Counseling— A Friend to Placement

The policy declaring placement as top priority, accompanied by a responsive focus of staff and budget resources, has decreased the availability of counseling services to applicants contacting the employment service. Many people, if they are to be assisted in finding and keeping jobs, need the help given by professional employment service counselors. Management and program planners need an accountability rate of the importance of counseling services in the accomplishment of the placement priority. A study, covering two years of employment activities, was conducted in the Utah agency to gain insight into the question. The statistical material studied concerned available applicants, number placed, number counseled, and counseled applicants placed. The data indicated that counseled applicants have better than twice the chance of being placed on a job than uncounseled applicants. Thus, in Utah, counseling services have a positive influence in the job placement of an applicant.     

Timeout: guidelines for its selection and use

This article focuses on the use of “timeout” as a classroom behavior modification technique, examining whether or not the counselor should suggest its use in a given situation and how to insure its maximal effectiveness once it has been chosen as an appropriate procedure. The authors present some questions to be considered when deciding whether or not to use timeout and give guidelines for its best use. The questions and guidelines are presented in a flow chart format in order to facilitate easy and quick use by practitioners.     

Case Studies in the Family Treatment of Drug Abuse

This article, with case illustrations, attempts to demonstrate that drug-abuse behavior can be understood more clearly in the light of family loyalties and unresolved family crises than from the perspective that drug abusers are social deviates.1 Drug abuse is viewed as symptomatic, as a signal that both drug abuser and his or her family are having difficulty in getting past a particular stage in the natural unfolding life cycle of a family. Treatment of drug abuse is seen primarily as helping the family to become "unstuck," thereby freeing the individual's and family's energy for the task of self-development and growth rather than expending it to maintain rigid patterns of interaction in an attempt to prevent change.     

PPS director: administrator or counselor educator?

What is the primary role of the director of pupil personnel services? Is he a general administrator or a counselor educator? The author of this article feels that there is a great need for more directors who are oriented toward counselor education, and he focuses on three areas in which this type of director can have a great impact on school counseling.     

The counselor-consultant and the effeminate boy

This article presents a case study of an effeminate boy in an elementary school. Rather than counseling the boy directly, the counselor consulted the child's teachers regarding strategies for change. Following experimental procedures, significant changes were recorded in behavior and attitude as measured by pre- and post-experimental measures: playground behavior, lunchroom behavior, physical education activities, class sociogram, and a Semantic Differential. The case demonstrates how deviant children, such as this effeminate boy, can be aided through consultation with teachers and through learning experiences within the regular school program.     

Situational group counseling with disadvantaged youth

Male adolescents in a job training program for culturally disadvantaged youngsters were provided with 14 weeks of on-the-job situational group counseling (SGC) to supplement more conventional casework approaches. Interdisciplinary teams of group leaders met with work-training crews for discussions designed to facilitate exploration of issues relevant to the present life situations of the trainees. Trainees who met twice weekly showed greater improvement in job performance and in overall adjustment than did those meeting once per week, while control subjects who did not receive counseling showed less gain than either of the counseled groups.