School Psychologist as Counselor

by Cynthia A. Plotts, Jon Lasser

School Psychologist As A Practitioner's Handbook

Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Summer Bartunek]

I expected it to be more of a resource that included skills to use in practice. Instead it was more of a literature review.

[Frank Spencer]

This is a pretty good resource for this topic. Here are some take home points. (1) A problem solving approach works well for counseling in the schools. To use it, four questions can be your guide: (a) What is the problem? (b) Why is it occurring? (c) What can be done about it? and (d) Did the approach work? (2) There are several counseling approaches that you can draw from. The major ones described here are behavioral, cognitive, Gestalt, therapeutic recreation, Art Therapy, dance/movement, reality/choice, and play/sandtray. Brief Strategic Family Therapy, which I researched at one point, is also mentioned. (3) The counseling process involves many steps and issues. Some are referral, informed consent, assessment to determine eligibility, development of goals and objectives, planning, organization of sessions, reporting progress, and dismissal/termination. (4)There are many special situations. Dealing with grief/loss is one of them. A framework for understanding grief responses (Precedent is the acronym) involves the person's personality, relationship with the person being grieved, experience with loss, culture and values, environment, developmental stage, equilibrium of grief/moving forward, nature of the loss, and transcendence (capacity to find meaning in the loss). (5) There are several models for consultation in the schools. The ones considered here are behavioral, instructional, Adlerian, social-cognitive, and mental health. The book is published by the National Association of School Psychologists, and so it certainly has their seal of approval.

[Issac Silberstein]

meh. far too much of a lit review than anticipated. "A Practitioner's Handbook" should be more practical to use than this book. Chapters on Behavioral and Cognitive Behavioral techniques are strong. Play therapy is described nicely. The book does a poor job of explaining REBT and completely ignores important counseling techniques for busy school psychologists such as Solution-focused, brief-counseling methods. I did like the emphasis on meeting IEP goals and the important point that there are many methods to reach those goals. Overall, disappointing.