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ther graduate training. They became aware of their limitations and realized what complete preparation for counseling would entail. Thus for many the institute was just the beginning of a planned program leading to a master's degree, State certification, or some other tangible evidence of full professional status.

Many enrollees joined professional organizations on the national or the State level, or both. A sense of professional identity as a counselor developed. The person formed a new image of himself and his role, an image that could be distinguished from that of the teacher or of the school administrator. At least one State guidance association was revitalized as a result of the interest the enrollees developed.

There were some other indirect effects that seemed to many institute directors to be important. Guidance took on a new and more respected meaning in the schools and in the communities from which enrollees came. High school principals assigned counselors to halftime counseling duties in place of the period or two a day they had previously been allowed for it. Physical facilities and administrative arrangements were improved. Practicum centers where high school students were invited to come for counseling during the summer made parents as well as teachers and school administrators aware of the part counseling might play in the efforts of boys and girls to formulate good plans for their lives. Newspaper stories in the hundreds of towns and cities from which individual enrollees came brought guidance to the attention of citizens who had never thought about it before. While it would be hard to assess in any accurate way this indirect impact of the institute program on attitudes in school and community, there are many indications that it was an important outcome. Another indirect effect was on training institutions and their ongoing programs for training counselors. In many instances persons from different university departments and from State offices of education cooperated in a way they had not considered possible before. Such cooperation tends to be maintained. Some of the techniques that worked best in institute classes are applicable to all classes in which the same subject matter is taught. The desire for further training on the part of enrollees will almost certainly increase the demand for summer session courses, apart from the institute program. There is some indication that even in 1959 the publicity the institutes received stimulated an unusual number of teachers to enroll voluntarily in guidance courses offered in the regular summer programs. While we cannot assess this outcome with any accuracy, it may well rank with the others in long-range significance.

PART IV. LOOKING TOWARD THE FUTURE

CHAPTER 11

Problems and Issues in Institute Operation

THE

'HE DIRECTORS AND FACULTY MEMBERS of short-term institutes were confronted during the first season of the program with certain persistent problems. The identification of these difficulties and the thinking that was done about them should prepare later faculties to handle them in the most satisfactory way possible. In many cases, specific suggestions can be made.

The first of these problems is the wide variation in ability, background, and temperament that turned out to be present even in groups that were expected to be homogeneous. As has been explained in chapter 8, special efforts were made to select, for any one institute, enrollees who would not be too different from one another in level of training. Courses were pitched at what the instructors thought would be an appropriate difficulty level for the group. But again and again the reports mention that the enrollees were far less alike than had been expected. For instance, even in a group consisting entirely of counselors with 5 to 10 years of experience, all of whom reported from 10 to 20 semester hours of previous course work in guidance, there would be marked individual differences.

In places where tests were given at the beginning of the institute, the extent of this range of individual differences could be well documented. In one institute, a high level test of academic aptitude produced a distribution of scores ranging from the 5th to the 95th percentile on norms for graduate students. Such a difference in the ability to understand abstract ideas and concepts is something an instructor cannot ignore. The student at the 5th-percentile point is completely lost when he grapples with material which the 95th-percentile student grasps with ease.

Differences in just what kinds of things individual students already knew also complicated the picture. Many training programs and State certification plans allow a good deal of latitude for qualifying training. It may be required, for example, that the person have on his record 15 graduate semester hours chosen from a list of areas

like the following: Principles of Guidance, Analysis of the Individual, Occupational Information, Counseling Techniques, Organization and Administration of Guidance Programs, Supervised Experience, Statistics, Group Guidance. In such a program it is quite possible for a person to become a certified counselor without ever having taken any statistics or participated in any supervised practicum experience. As has been said in an earlier chapter, these were the areas most often found to be deficient in institute enrollees, but many other gaps also showed up. Some had missed all contact with developmental psychology; some knew nothing about occupational and educational information; some had missed entirely the sociological aspects of guidance. Such gaps are especially likely to occur in the programs of persons whose professional education has been carried on in summer school sessions spread over a considerable period of time.

Add to these differences in general academic ability and in previous preparation the inevitable differences in temperament and values, and a considerable amount of diversity results. As school people who have struggled with this problem on all educational levels have found again and again, really homogeneous grouping is impossible. One can decrease the range of differences in a group but can never abolish it.

Several of the 1959 summer institutes tried to work out methods for adapting instruction to individual differences. One method that was used in a few places, ordinarily not feasible for a limited enrollment group organized as the institutes were, was to allow for some choice of courses. Thus one person, unfamiliar with measurement theory, could acquire this necessary knowledge while another was studying the psychology of the gifted. Another way of dealing with variations in academic ability and knowledge was to organize different sections of the same course, in measurement and statistics, for example, another technique, somewhat easier to incorporate in the basic institute plan, was to arrange for individual reading and conference sessions through which enrollees could be helped to fill in their own particular gaps.

In view of the situation that was encountered during the first summer, it seems desirable to build some provisions for flexible grouping or individual study into the plans of institutes. It is perhaps possible to improve selection procedures so that enrollees in any one institute are more alike than they were in the 1959 sessions, but it seems likely that there will always be differences that must be considered if the objectives of the program are to be achieved.

The second topic that has come up for much consideration following the 1959 institutes is enrollee motivation. Considered as a whole, this was certainly no problem. One of the major strengths of this educational undertaking was the high level of enthusiasm and esprit de corps that was attained. Institute directors identified many reasons the constructive motives of many sorts that had led individuals to apply for the training in the first place; the selection procedures that allowed each person to feel that he was an important individual; the group experience, the idealism and sense of mission that each felt as a part of a significant national undertaking; and the enthusiasm and special effort that director and instructors put into the program. The unusually high level of motivation was an aspect of the institutes most commonly noted by staff and by enrollees in their appraisals.

However, there were some exceptions. As explained before, in almost every group there were a few persons who were unhappy about the whole situation, and in some places there were enough of them to pose a real problem. One possible reason for this was the stipend provision of the program, which had been of some concern at the outset. Would teachers apply simply in order to support themselves and their families throughout the summer as easily and painlessly as possible? It seems quite possible that this did happen in a few cases and that a person expecting to enjoy a pleasant vacation in the halls of knowledge was not able to reorient himself to the strenuous demands the situation placed upon him. There were among institute directors some few who recommended that stipends be drastically reduced in order to prevent such occurrences, but they were an extreme minority. In general, the motivational problems arising from the question of stipends were much less troublesome than anticipated.

This may have been because the selection procedures used in many places required from the applicant some statement of his motives in applying. From such expressions of purpose, a distinction can usually be made between persons who really desire the training and those who do not. Naturally it can never be 100 percent accurate, but it works fairly well. Other selection procedures, such as recommendations and personal interviews, also helped to screen out the stipend seekers.

A more troublesome kind of case was the individual whose whole personality seemed unsuited to counseling. In a number of instances it was found that certain enrollees, even some with a considerable amount of previous experience and training, were too rigid, inflexible, and defensive to gain anything from the institute experience. To such a person, the emphasis on growth and change constitutes a severe

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