51-6 The Perspectives of Novice School Counselors in Taiwan Elementary and Secondary Schools for Pre-service Training Programs
| Yu-Hsien Sung | Pei-San Lee | Sheng-Chieh Chang |
| National Sun Yat-sen University | National Taipei University of Education | |
After Taiwan’s Ministry of Education enacted “Student Guidance and Counseling Act” in 2014, thousands of novice school counselors are recruited to provide counseling services in elementary schools and secondary schools. Based on this act, school authorities must also arrange at least 40 hours pre-service basic professional training programs for novice school counselors to enhance their professional counseling capacity and even to help them realize the job descriptions of school guidance work in advance. However, there are no any empirical studies regarding this pre-service basic professional training programs until now. Some studies indicate that if the effectiveness and quality of professional training programs want to be improved, the perspectives and opinions of the participants for the professional training programs need to be explored. Therefore, to explore the effectiveness of the training programs and to provide constructive suggestions for the further training programs, this study recruits the main participants of the training programs - 113 novice school counselors to participate in the quantitative survey and the qualitative interview. The purpose of this study is to explore satisfactions, needs, and participating experiences of these novice school counselors for the training programs based on the reaction level of Four Level Evaluation Model (Kirkpatrick & Kirkpatrick, 2006). The data is collected by self-report questionnaire and semi-structured interview, and then these collected data is analyzed by Rasch PCM Model, good-of-fit test, and constant analysis. The results indicate that these novice school counselors feel dissatisfied with some aspects of the training programs which do not meet their needs. For instances, they feel dissatisfied with the time planning of the training programs, topics of courses among the training programs, teaching methods of courses among the training programs, and so on. As a result, their expectation for this training programs are as below. First, they expect that these courses among the training programs should be divided into compulsory courses and elective courses according to different positions of participants, and this categorization not only can assist the novice school counselors to establish their common professional capability but also assist them to establish the professional capability according to their different positions. Second, they expect that the organizer needs to survey the participants’ training needy and then plans the training programs. Third, they think that the best period to hold the training program is summer vacation. Fourth, they think that, in order to enhance the effectiveness of the training program, the organizer needs to adopt some appropriate teaching methods for these novice school counselors, such as case method, practical discussion, and so on. Fifth, they expect that the organizer should establish evaluation mechanism to evaluate the effectiveness of the courses among the training program. Although the above-mentioned expectations are deserved consideration, overall, these novice school counselors still agree with the values of the training programs. For instances, they agree that the training programs can assist them to understand the work contents of school counseling, to clarify their role definition, and to prepare well basic professional skills for school counseling, thereby enhancing their professional identification and building their professional images. In addition, this study also proposes the two-track training and blended learning models for promoting novice school counselors’ qualities and abilities. Most importantly, this study reorganizes the course structures of the training programs. Based on the results of this study, it is expected that the effectiveness and appropriateness of the training programs can be improved to support the development of professional capability of novice school counselors.
Keywords
Needs assessment, novice school counselors, pre-service training programs, satisfaction.
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