threat. Instead of exposing himself to it, he entrenches himself even more firmly behind the walls he has built up.

Several kinds of suggestions for handling such situations have been made. They fall into three main classes. The first is better screening of applicants. It may be that a more extensive program of personality testing, including projective tests, would enable selection committees to identify persons of this kind; but the questionable validity of most such tests does not make for any certainty about this approach. It is worth trying. The second type of suggestion is that some provision be made for dropping enrollees who do not adapt well to the institute situation. This would require changes in the standard procedures. It is doubtful whether there is at present enough support to warrant making such changes. The third kind of suggestion, tried on a small scale in several places, is to provide more opportunity for emotional learning or reorientation within the institute program itself. This suggestion implies that the undesirable personality traits may not be as impervious to change as they appear, and that even should they turn out to be unshakable, the person can still be helped to change his direction and to move into some educational area where they do not constitute so great a handicap as in counseling. (One institute director cited among his favorable outcomes the fact that one enrollee had taken himself out of the counseling profession entirely.) It seems probable that several institutes in the future will try out different ways of setting up self-oriented groups or individual interviews to help enrollees deal with their own feelings. As yet it must be concluded, however, that there is no real consensus about how to handle the individuals whose personalities are obstacles to counseling success. Another, less serious kind of motivational problem is commonly reported. Certain kinds of negative attitudes are generated by the institute experience itself. An enrollee in courses that require him to struggle with a bewildering succession of new ideas, and in a practicum group where his counseling skills are being questioned, analyzed and criticized may have his basic sense of adequacy severely threatened. Competitive grading systems increase this effect. A considerable amount of anxiety is natural in such a situation. How can the person best cope with it?

Resistance to change is not a monopoly of the rigid personalities considered above. All of us feel it, especially when ideas and skills of which we think we are sure are threatened. If growth is to occur, a person must overcome such resistance, and this is never easy.

Sometimes actual hostility arises even in basically nonhostile persons and they themselves are more alarmed than others at its appearance. Comments in institute reports would suggest that such hostile

attitudes were more likely to be directed against statistics and measurement courses [and those who taught them] than against any other part of the program. Perhaps some hostility toward things mathematical is dormant in many people, ready to be aroused with a minimum of stimulation.

It seems most important to recognize that these attitudes are part of the growth experience itself. Attempts to minimize them by cutting certain experiences out of the institute program would be ill advised. Counselors do need statistics, in our test-conscious world. The experience of listening to a tape-recorded interview, upsetting as it may be, is worth whatever anxiety it arouses. What institute planners can do, however, is to work out arrangements that will help staff and students deal with such feelings so that they do not get in the way of progress. We have already mentioned the use of some kinds of group meetings for this purpose. Such groups constitute a means of sharing common experience and of drawing on one another's strength.

Both

A fourth type of problem commonly reported is much simpler to deal with than are the first three enumerated. Generally, the institute programs turned out to be overly demanding for staff members, requiring much more staff time than ordinary courses. individual conferences and small group work necessitate small studentstaff ratios. To keep integrated the complex programs that characterized many institutes, it was necessary that instructors listen to each other's lectures. Regular staff members needed to hear the contributions made by consultants if they were to help students fit all the pieces into a coherent whole. Furthermore, the planning of new courses bringing together material from many sources involved much more preparation time than for regular courses.

The obvious answer to this problem is to increase the amount of staff time available in the institutes. Fortunately there are no hardand-fast rules about this in the policies with regard to institute contracts. What is required is careful planning in the light of the first year's experience. From now on it will not be necessary to rest estimates of the staff needs on our experience with summer school programs that are not really similar to the institutes' programs. As has been said before, however, it is not possible to report any one student-staff ratio that would be appropriate for all institutes. The goals, objectives, and particular program features differ so widely that much variation must be expected. One other concrete suggestion made by several directors was to increase the amount of clerical help. A fifth kind of problem reported by some institute directors is that the programs as originally set up were too demanding on the enrollees and too rigid. Perhaps because of their awareness that students

would receive stipends, planning committees tended to schedule some activity for every hour of the day. They soon found that this left too little free time for reading and studying, for conferences with staff members, and for thinking and talking about ideas. Usually it was possible to introduce a little more flexibility into the structure by arbitrarily canceling some of the scheduled activities. A more satisfactory solution for subsequent institutes would be to make the whole program a little less ambitious. For this first year there was a tendency to include too many objectives-more than one could reasonably attempt to accomplish in 6 or 8 weeks. It was a natural error. The counselors whom an institute was set up to serve probably needed all the kinds of improvement included in the plan of operation. But what should be remembered is that a person need not remedy all of his deficiencies at once. A shift to less ambitious goals and a more flexible plan of operation would not necessarily mean that less would be learned.

A sixth issue, discussed at some length by the directors in their postinstitute conference as well as in their technical reports, is the place of practicum experience in the total institute program. As explained in the previous chapter, 33 of the 50 institutes had made some provision for supervised practice in counseling. In many of these centers, staff and students were impressed with the importance of this experience and recommended that it be given a larger place in subsequent plans. Interestingly enough, in only one instance was recommendation that a practicum be set up made by the director of an institute that did not offer one. It is apparently the kind of experience one must engage in before he can see its value.

As was mentioned earlier, there is far more unanimity among directors about the desirability of counseling practice for advanced than for beginning trainees. They recommend a supervisor-enrollee ratio of 1: 5, and suggest arrangements permitting an enrollee to work with several different supervisors. Recording equipment is essential, one-way vision arrangements desirable. In settings where it is not. feasible to offer a counseling practicum because of inadequacies in enrollee preparation or scarcity of supervisors, other kinds of laboratory or prepracticum activities can be used to provide experience with tests, occupational and educational information, and case studies and records. Some kind of active practice enriches any didactic instructional program. As a group, institute directors approved of practicum experience but had some misgivings about making it available to enrollees at beginning levels of training.

Several other miscellaneous problems were mentioned in one or another of the directors' reports, having to do with planning difficulties, the shortness of time, the scarcity of secretarial help, and the like. Many directors would like to see long-term commitments, so that they could coordinate the planning for the institutes with the planning for regular sessions and summer sessions. They would also like to have institute funds made available for use during this planning stage. There is a definite limit to what can be done about such problems within the framework of the NDEA law. Some frustration is perhaps inevitable for the director who must work with both a Government agency and a training institution. The things that can be done to eliminate such problems will be done in subsequent years. But it may be helpful to mention the frustrations in order to prepare new directors to expect them.

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CHAPTER 12

Some Larger Professional Issues

'HE INSTITUTE PROGRAM raises some questions about which the whole school counseling profession must need be concerned. The first of these is the problem of how guidance services in private schools can best be improved. The institutes were designed for service to all the schools, although the NDEA law does not permit the payment of stipends to private school counselors attending the institutes. Places in each institute were reserved for private school workers, and efforts were made to inform all schools in each area served of their availability. The results, as indicated in table 3, show plainly that this attempt to get private school counselors into the program was almost completely unsuccessful. Since about 14 percent of American high school students are attending nonpublic schools, we cannot ignore this need that was not met by the institute program, at least during its first summer. Among those responsible for planning there has been considerable discussion of this problem, but as yet no solution has emerged.

The second professional problem is the integration of the institute program with regular ongoing programs of counselor training and certification. The offering of complete programs of counselor education is recognized by the Office of Education as a continuing institutional responsibility. The institutes program is to be viewed as providing only a part of the total professional preparation of secondary school counselors. As explained in chapter 2, here as in other areas of public education, only a small fraction of all counselor education is financed by Federal funds. It is not remotely possible, even if it were advisable, that federally supported institutes will ever carry the full burden of counselor education. The Policies and Procedures Manual, published in September 1959, specifically makes this point clear.

In previous chapters we have called attention to positive effects of institutes on regular training programs. Let us look now at some of the possible negative effects. The most immediately obvious one