Friday, September 9, 2016

Blog 2


            I really enjoyed the article by Donna Gibson this week about using genograms in career counseling.  As I mentioned in my discussion post, I really feel like I would have benefited from some career counseling in my pre-college years.  It seems like such a good idea to start slowly planting the seed of thinking about a career when these children are so young, and in such a fun way.  I have always liked doing projects like this where you interview family members and get everyone involved.  I have also found that family members really enjoy being a part of these projects.  A few weeks ago during summer 3 semester, I took a class called whose school is it anyways?  In this class we had to do a family genogram on our family’s education patterns.  My dad’s side of the family was hard to track as they are all over the place, but my mom and step dad’s sides were very interesting.  And everyone involved was very excited about sharing stories and sending pictures to be added into the slideshow.  I think having children start on a small scale at a young age, and then grow their tree and add on to it as they age, it will get them thinking and planning.

            The article I found for Discussion 2, “Assisting High School Students with Career Indecision Using a Shortened Form of the Career Construction Interview” was very interesting also.  It talked about a research study where 9 high school juniors who scored low during the screening process in career concern and curiosity became more aware of the decision they will have to make by asking three specific questions.  After the interview, they started to think about what career they would like, started doing activities that would get them more information about the career they are interested in, and obtaining information from books or websites on these careers.  The study would be hard to replicate in most schools due to the fact that the screening process was time consuming, and most schools do not have the proper student to counselor ratio to front something like this.  However, I think that even if this was done without the screening process and maybe as a fun project or something, high school students would start thinking about it before they head to college undecided.  Or maybe that could be the screening process in general.  The only thing that was even close to this for me was our senior project.  We had to shadow someone and do a big project on it.  There was no preface to it that we had to be overly interested in the career or anything.  I ended up shadowing my step-dad’s sister who was the principal at a high school in Berks county.  I actually found her job very interesting but I never thought it was what I was interested in before or after the project, which is a shame.  Needless to say, my overall high school and undergrad experience made me a huge proponent for more career counseling in schools!

References

Rehfuss, M.C. & Sickinger, P.H.  (2016).  Assisting high school students with career indecision using a shortened form    
          of the career construction interview.  Journal of School Counseling, 13(6), 1-23.
Brown, D.  (2016).  Career information, career counseling, and career development.  Boston, MA: Pearson.
Gibson, D.M.  (2005).  The use of genograms in career counseling with elementary, middle, and high school 
          students.  The Career Development Quarterly, 53, 353-362.

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