Interview with an educational professional in school settings

Interview an educational professional who works in a school and is not a school counselor (i.e., teacher, principal, social w

Counselors - from the perspective of English teacher Chris Sharpe

Although teachers in general need to be very versatile in the workplace, there are limits as to their influence over children. The fact that they need to concentrate on acting in agreement with the curriculum they are in charge of sometimes makes it difficult for them to concentrate on other aspects of the classroom. They are thus left with no alternative but to separate their times into several parts, with counseling actually being one of these respective parts. Even with this, their role means that they also have a limited understanding of the attitudes that a counselor needs to put across children in school.

A school counselor takes on a very general role in his or her field of work -- they need to take on a series of attitudes ranging from focusing on students' personal competencies to encouraging these respective people to pursue their academic goals depending on their backgrounds.

From my perspective, the more general a role of an educator is, the more experienced the respective person needs to be in dealing with a series of ideas. Many people have a limited understanding of counselors and I've actually had parents and students turning to me with issues that a counselor would normally try to deal with. These respective people appear to believe that counselors are simply required to stay in their office, hand out college applications, and come up with ideas regarding which type of educational institute each student should be interested in. A teacher would also have to address students from a general point-of-view, but the fact that he or she typically concentrates on promoting the same ideas over and over again means that they gain experience in doing it over time and that they are more likely to succeed in their endeavor. In contrast, while a counselor also obviously gains experience as he or she interacts with more and more students, they do not just have to focus on providing them with guidance in a single domain. While I concentrate on trying to make my students gain a more complex understanding of the curricula I'm teaching, a counselor would have to also concentrate on identifying what students want to learn and to eventually provide them with the assistance they need in order for them to actually be able to achieve their goals. I consider both role to be equally important in preparing students to turn into successful adults, but the principal idea is that they are very different from one another.

Although they seem very similar, the roles of a teacher and of a counselor are actually very different. A teacher is more concerned with his or her area of expertise while a counselor has to go through great efforts with the purpose to understand what are each student's abilities and goals and to attempt to find a middle ground between these two so as for the student's experiences to be as fruitful as possible.

In a perfect world a school counselor and a teacher would have very different jobs, with the former primarily being concerned with the psychology aspect of educating an individual while the latter being concerned with making it possible for the student to accumulate important information from the curricula that he or she teaches. However, the reality is that depending on the school, on the counselor, and on the teacher, each of these factors can influence the balance in the educational institute.