Maintaining and Enhancing the Developmental Focus in School Counseling Programs.

In 1984, I returned to school to work on a doctorate in counselor education. I had been a middle school teacher for 3 years and a school counselor for 7. As a school counselor, I had even had the opportunity to move from elementary school to high school with some of my students. Over those 10 years in public school, I had a chance to see development occur. I had watched children become adolescents and adolescents become young adults. I had worked with them, laughed with them, cried occasionally, and had been privileged to hear their stories and share their lives. When I chose my doctoral program, I chose very deliberately. I selected a program focused on human development. I wanted to have the vocabulary to explain what I had seen. I wanted to understand the concepts and the supporting research for the process for which I had been a personal witness. As I stood in the parking lot that last high school graduation night, I wondered if I would ever do anything that mattered as much or that I enjoyed so completely. I am grateful to say that I have. When I watch the graduate students I teach become better professional school counselors than I ever dreamed of being, when I watch them touch a child or challenge a system, I genuinely love what I do for a living. In graduate school, I had a chance to study with Norman Sprinthall. He was department head and was what my grandmother would have called died-in-thewool when it came to developmental theory and principles. Regardless of any of the seminal work he has written and I have read, I still have some rather humorous images of Norm in class pretending to be this amoeba-like creature, moving from floor to table to try to explain developmental stage change. I learned more than I ever meant to, and some days far less than Norm would have wished. There were a whole group of us learning from him, conducting developmental research studies as our dissertations, and becoming inadvertently the Legacy. (Author's note: In fairness to him, he grimaces every time any of us refer to that designation.) We became committed to the principles of primary prevention and grounded in the Mosher and Sprinthall (1971) model of deliberate psychological education. Ten years after beginning that doctoral process, I had an opportunity to become involved with colleagues (Glenda Hubbard and Sandy Peace) in two efforts translating developmental theory to practice in school counseling. Our purpose was to, in some way, define the developmental part of school counseling programming. We hoped to define it in contrast to the traditional guidance roles and in complement to the comprehensive and collaborative components of current models. In reality, talking about developmental programs is almost impossible to do without talking about the significance of structuring those programs within a comprehensive framework and in collaboration with others. But for our purposes, we tried to separately define and acknowledge the developmental contribution. So where is the profession now as it moves into the 21st Century? What does the developmental part of a comprehensive, developmental, and collaborative school counseling program mean? What is the status of its application? The answers to these questions most decidedly merit consideration. The Current State of the Profession While school counseling is, and will continue to be, an evolving specialty within the counseling profession (Paisley, 1999; Paisley & Borders, 1995), the most recent evolution has focused on school counseling programs that are comprehensive, collaborative, and developmental (Gysbers & Henderson, 2000; Keys, Bemak, & Lockhart, 1998; Myrick, 1997; Paisley & Hubbard, 1994; Schmidt, 1999). As the profession moves into the 21st Century, perhaps it is important to examine these program descriptors in order to be mindful of what the specialty of school counseling involves, to determine its current status, and to learn where it needs to go. …