Solution-Focused School Counselor: Shaping Professional Practice

Rating:
Summary: Changing how we think and do
Review: Having surveyed the growing literature, Davis and Osborn have managed to provide a very succint, practical and up-to-date overview of Solution-focused counseling. Steve de Shazer and his wife, Insoo Kim Berg, first distilled the wisdom of Milton Erickson, psychiatrist and hypnotherapist, and developed a very influential school of interventions, without formal hypnosis, for the last 15-20 years. It is the change in perspective in developing new ways of thinking, believing and doing that is most valuable for any person. In contrast to traditional approaches, the focus is on the student's own competencies, strengths, possibilities and solutions. Counseling is structured and time limited. The goals are set jointly by the student and counselor, behavior-oriented, measureable, action-oriented... p. 44. Numerous specific strategies, such as highlighting exceptions, the classic "scaling question" of 1 to 10, that even surfaced in Woody Allen and other movies, the "miracle question", with the modified "dream question", the use of "instead", "coping questions", "relationship questions"... are all clearly summarised here. You also get a glimpse of applications of solution-focus to groups, parents, teacher-education and schools. This book is worth repeated study. The principles and strategies of the solution-focus perspective are not only useful for school counselors, but also for any person in daily life.


Rating:
Summary: Seeing Problems Through a New Lens
Review: Unlike most books related to the field of counseling, The Solution-Focused School Counselor addresses the biggest constraint of school counselors: TIME. While counselors have a vast assortment of theoretical approaches to incorporate into their practice, most theories assume an unlimited amount of time. Such is not the case within the fixed time that a counselor is given to handle an overwhelming number of students in each day.

Solution-focused counseling is not a compilation of techniques, but rather a philosophy of how to approach students' problems. At the heart of solution-focused counseling is the concept of exceptionality: looking for instances when the problem does not exist, and then using those instances to formulate solutions. Therefore, the counselor's goal is to turn the attention away from the negative and to focus on what is positive. By jumping right into the solution-finding process, time is not wasted on investigating all the reasons that the problem exists (particularly reasons that may be out of the student's control).

I would highly recommend The Solution-Focused School Counselor for both beginning and well-seasoned counselors. This book is direct, concise, and saturated with helpful suggestions to implement the Solution-Focused model into individual and group counseling, parent conferences, and teacher consultations.

Rating:
Summary: Seeing Problems Through a New Lens
Review: Unlike most books related to the field of counseling, The Solution-Focused School Counselor addresses the biggest constraint of school counselors: TIME. While counselors have a vast assortment of theoretical approaches to incorporate into their practice, most theories assume an unlimited amount of time. Such is not the case within the fixed time that a counselor is given to handle an overwhelming number of students in each day.

Solution-focused counseling is not a compilation of techniques, but rather a philosophy of how to approach students' problems. At the heart of solution-focused counseling is the concept of exceptionality: looking for instances when the problem does not exist, and then using those instances to formulate solutions. Therefore, the counselor's goal is to turn the attention away from the negative and to focus on what is positive. By jumping right into the solution-finding process, time is not wasted on investigating all the reasons that the problem exists (particularly reasons that may be out of the student's control).

I would highly recommend The Solution-Focused School Counselor for both beginning and well-seasoned counselors. This book is direct, concise, and saturated with helpful suggestions to implement the Solution-Focused model into individual and group counseling, parent conferences, and teacher consultations.