School Counselors Collaborating for Student Success. ERIC Digest

Living in a world-class society with information-age technology challenges American educators to improve their communication and collaboration skills. Recent discussions concerning the school counselor's role in education emphasized the need to achieve a clearer understanding of this role in educational reform, and a desire to improve counselor communication and collaboration within the school and in the community. Effective collaboration is built on the strong personal characteristics of the collaborator, a clearly defined system, and administrative support for change within the organization. Organizations which encourage collaboration will demonstrate evidence of: shared decision-making; the encouragement of multi-disciplinary efforts; leaders ready to restructure for change; and other features. Collaboration yields many benefits, including reduced competition for diminishing resources, elimination of service duplication, and diversified problem-solving. With stiffer competition and growing student needs, the only way to keep up with the diminishing resources and increasing demands is to collaborate with other educators in comprehensive health reform, to develop an integrated services model at the local school site, and to reach out into the community with school-to-work transitions linkages with business and industry. School counselors now have a chance to become proactively involved in the education reform taking place across the United States. (RJM)