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This manuscript details the development and exploratory factor analysis of a United States’ version of the International Survey of School Counselors’ Activities (ISSCA-US), a 42-item instrument that identifies activities of school counselors. Responses were collected from 390 US school counselors. Separate EFAs were conducted for two distinct sections of the survey involving appropriateness of role activities and their actually being undertaken, both resulting in reliable 6-factor models.

It is not unusual for school counsellors to be involved in trauma-aware education practice; however, their role is not uniformly defined in the literature nor consistently applied in professional settings. Trauma-aware education is relatively new but rapidly growing in Australia and beyond. It involves supporting students in a neuroscience-informed manner to address the impacts of complex trauma on their capacities to feel safe, to relate, to emotionally regulate, and to learn. Twenty-six school counsellors completed questionnaires, and eight of those joined focus group discussions to explore the role of school counsellors in trauma-aware practice in Queensland, Australia. Drawing on the voices of practitioners, the present report discusses categories of practice that are prioritised by school counsellors and recommends supports to effectively undertake trauma-aware practice in school settings.

Previous research suggests high school counselors are not living up to their potential as social/emotional, academic, and postsecondary counselors. This article addresses this concern by studying how schools and districts utilize counselors. Through interviews and observations of high school counselors, administrators, and counselor educators in an urban midwestern community, I find that counselors suffer from role ambiguity and role conflict due to lack of a clear job description, overlap with similar professions, supervision by noncounseling administrators, inadequate forms of performance evaluation, and conflict between their roles as counselors and educators. This conflict leads to poor boundaries at work, with counselors receiving an overwhelming amount of noncounseling duties that reduce their time with students. High school counselors have the potential to improve student social and academic outcomes, but these obstacles of role ambiguity and role conflict reduce them to school managers rather than master’s-level trained educators with a mental health background.

Implementing social emotional learning (SEL) programs in school settings is a promising approach to promote critical social and emotional competencies for all students. However, there are several challenges to implementing manualized SEL programs in schools, including program cost, competing demands, and content that is predetermined and cannot be tailored to individual classroom needs. Identifying core components of evidence-based SEL programs may make it possible to develop more feasible approaches to implementing SEL in schools. The purpose of this study was to systematically identify the core components in evidence-based elementary school SEL programs, using the five interrelated sets of competencies identified by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) as an organizing framework. We present the components that were identified, and the rates at which each component was included in the sample of evidence-based SEL programs. The core components that occurred most frequently across programs were Social Skills (100% of programs), Identifying Others’ Feelings (100% of programs), Identifying One’s Own Feelings (92.3% of programs), and Behavioral Coping Skills/Relaxation (91.7% of programs). These findings illustrate the feasibility of systematically identifying core components from evidence-based SEL programs and suggest potential utility of developing and evaluating modularized SEL programs.

Many minority, first-generation, and low-income students aspire to college; however, the college application process can present a significant obstacle. These students cannot always rely on their parents for college information and must instead turn to their high schools, where counselors are in a key position. Drawing on a two-year field study at two racially and socioeconomically diverse high schools and interviews with 89 students and 22 school counseling faculty and staff, I examine the role of trust in creating successful student-counselor relationships that can facilitate the transmission of social capital during the college application process. My findings indicate that distrust between counselors and students is due to a lack of shared understanding regarding expectations and roles. My evidence suggests that the diverse nature of the school context created structural constraints that contributed to this distrust By analyzing the strategies of one counselor who succeeded in connecting with students and working through these structures, I demonstrate ways that trusting relationships can be formed.

Burnout is an ongoing concern for counseling professionals across the career span. Master’s students studying to enter the field are vulnerable to burnout due to multiple factors, including the numerous challenges associated with graduate school and the dearth of experience coping with the pressures of clinical work. The onus of self-care is often placed solely on students, yet the training process allows opportunity for shared responsibility among leaders who encounter counselors in training. Considering the roles of counselor educators, faculty, and administrators; counselor supervisors and workplace leaders; and master’s-level students themselves, the authors apply the 5 P Communitarian Model for Preventing Burnout (Simionato et al., 2019) to the master’s-level counseling training process and suggest strategies for prevention.

This article reframes the potential for partnerships between university researchers and counseling practitioners that yield more applied counseling research. The gap in practitioner research and its resultant fracturing of the counseling field are well documented in the literature. Guiding principles of these partnerships are offered as a method of grounding the relationship based on a case study example between a university researcher and a local counseling training organization. The four primary values that can guide this reframing of practitioner research are the emphasis on practitioner expertise, development of research identity for practitioners and future practitioners, flexibility in data collection and analysis, and establishment of trust between researchers and clinicians. These values address the barriers to practitioner research that are currently explored in the literature. Application of these values led to a successful partnership yielding ample data collection with plans to produce academic articles and new training programs. Exploring the potential for effective practitioner research has the potential to produce more applied research that is currently lacking in the field of counseling.

While socioeconomic inequality in postsecondary outcomes is well documented, limited research explores the extent to which seeing a high school counselor can help to reduce inequality in college destinations. In particular, previous research rarely considers the high school context in which counselors and students interact as well as the other sources of social and cultural capital available to students. Using the Educational Longitudinal Study (ELS: 2002), we find that seeing a counselor plays a significant role in predicting application to college, and while this relationship is attenuated, it remains strong even net of other sources of information. Moreover, the relationship between seeing a high school counselor and whether and where students apply to college is largely similar across high school contexts, with some indication that high school counselors may be most relevant in schools with moderate college-going culture. Finally, presented analyses provide insights regarding the extent to which different factors contribute to socioeconomic inequality in the college application process.

Although self-care and wellness practices are important in counselor education, they have yet to be mapped and incorporated into the CACREP curriculum. Counselor educators are called to teach and model these practices for counselors in training (CIT) in a post-pandemic reality. The authors provide specific recommendations for integrating self-care and wellness practices across the CACREP curriculum in counselor education training programs, as well as pragmatic approaches for professional counselors, to address the paucity of literature.

In 2003, the American Counseling Association (ACA) adopted the ACA Advocacy Competencies (J. A. Lewis, M. S. Arnold, R. House, & R. L. Toporek, 2002) to provide guidance to counselors and acknowledge advocacy as an ethical aspect of service to clients. This article provides a foundation for this special section by sharing a historical perspective on recent pivotal advocacy movements within the profession. An overview of the development and content of the Advocacy Competencies is provided followed by a case example to assist counselors in understanding and enhancing their application.