Abstract:

This paper describes a partnership between two graduate counseling faculty members who combined their expertise and experience to create an innovative variation to a traditionally lecture-based course. During the summer semester of 2010, these two professors revised a required course in a Master’s degree program in School Counseling at a major metropolitan university in New York City. The course, entitled “Organization and Administration of Pupil Personnel Services,” was not only a requirement but an especially popular course, as it was frequently filled to capacity. This course reviews the organizational setup of urban schools and the various roles of contemporary school counselors, as per the American School Counselor Association’s framework for comprehensive school counseling programs (Cobia & Henderson, 2007). Due to the high enrollment in the course, and its fundamental importance for school counselors, faculty began to consider ways of making it even more dynamic and effective at preparing professional, ethical counselors-in-training for the realities of the counseling profession. The new course setup involved team-teaching, where one faculty member taught for the first hour of each class meeting, and the other faculty taught for the second hour. The first hour reflected the faculty member’s preference for highlighting organizational theory, research studies, and review of comprehensive counseling program models and included discussions, small-group work, and debates. This professor also integrated technology and media into the lecture and presentation, such as video, Internet, and online threaded discussion boards. The second hour reflected the respective faculty member’s extensive experience in the field as a practicing school counselor. This professor followed the discussion of theory with in-depth illustrations of organizational issues in practice, focusing on ethical considerations, school crises, and the challenges of balancing multiple responsibilities within the school context. These lessons did not include technology or media but relied on class discussions, reactions to scenarios, and role-playing. The positive faculty and student descriptions of their experiences in this course concur with prior evidence on the benefits the team approach to teaching counseling courses (Corey, Corey, & Callanan, 2005). The differentiated instructional methods these professors employed successfully engaged students, while exposing them to knowledge- and skill-building activities, and to the theory and practice of school counseling with its obstacles and dilemmas (Babione, 2010). The various pedagogical strategies also responded to diverse learning-style preferences of students (Dunn & Griggs, 2003). The ongoing collaboration of the two professors as a team was crucial to effective delivery of the course’s learning objectives, and to students’ successful demonstration of performance objectives. They also modeled important behaviors for school counselors, as dedicated counselor educators and lifelong learners (Orr, Hall, & Hulse-Killacky, 2008).

Keywords:

Theory and practice, team-teaching, graduate faculty collaboration, school counseling instruction, differentiated instruction, pedagogical strategies, learning style, student engagement.