Collaborative Principal-School Counselor Preparation: National Standards Alignment to Improve Training between Principals and School Counselors

To meet the challenges of promoting equitable educational opportunities and improved academic achievement for all P-12 students, principals and school counselors must join forces in substantive ways. However, higher education preparation programs for principals and school counselors have not typically collaborated in efforts to prepare candidates to work together through curricula employing national standards from both fields. The purpose of this project was to align standards and competencies from National Educational Leadership Preparation (NELP) and the American School Counselor Association (ASCA) to develop units of study for preparation programs that foster effective partnerships between administrators and school counselors. Guided by Social Capital Theory, this paper outlines standards-aligned curricular units for principal preparation, developed in partnership with school counseling faculty, that are currently being implemented at one Midwestern university with the goal of promoting collaboration toward P-12 student success.