Topic: The Benefits and Importance of Counseling and Guidance in the Education Sector Introduction Counseling is the advice given to another person with purpose of making such a person effective in life again. Guidance is an act of guiding, showing, directing, a person to find his or her way out or to someplace or somewhere. However Counseling and Guidance share some very common characteristics as it both helps students to understand their own world, that is students are able to fit or adapt and adopt to their learning environment and thus it also helps students to make wise decisions now and also in the future and to be able to identify their abilities and trying their level best to cultivate them.
It will benefit the students, teachers, parents, school administrators and other stakeholders in supporting excellence in the area of education. This essay will seek to discuss the meaning of Counseling and Guidance, how and which group benefits from the program. Counseling Counseling can be a confusing term and it often has different meanings for different people. Counseling are mostly formal and it always involve a specialized person (counselor) by profession to deal with such matters and cases whereby a particular person or client faces a lot of difficulties in dealing with difficult issues relating to his or her personal life. Carls Rogers (1902 – 1987) invented an approach for counseling that was known as the ‘Client – Centered Approach’ or ‘Person – Centered Therapy’. This approach views individuals as rational, good, trustworthy and moves in self-actualizing directions or towards growth, health, self-realization, independence and self-sufficiency.
Rogers (1951) also argues in his approach that individuals strive for excellence and independence if given the right push/motivation. Thus it simply means that counseling deals with wellness, personal growth, career and pathological (uncontrolled) concerns that is issues faced by a student or a client that he or she personally cannot control or resolve and that particular student or client seek for advice. If a particular client or student faced a lot of difficulties to try and cope up with their school work in terms of completing their notes or a particular given activity. Despite being told at by the teacher, the matter was then referred to the school counselor. For instance, the counselor will try to resolve the matter by looking into the profile of the student and asking him or her about his or her background. May be the child does not manage his or her time well and what the counselor does he or she asks the student to draw a timetable and try to work on that every day and the counselor will keep on monitoring the student’s work until the student’s notes is complete.
Therefore time management is very important in order for that particular student to complete his work. While at home the child can just reach home and straight away do some household chores before having a shower and without any delay he can start completing his notes and activities. The advice given by the counselor to the student will assist the client to improve on his attitude towards his school work. Students are emotionally disturbed from a very young age and therefore it is bottled through different stages in their life and it happens to explode in school where the child is seeking attention to be loved and cared by someone.
Counseling plays a pivotal role in this scenario where the counselor will counsel with acceptable diagnosis and treatment. Counseling should be a tool used by parents in a child life starting from childhood until adulthood and it will somehow have an impact in the student lifetime. The ignorance of counseling will contribute to the poor mannerism and performance of a student. Guidance Guidance is the act of guiding someone to achieve his or her goal that needs to be achieved in life. Thus it is also the act of directing someone to follow the right path or direction towards achieving that particular goal. Furthermore, guidance can also be said as the act of giving advice or counseling a particular child, client or student especially when that student is undecided of which course to choose according to his or her own ambition in fact that particular student can seek guidance from his favorite teacher in school.
The concept of guidance has three main factors which include continuous process related with life which human being needs all the time in terms of real life situations. Individual guidance for students will be entailed by a person who is guiding them and he may not feel comfortable when guidance is applied to a group of students. One can say that through individual guidance the student will draw himself or herself closer to the teacher for guidance and that particular student will only feel comfortable to share his problem and not wanting his peers to hear his or her problem. Adjustment is where the teacher, parents, pastor can use some technique in order for that particular child to adjust him or her inside the classroom or community after the matter is solved. In the real life situation of a student he or she is not aware of which direction to take in his or her educational journey to achieve excellence and enter the workforce. The child will need guidance for the subject combination to take so that he or she can align him or her to appreciate and enjoy studying which will generate interest within the child to work smarter and achieve high in school.
Moreover parents need to accept and appreciate the choice chosen by the child and not to have high expectations on what they want of their child to become in future. Parental support to the child’s choice will continue to boost the child academic performance or sports achievements which will flourish and success is achieved and appreciated by everyone who has contributed to the child’s accomplishments. Some of the parents have always high hopes for their students while not contributing in educating the child. They always rely to teachers, neglecting their part as parents guiding their students in the right direction. Education is like a chair, whereas the chair represent the child and the four legs reflects the role of the teacher as the first leg, parents/guidance as the second leg, society as the third leg and the Ministry of Education as the fourth leg.
Conclusion To conclude counseling and guidance truly plays a crucial role in the lives of people nowadays. However it also changes the life of a counselee to help discover the new way of life. The life of the counselee improves as it discovers and explores the world as well as learning from their previous mistakes. Therefore counseling and guidance changes the lives of people and choosing from right and wrong, good and bad, positive and negatives in helping people or counselee a successful person in life. Guidance focus on helping individual chooses what they value most, whereas counseling helps them make those changes. REFERENCE: Rogers, C.
(1951), Client – Centered Therapy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Gladding, S.T. (2004). Counseling: A Comprehensive Profession (5th edition). Upper Saddle River, NJ:Merill/Prentice Hall.
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