Role of a Guidance Counsellor in Schools and Colleges
While children in their innocent curiosities are hungry to learn, explore, and experience the unfamiliar without any inhibitions; they are equally left distressed when the new is laden with unpredicted but solvable problems. It is perhaps the lack of experiential insight, but children seem to find hope with more ease than they do, with caution.
With increasing hormonal influences changing their bodies and minds, exposures to diverse interactions at school, time spent indulging in monitored or unmonitored consumption of media, and realizing that they are enroute being adults; children as they grow into teenagers may often be confusing to understand. As difficult as they may seem, they do not always have the right words or a safe ecosystem to express themselves within. While they are deemed hard to understand, a majority of teens do not feel understood.
Playing the role of being the home after home, schools and colleges contribute to the the growth patterns that children eventually take to. Aside from education and aptitude skills as required in the professional domain, children are often expected to learn before they graduate from college; to be well adjusted, empowered with linguistic prowess to comunicate, social skills, and a general idea of navigating through various walks of life.
Guidance counsellors play a pivotal role in the lives of children at school and college. They aid students with making academic choices to channelise the latter’s professional journeys and to be mentally balanced despite all odds.
How Students Benefit from Guidance Counsellors
Inculcating Self Confidence
By encouraging students to express both their opinions and emotions without any inhibitions, the guidance counsellor ensures that student takes their agencies to have a voice and make a choice seriously. Alongside details about the choices that students may have make to make in their academic pursuits, they are reminded that choices have consequences. Counsellors may thus reiterate that responsible and well-informed choices, cement their sense of confidence.
Once a student begins to share her/her opinions and the bond they share with the world around them and with themselves, the counsellor is able to channelize them into a path that is formed upon informed choices that reflect in their confident stride.
Use of Critical Analysis to Solve Problems is Encouraged
Both within academia and in the world outside the campus, students are bound to encounter difficult circumstances that they may have to tackle with spontaneously and tactful thought. One can wish for a problem to be small and easy to get past but oftentimes, life can throw complicated situations towards people and age like everything else, does not factor in. Child or adult, one must get past the obstacles that come one’s way, be it a tricky mathematics test or an unfamiliar and an unpredictable turn of events.
To think critically means to evaluate the problem or the circumstance to narrow down all the possible approaches to analyse its details. Resultantly, the most effective perspective and possibility is narrowed down. Time as it often plays a crucial role in difficult circumstances, may demand one to evaluate and approach the situation as soon as possible. When an individual can analyse the problem correctly, executing the solution is easier.
Students are gently mentored by their guidance counsellors to be open to various points of view, to perceive in as many ways as they can, and to approach every situation by evaluating possibilities before narrowing down on one.
Managing Stressors
To young minds, the new and the unfamiliar may not always seem frightening. Needless to say, experience eventually brings them closer to life in its greyscale. While they do learn about the world and its ways without letting the unfair hold them back completely, students experience their very own encounters with stressors. Their stress may seem small and easy to handle to us but it is pivotal to recognise their distress.
Learning to handle stress can be cultivated in children to make for a long term benefit. It is important to teach students that mistakes made bring valuable lessons; being accountable is rewarding even if it means that one may feel ashamed for a brief second. The counsellor assures students that their vulnerabilities are part of being human. The reassurance that they will learn the next time around, may help greatly.
Statistics today demand us to expose our children with knowledge on mental health counsellors ensure that children learn to prioritize their own mental wellbeing.
Positive Social Interactions
When interacting with the counsellor, every student learns that they can and when they can, should express themselves without any inhibitions. Normalising conversational intimacy plays a very significant role in building a robust foundation for participating in human interactions within personal and social settings. Positive interactions beget positive interactions.
If the counsellor senses in their students, aspects of behaviour and personality that needs to be addressed; the guidance counsellor does so to ensure that the same does not journey with students into their adulthood.
Walking Students Through Academic and Professional Prospects
The primary and lower secondary syllabi often include the same set of foundational concepts that pertain to linguistics, the social realm, sciences, and mathematics as far as academia is concerned. Soon after in some cases and after the completion of higher secondary; students are presented with choices to make.
Although parents and teachers as they may have watched the child grow up from being a toddler to being students at the higher secondary class, teenage students are still young and do not always have the mental faculties to make choices that may have long term consequences. Be it a result of being unaware, or a stressful consequence of being confused, of succumbing to performance pressures; guidance counsellors walk students through the journey ahead and aids them in making the choices that suit them best.
It is important for both parents and teachers to recognise that students while at school and college, may or may not be comfortable sharing how they feel. A guidance counsellor is often trained to speak to growing minds and in the safe space created for them, students discover themselves and their paths ahead.
