Engaging Schools Fostering High School Students' Motivation to Learn (2004) / Chapter Skim
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6. Meeting Students' Nonacademic Needs
6. Meeting Students' Nonacademic Needs
Pages 145-167
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From page 145... ...
6 Meeting Stuclents' Nonacaclemic Neecls Students who come to school hungry, tired, chronically ill, depressed, or preoccupied by family problems cannot engage fully in the academic curriculum. Pregnancy and drug and alcohol addiction can also interfere with attention to schoolwork.
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From page 146... ...
Special education provides specific, individualized, or small-group services to students who qualify, and experts or packaged programs are brought in to address issues such as pregnancy prevention and alcohol and drug abuse. School nurses and occasionally doctors may attend to students' physical health on site, or students may be referred to community clinics for physical as well as mental health problems.
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From page 147... ...
. When counselors do engage with students in any form of career planning, they typically use the trait and factor approach, in which counselors help students uncover their own preferences and personality traits (often through interest and personality inventories)
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From page 148... ...
Resources in guidance counseling are so limited that few students and counselors get to know each other well. The dominant approaches to career and academic counseling fail to offer students any active role in learning about or weighing postsecondary education and employment options.
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From page 149... ...
In another review, Whiston and Sexton (1998) examined outcomes from several studies of both academic and personal counseling and found positive effects on student achievement, career planning, and social skills.
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From page 150... ...
Even those who are able to carve out time to provide mental health services tend to focus on crisis intervention and not on individual or group work (Borders and Drury, 1992; Keys and Bemak, 19971. Although estimates vary depending on the definition used, it is clear that emotional difficulties and mental health problems are common among students whose academic performance is poor and who drop out of school, suggesting the importance of addressing emotional problems in any effort to increase student academic engagement (Adelman and Taylor, 1998; Roeser, Eccles, and Strobel, 19981.
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From page 151... ...
Positive mental health in seventh grade predicted adolescents' academic performance in eighth grade, suggesting a reciprocal relationship between mental health and academic engagement. Many mental health providers and policy analysts agree that young people with mental health problems are inadequately served.
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From page 152... ...
Most mental health services in schools are currently limited to students in special education (Duchnowski, 1994) , but even many students who have been diagnosed to have special needs do not receive appropriate services.
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From page 153... ...
The disadvantage is that referral to outside agencies makes it difficult to coordinate mental health personnel with professionals, including teachers, who see adolescents in school. To address these problems, some schools have hired school social workers or school psychologists specifically to create bridges between schools and community-based organizations.
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From page 154... ...
, and without greater understanding about how well either school- or community-based services work in a widely diverse range of communities and local circumstances,7 we believe that using community-based services with liaisons such as school social workers seems a promising way to meet the mental health needs of students without diluting the educational focus of schools. Other Support Services High school students have a significant array of problems and conditions, in addition to mental health problems, that undermine their academic engagement.
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From page 155... ...
Weaknesses of Traditional Approaches Although the need for support services remains widely acknowledged, and despite some evidence that they can have positive effects on student engagement, the current status of students' academic and nonacademic well-being persuades us that conventional approaches to providing these services are not achieving their purposes. First, most available services are not good matches with the needs of high school students, especially low-income students, no matter where the services are located.
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From page 156... ...
Distinguishing effective from ineffective services, let alone creating effective services where none exist, is not something that educators are likely to have the expertise to do; they certainly lack the funding. Although a few energetic school leaders have been successful in creating ad hoc relations with communitybased organizations, they may be making their improvements at the expense of other schools with less aggressive or ingenious principals.
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From page 157... ...
Second, because students as learners cannot be divorced from students as people with social-emotional, physical, and mental health needs, strict distinctions among the roles of school personnel in all of their relations to students do not make sense. We recommend restructuring the roles of all school personnel, eliminating the notion that only counselors, social workers, and nurses are responsible for identifying and addressing students' nonacademic needs.
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From page 158... ...
The negative effects of an unsupportive school climate are more likely to be exacerbated than overcome when high-stakes tests are imposed by districts or states without the resources that would help students meet the new standards. The day-to-day experience of failure in classrooms and low expectations conveyed by teachers cannot be overcome by counseling or pull-out programs designed to make students fee!
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From page 159... ...
We conclude, therefore, that it is inadequate merely to add to the array of services offered at or near high schools, although these services may be needed and may bring benefits. Addressing the nonacademic barriers to student engagement requires reforming high schools themselves as well as improving and strengthening services designed to meet individual needs.
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From page 160... ...
Ongoing support for people in mentoring roles is essential, as is time to take on these additional responsibilities. Specialized staff such as counselors, social workers, and nurses can provide training and support for the adults who serve as advocates, in addition to providing specialized services to students.
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From page 161... ...
, and ongoing training by teams of district employees (e.g., counselors, social workers, parent liaisons, school improvement facilitators) in identifying students who need services, in making appropriate referrals, and in handling troubled and troubling students.
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From page 162... ...
Another promising effort in reconceptualizing the roles of counselors is the National School Counselor Training Initiative, which envisions moving counselors away from one-on-one (or small group) counseling to participating in more central ways in academic reforms designed to enhance achievement.l2 Counselors become diagnosticians and reformers, responsible for collecting information about substandard performance, diagnosing problems, and working with teachers to develop solutions that may involve changes in a teacher's instructional practices and treatment of students.
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From page 163... ...
In both Puente and the National School Counselor Training Initiative, academic counselors are central to school changes rather than peripheral service providers. They arrange a wide variety of activities and their work is closely connected to that of teachers.
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From page 164... ...
Some schools have used school social workers or school psychologists in a caseworker role to keep track of students with serious nonacademic needs and create bridges to community services. Technology also offers some opportunities to create databases that can be used to collect information on individual students from various sources and to facilitate communication among individuals who care for students' different needs.
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From page 165... ...
The Coalition also reports on 18 evaluations which, taken together, found that participation in community school activities was associated with varying combinations of improved grades in school courses and/or scores in proficiency testing; improved attendance; reduced behavioral or discipline problems and/or suspensions; greater classroom cooperation, completion of homework and assignments, and adherence to school rules and positive attitude; and increased access to physical and mental health services and preventive care. The Coalition concluded that the community school approach achieves improved student performance when it builds on sufficiently high quality teaching and curriculum to meet the needs of young people when they are ready to learn (Blank, Melaville, and Shah, 20031.
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From page 166... ...
Their supporters hope they will "provide a safety net for children who are at high risk for depression, substance abuse, early sexual activity, teenage pregnancy, and violence," and can thereby promote long-term academic success.13 Although after-school programs vary enormously, most seem to provide a variety of activities and experiences that provide positive alternatives to just hanging out with peers, including sports and recreation, dance, computer work, school-based enterprises, and school-related tutoring (including practice on high-stakes exams such as exit exams)
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From page 167... ...
Coordination among those who are directly involved in the education and life of any particular student is essential, and specialists such as counselors, social workers, and nurses need to be well connected to teachers and administrators, providing training and guidance and assisting them in creating environments that support positive development. The school reforms that we recommend as particularly promising represent substantial departures from conventional practices.
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