plans, and may need to overcome interpersonal
difficulties that contributed toward their present scholastic deficiencies. In
short, their scholastic shortcomings are deeply influenced and intertwined
with negative attitudes and emotions. Such students must be helped to
recognize and find ways to overcome these affective blocks to learning if
they are to succeed academically.
This paper describes a model for incorporating counseling principles and
strategies into a developmental education program using a variety of
delivery methods including overall staff training in providing support and
challenge to students as well as in identifying students who may need
more intensive counseling and in providing appropriate service for them.
Programs that have successfully combined counseling with team-taught
developmental programs and those who have used other strategies will be
described and discussed in light of the findings of current research on
self-efficacy, locus of control, self-concept, learning styles and so on. The
chapter will also show how theories and schemata of theorists like Perry,
Vyygotsky, Kuhn, Bandura, and others underlie and are embodied in
successful practices that help students overcome their prior dysfunctional
academic experiences.
Counseling has been a service offered by programs for low achieving
students ever since professional college counselors began to take over
student counseling from faculty in the 1930s. That counseling benefits
students is amply documented by Rayman & Garis (1989) who conclude
"...freshmen who use counseling services are more likely to succeed in
college than those who do not." (p 129).
Counseling freshmen developmental students is very important because
many enter college with a crippling load of emotional baggage. They bring
with them problems from many different sources for they are not just
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underprepared in skills and coursework, but they are academically at-risk
for many other reasons as well. They may be working full-time with family
responsibilities, or have minimal support from key family members, or may
expect to fail college courses no matter what they do or have other
personal difficulties that limit their success. Some are recovering from
alcoholism or drug use or mental illness. As Roueche & Roueche (1993)
explain "Today's (open-admission) students are at risk in a number of
ways that complicate and make obsolete the old definition of college
students" (p. 1). Today's developmental students differ from those we
considered underprepared in the 50s and 60s in that their difficulties are
greater. Often, they don't know that they don't know and they don't
understand what college professors expect. They need comprehensive
services including effective counseling, advising, and mentoring as well as
academic skills development as well as courses that will increase their
background knowledge if they are to survive in college.
Students who were previously unsuccessful in school tend to reject the
teaching methods, materials and strategies that were used to teach them in
elementary and high school; they need to be treated like the adults they are
and taught with different approaches and materials. Most need counseling
to help undo the lingering effects of the negative attitudes, emotions, and
fears they experienced in their earlier schooling. Returning adults often
need counseling to help them readjust to playing the role of student again.
In this chapter we will discuss how counseling can help in developmental
programs and the different roles counselors play as team members in a
successful program for underprepared students, as well as the strategies
that can be used to help at-risk students survive and succeed in college. In
addition, typical kinds of student problems and the psychodynamics of
failure will be described and examples of successful programs presented.
Counselors must be an integral part of the developmental program team -
they can not remain 'stand-alone professionals who work with students
behind closed office doors.
The role of the counselor in a developmental education program is
different from that of the traditional college counselor who meets and talks
with students in an office in a counseling center. To be sure, counselors in
a developmental education program may still counsel individuals and
groups but their main duty is to provide outreach activities with students
and staff and reduce the perceived formality and distance of counseling by
making it more accessible to students. In other words, their job is not
restricted to crisis intervention, but rather they function to prevent crises
from occurring. To this end they also have the responsibility of convincing
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both students and staff of the uses and benefits of counseling and how to
create a supportive environment for students. .
Counselors must be included in program planning attend regular staff
,
meetings with instructional staff and participate in the program evaluation.
The counselor's position must be integrated with those of program faculty,
and staff including tutors. The counselor should participate in training
receptionists and paraprofessionals such as tutors who interact with
students. They should select train and supervise mentors and provide
assistance to the instructional staff in understanding and coping with
students' learning difficulties.
In other words, counseling services that enhance student success must
proactively meet the needs of students in three areas : personal, academic
and career development. (Rayman & Gads, 1989, p 129). This means that
the counselors must have as their primary goal planned programmatic
counseling rather than waiting until problems occur to help students.
By a proactive counseling model emphasizing outreach programs. we
mean that intervention programs can be initiated before problems become
crises. In other words, counselors should not wait until students are
desperate. As Rayman & Gads (1989) state, " We know what the presenting
problems (for freshmen) were in the past and what they are now, and what
they are likely to be in the future." It is also important that counselors
stress short-term, approaches and address a wide array of outreach
programs. They should offer groups on timely topics, teach courses with
credit that address personal, educational, and career development
concerns and serve staff, instructors and faculty. Although there may be
times when counselors are called upon to provide crisis intervention
service as well as individual help, their main function should be
preventative.
In order to offer appropriate groups and services it is assumed that
,
counselors keep up with changing student problems through regular
surveys, interview studies, etc. For example, they might offer groups on
test taking skills and include information on how to overcome common
difficulties in taking computer administered exams timed appropriately
during the semester.
Counselors must be confident enough in their beliefs about counseling to
deliver what they know students need in the way of assistance and deliver
it BEFORE students ask. Also counselors must be more directive in
working with underprepared students than with students who have
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previously been successful in their pre-college schooling. (Rayman & Garis
1989, p. 139).
,
Among the individual and group services that counselors should offer are
academic planning and concerns, career planning, and social/personal
issues. In addition to teaching credit courses, they can offer mini courses
on time management, improving interpersonal relationships, study skills
personal issues like exam panic or homesickness, (For example,
counselors at a southern university located in the mountains that recruited
many students from a large coastal city offered a popular group for
freshmen called "I hate this place"). Also they can offer computer assisted
assessment and guidance to support freshmen development and provide
handouts and other aids on these areas.
Outreach services should include on-line Internet information services. For
example, Paul Treuer has developed a course called Introduction to
College Learning at the University of Minnesota Duluth with an on-line
textbook, The Student Handbook (hftp://www.d.umn.edu/student). Among
other applications, students use the web-based assessment tools in the
Student Handbook for self-diagnosis and, if necessary, referral to campus
resources. The Student Handbook (an on-line program) has awide range
of modules grouped into three competency areas: academic,
personal/social, and career. Within academic, for example, students can
work on basic skills, academic planning, study skills, research, problem-
solving, communication skills, computer literacy, leadership, and
knowledge in major field of study. Likewise, the text has subheadings,
with web text or links, to personal/social and career issues and describes
the persons and their location on campus who provide assistance in these
areas. On a large campus where services are dispersed, having a well
designed Web page for new students can be a very important student
service.
Also when necessary, counselors must make direct referrals to the
psychiatric service, health services or other support services when
appropriate. They should cooperate with residential life and peer-
counseling or peer-mentoring programs. The latter can be particularly
effective with low achievers, particularly if those chosen to be peer
mentors started college as developmental students and are now
successful upperclassmen. Appointing students to these positions is also
good way to recognize and reward former developmental students.
Personal and career development courses offered by counselors are
particularly effective when offered during the second term of the freshman
year (Rayman & Garis, 1989, p.138)
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Helping Faculty Understand and Deal with Student Motivational and
Behavioral Problems.
Counselors can serve another important role by helping faculty understand
and deal with student motivational problems. For example, a
developmental skills instructor writes "The hardest things for me to adjust
to is students' passivity in class and resistance to homework. My students
are for the most part wonderful, smart people. But they don't value
knowledge intrinsically. They also seem to view reading as very boring (I
guess it is when compared to video games and action movies)."(Linda
Lane, Foothill Community College, personal communication).
Furthermore, faculty in other disciplines face the same problems and
complain of "students who behave with passiveness and caginess and
don't want to be engaged in learning; who are reluctant to pursue self-help
strategies despite strong encouragement to do so. and don't take their
instructor's advice." (Petit and White 1996).
Explaining that some students become abrasive, unruly, and disrupt the
learning process if it threatens to reveal their deficiencies, Petit and White
(1996) quote a professor as saying "They don't come to class or drop out
or try to bribe the instructor. Guys want to become your closest friend and
ally- young ladies think they can impress you with as much of their body as
they can get away with." (Petit and White, 1996).
A statistics instructor writes, "With my community college students there
is also a motivational problem: Increasingly, I cannot get students to do the
homework, let alone a group project outside of class. They simply refuse,
and seem willing to take the C rather than the A they could get if they really
worked. Or they just do not believe that they will get only a C until it is too
late. Many students act like they are still in high school. I think they get the
message that reading is not important and that encourages them to do the
minimum they can get away with." (Annette Gourgey, CUNY personal
communication.)
Because students direct more behavior at the teacher, teaching becomes
more stressful. "Students are quick to blame and intimidate faculty which
creates an adversarial student teacher relationship. " (Petit and White,
1996). Faculty members in open-admissions institutions daily face the
dilemma of maintaining academic standards and challenging very
underprepared students to meet them . As one faculty members
states,"They compare you with other teachers and give you poor
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evaluations" leading Petit and White to conclude that the mismatch
between faculty and student expectations has left both parties unfulfilled.
As a result of this clash in values, faculty tend to offer more depth and less
breadth in their courses and add remedial content, inflate grades and
straggle with the question of whether to pass students who don't know.
Since low achievers place a lot of stress on instructors and are more likely
to blame their teachers for their failures and act out in class, faculty can
profit from counselors' input and support on how to deal with classroom
behavior problems. Counselors can also assist faculty in establishing
clear policies on handling psychological crises including behavioral
problems in the classroom, and communicating these policies to other,
faculty instructional staff and students.
Mentoring
In my opinion, mentoring is the most important part of a comprehensive
program for low achieving students and counselors play a vital role in
selecting, training, and supporting mentors. Mentoring can be defined as a
"one to one relationship between an older person and a younger person
that is based on modelling behavior and extended dialogue between
them." (Lester & Johnson, 1981. Although mentoring has both formal and
informal aspects, it is the informal aspects that are the most powerful.
Astin (1993) points out that interaction with faculty and staff is a crucial
factor in getting students involved with college and Noel, Levitz and Saluri
(1985) consider mentoring as an invaluable way of improving student
retention.
Mentors play many roles - as an information source, or one who listens to
problems, or as an academic advisor, social or activities advisor and
problem solver. Studies have shown that mentoring is particularly helpful
to students who have not decided on a major, minority students and
freshmen women. (Women are now the majority of students attending
college and are more willing to seek counseling help than men. Women of
color who often face isolation, exclusion and attitudinal barriers in higher
education may gain in self-affirmation and remain on campus longer if they
are mentored. Studies have also shown that student who are mentored
increase their confidence in seeking goals, making decisions, solving
problems and, in general developing a more positive attitude toward the
overall institutional environment. (Johnson, 1989, p. 122).
Fleming (1984) reported that mentoring was a critical factor in the success
of Black students on both Black campuses and predominantly white
campuses , that the importance of having "one caring person" to student
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success applied to Black students too, and that the race of the mentor
was not an issue. (Fleming as quoted in Johnson, 1989 p. p. 121).
Usually faculty members, counselors, and academic advisors are
recommended as mentors, but upper-classman, graduate students, even
other campus staff like the head of the campus police can serve in a
mentoring capacity and be accepted by students. Certainly, the pool of
mentors should reflect the diversity of the student body- in gender, racial
and ethnic diversity .. and should be comprised of persons willing to
undertake training and spend the time necessary with individual students:
persons who have the ability and the desire to establish rapport with
students and are sensitive to student differences. Experts in student
mentoring emphasize that mentors should undergo comprehensive training
programs with periodic retraining as essential components of the program.
The training should be structured and include skill development, program
philosophy and knowledge of the campus support services. (Johnson,
1989). Mentors also need training both in how to develop relationships as
well as how to end them
"The key to mentoring is caring. Many freshmen need someone who cares
and can help them through the academic maze and the confusing process
of becoming mature and achieving academic success. Mentoring is one
important and caring solution to enhancing freshman success." (Johnson,
1989, p. 128).
In successful programs for underprepared students students see a mentor
one hour a week at a minimum, and counselors are responsible for
organizing and supervising the mentoring program. Mentors should follow
students very closely and contact them if they fail to keep appointments. If
your program has a large number of students, you will need many mentors
and a very well organized and highly structured mentoring system. Mentors
can encourage reluctant students who won't otherwise volunteerfor help,
to use the various support services you offer and ensure that they follow
through.
Remember you may have excellent skills courses, tutoring support and
other services, but if you do not have a mentoring system to support
individual students and insure they use the services they need, many of
your students will fall through the cracks.
Who Are the Developmental Students?
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If you were to visit a typical developmental skills class, you would be
surprised at the diversity you would encounter for developmental students
range widely in age, ethnic background, physical ability and in many other
ways Some are adults returning to school after many years - insecure and
with rusty skills. Others are high school dropouts, while some planned to
enter technical fields after high school, but now want college. They may be
certified as learning disabled or victims of poor schools that never
challenged them or international students or refugees who acquired their
previous schooling in a language other than English. Some are
disadvantaged minorities from ghetto high schools; a few are graduates of
expensive prep schools. Some were ignored by their teachers--those whom
no one bothered to encourage to consider going to college. (Hardin 1991).
Many are convinced that they can't learn certain subjects like writing or
math. Some have handicaps in vision, or hearing or emotional problems
which interfere with learning and others have more subtle handicap such
as learning disabilities or attention deficit disorders that limited their ability
to learn in the past but were not detected before college.
Another group of developmental learners have been called The Users- -
students who lack clear cut academic goals and use the educational
system for their own purposes. (Hardin, 1988). Their main reason for being
in college is to receive financial aid and other benefits and they aspire to
get the minimum grades that will enable them to continue in school/. So
they apply little effort to studying. Obviously they need more than
academic assistance: they need counseling and other support services,
but are unlikely to seek them out. Interestingly, if these system-abusers
can become excited about the prospect of learning, they can become
excellent students, but they are among the most difficult to teach. (Hardin,
1988).
Large Numbers of Developmental Increase the Need for Services
During the 1992-93 academic year, about 1.6 million students--13 percent
of all undergraduates-reported taking at least one remedial (or
developmental) course and more recent U. S, Office of Education studies
show that 29 percent of 1996 entering freshmen took developmental
courses.
Although many people associate college developmental education with
minority students, most developmental students are White. (Boylan,
Bonham & Bliss, 1993, American Council on Education, 1996). Nearly two-
thirds (65 percent) of the individuals who took these courses were white,
however, students of color enrolled in developmental classes at higher
rates comprising more than one-third (35 percent) of those who took
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