School Counseling: Foundations and Contemporary Issues

The School Counseling and School Social Work Treatment Planner provides all the elements necessary to quickly and easily develop formal treatment plans that satisfy the demands of HMOs, managed care companies, third-party payers, and state and federal review agencies.

"This book will aid adults who seek to be more effective in their interactions with youth, but even more important, it offers a framework to help school personnel reconnect to the values and purposes that brought them into education and keep their interactions with children consistently grounded in their best intentions."
William Madsen, Training Coordinator
Family Institute of Cambridge

"What you are about to read represents an ingenious application of narrative ideas to work in schools. While many people use these ideas, this book develops them in novel and interesting ways. This is some of the most creative and exciting work I have seen in this field."
Jeffrey Zimmerman, Director
Bay Area Family Therapy Training Associates

With caseloads often exceeding 500 students, counselors cannot afford to spend countless hours on traditional approaches to individual problems. Solution-Focused Brief Counseling (SFBC) offers counselors an effective approach that leads to rapid, observable change in students.

Brief Counseling That Works, Second Edition, combines step-by-step instructions with vivid case examples to provide a comprehensive and practical overview of the fundamental principles of SFBC. Author Gerald B. Sklare has extensively revised this second edition to include new adaptations of solution-focused methods, more opportunities to practice the SFBC model, and an expanded discussion of ways school administrators can use SFBC.

This essential resource for counselors will also be helpful to teachers and school administrators who advise elementary and secondary students, as well as psychologists and social workers who work with youth both in and out of the school setting.

Should I go to graduate school? How do I choose where to apply? Are my grades and accomplishments good enough to get in? Who should I ask to write recommendation letters for me, and how should I approach these people? How do I write my "personal statement?" When will I hear my fate, and how should I make my final decision? These are just a few of the many questions to which this well-researched, thorough, and extremely user-friendly book offers answers. Students who are contemplating graduate training in psychology, counseling, and related fields are often apprehensive and confused about applying to graduate school, but this book takes the guesswork and anxiety out of the process.

The tone and features (such as the Q&A format, timeline for application-related tasks and activities, and special advice for special populations) that made the first edition so successful, eliciting hundreds of thank-you notes and e-mail messages to the author, are just as evident in this new edition. The book has been thoroughly updated to include coverage of new topics such as use of the internet and e-mail, as well as changing trends in the professions. The most obvious difference is that the book is now significantly shorter as a result of meticulous rewriting, making it even easier to use.

There have been attempts since the publication of the first edition to copy the format of this book, but none of the others have successfully duplicated the depth of research-based advice and the supportive style that make this book the guide of choice for thousands of graduate-school bound students and their advisors.