Strengths-based school counseling: introduction to the special issue

Two major and mutually supportive paradigm shifts are impacting school counseling practice in the 21st century. The first shift, which is already well underway, emanates from within our discipline. The ASCA National Model® (American School Counselor Association, 2005) involves a movement away from providing discrete counseling services to a small proportion of K-12 students and toward providing outcomes-oriented, comprehensive, developmental counseling programs to impact the academic, career, and personal/social development of all students. Like the Comprehensive Developmental Guidance Program (Gysbers & Henderson, 2000) movement begun in the 1970s, it repositions the school counselor away from an ancillary role in helping a few students to an integral role in education. In addition to managing a comprehensive program that delivers a collaborative guidance curriculum, individual student planning, and responsive services to all students, the school counselor functions as an agent of systemic change who engages in leadership, advocacy, collaboration, and teaming with other professionals. Although some manifestations of the second shift are evident within the counseling field in general (Myers, Sweeney, & Witmer, 2000; Smith, 2006) and school counseling in particular (Amatea, Smith- Adcock, & Villares, 2006; Galassi & Akos, 2007), much of the impetus for this shift emanates from service and research areas outside our discipline, including developmental psychology (Lerner, 1986), positive psychology (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000), positive youth development (Benson, 1997), resiliency (Werner & Smith, 1992), social development (Catalano & Hawkins, 1996), and social work (Saleebey, 1997). The shift involves a movement away from a primary emphasis on pathology and deficits that impede development in a small percentage of students to a primary focus on personal strengths and environments that facilitate positive development for all students. Elsewhere (Galassi & Akos, 2007) we have referred to this newer emphasis as Strengths-Based School Counseling and stated that it is characterized by six major conceptual or organizing principles: * Promote cultural and context-based development for all students * Promote evidence-based individual student strengths * Promote evidence-based strengths-enhancing environments * Emphasize strengths promotion over problem reduction and problem prevention * Emphasize evidence-based interventions and practice * Emphasize promotion-oriented developmental advocacy at the school level. Not only are the two paradigm shifts compatible, but it is difficult to imagine school counselors impacting development for all students without operating from a strengths-based perspective. ASCA (2005) has clearly recognized that traditional deficitreduction emphases in school counseling reach only a small percentage of K-12 students. As such, the focus of this special issue is illustrating components of comprehensive school counseling programs in the 21st century being implemented from a strengthsbased perspective. The articles in this issue are organized into two complementary sections that should be familiar to the readers of Professional School Counseling. The first six articles are feature articles. Starting with Dennis Saleebey, who pioneered the application of a strengths-based perspective in social work, these articles are more conceptual in emphasis and focus primarily on more fully illustrating one or more of the strengths-based principles. …