How High School Counselors Can Change Student Lives

With rising rates of mental illness, increasing career questions, and complex academic challenges, high school students need real guidance. In that capacity, high school counselors can positively impact the lives of the students they serve by giving students the best support possible as they navigate important academic and future-impacting opportunities and decisions. High school counselors can provide critical advice to students, help them find their strengths, and teach them invaluable skills to assist them when they leave school and enter college or the workforce.

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Becoming a high school counselor can be an exceptionally helpful, useful, and rewarding job. Let's examine how you can become a high school counselor, what you can do as a counselor, and what tools you need to thrive in that capacity.

Personal and Educational Requirements

From an educational perspective, guidance counselors must meet different requirements in different states. Most states require a Master's degree in school counseling, education, or a related field. They will also need to obtain an appropriate license. Getting this license may require passing a licensure exam and will involve filling out paperwork and paying a fee.

From a personal perspective, there is no doubt that individuals who wish to become guidance counselors should have certain personal attributes to strive in the profession. These include:

• Extensive empathy and listening skills: High school counselors will have to listen closely to the problems high school students experience, then offer solutions as needed. Counselors must closely pay attention to the needs and feelings of their students.
• Patience: High school students can be bright, creative, and passionate. They may also engage in behaviors and communication patterns that are ill-advised. Counselors must be prepared to guide and teach students about the negative impact of these behaviors and how to make better choices as they grow and mature.
• Planning skills: High school counselors are the front line in helping students make career and college planning decisions. Counselors must understand students' needs and help them find future career paths by helping them with self-awareness of their great talents, motivating them to reach their academic goals, and encouraging self-belief.
• Passion and compassion: Above all else, a high school counselor must be able and willing to help vulnerable students find their way through difficult experiences. High school counselors must be ready to assist these individuals in getting the help they need or working through life's challenges.

What High Schools Counselors Do

High school counselors can provide an array of services for students and schools. These services have the same general purpose: Helping students prepare for entry into the real world or the next phase of their academic journey. Specifically, this means high school counselors will work with students in many ways, including:

Assist in Long-Term Life Planning

Being a high school counselor means having the opportunity to offer guidance to an individual at a potential inflection point in their life and academic career. Catching a student early enough can help identify passions, find extracurricular activities, and set a student on a pathway that will allow them to fulfill their long-term academic or professional goals. In addition, high school counselors can help students find classes and participate in opportunities that will enable them to make long-term determinations for their future.

Provide Advice, Counseling, And Referrals

High school students sometimes experience issues beyond normal sadness or teenage angst. In these instances, a counselor can provide critical advice, help students overcome their difficulties, or make referrals to other professionals.

As you can see, counselors have a major role in developing a young person's life. This potential impact makes counseling a perfect career for an individual that cares about the success of others.

The Good High School Counselors Can Accomplish

Simply put, a good counselor can make a massive difference in high school students' lives.

Research has shown that high school counselors can help students through some of their most difficult moments in life. In some cases, a counselor can provide wisdom and counseling to a vulnerable student, helping them see a minor or major problem from a new perspective and allowing them to gain vital clarity. Other times, a counselor may identify when a problem is more significant and make referrals to a psychologist or psychiatrist to help students overcome their difficulties.

Furthermore, high school counselors can provide a guiding hand at key moments in an academic career. An informed high school counselor can help students identify work opportunities, certification programs, or college programs that fit their needs. It is not an exaggeration to say that a high school counselor can be the foundation for a student to build a successful career.

Tools Needed For Counseling Success

Guidance counselors need adequate resources and technological tools to meet the needs of their students. In a modern-day economy, and with the sheer amount of necessary academic and testing requirements, high school counselors can't afford to rely on outdated or paper methods to ensure that students do everything they need to graduate and apply to colleges. At Education Advanced, we developed our Pathways program for just that purpose. Pathways can provide invaluable assistance in tracking students' progress in high school, ensuring they meet all graduation and post-secondary education requirements.

Looking for more information about Pathways or our other tools? Contact Education Advanced for more information on how we can help your students thrive.

If your school is interested in new ways to improve the learning experience for children, you may also be interested in automating tasks and streamlining processes so that your teachers have more time to teach. Education Advanced offers a suite of tools that may be able to help. For example, four of our most popular and effective tools are:

• Evaluation is a solution for documenting every step of the staff evaluation process, including walk-throughs, self-evaluations, supporting evidence, reporting and performance analytics.
• Pathways is a graduation tracking tool that allows administrators and counselors to create, track, and analyze graduation pathways to ensure secondary students are on track to graduate.
• TestHound, our test accommodation software, helps schools coordinate thousands of students across all state and local K-12 school assessments while taking into account dozens of accommodations (reading disabilities, physical disabilities, translations, etc.) for students.