ADVOCATE: A Legislative Advocacy Model for Counseling Students

In the classroom, master’s students learn that advocacy is a central component of the counseling profession and counselor identity, whereas doctoral students train to be advocacy leaders. While counselor educators often infuse advocacy into the classroom through assignments and use current advocacy models present in the literature, we found a need for a practical model specifically for legislative advocacy to implement with counseling graduate students outside of the classroom. The authors pulled from their collective experience of meeting with state legislators at the state Capitol to create the ADVOCATE Model, a practical, step-by-step guide to legislative advocacy. The authors share the details of their model and discuss implications and recommendations for counselor educators and students.

Embracing School Counselors’ Situatedness: Data-Based Decision Making as Fulfillment of a Complex Identity

Since at least the 1930s, school counselors have used data to inform school counseling programming. However, the evolving complexity of school counselors’ identity calls for an updated understanding of the use of data. We offer an expanded definition of data-based decision making that reflects the purpose of using data in educational settings and an appreciation of the complexity of the school counselor identity. We discuss implications for applying the data-based decision-making process using a multifaceted school counselor identity lens to support students’ success.

School Counselors and Unified Educator–Counselor Identity: A Data-Informed Approach to Suicide Prevention

School counselors are vital in crisis prevention and intervention. In this article, we discuss the unified educator–counselor identity as it informs the suicide prevention work of school counselors, illustrated with a data-based case example from a quantitative study based in one high school. This case example includes a decision tree to show how school counselors can use data to understand the suicide prevention and intervention needs of a diverse student body in their own schools.

Educator–Counselor: A Nondual Identity for School Counselors

In this special issue, the editors and each team of contributing authors offer examples of how a combined identity as educator–counselor can affect the various roles and responsibilities associated with school counseling. The suggestion that school counselor identity is always both educator and counselor is neither trivial nor a semantic distinction. Reshaping the narrative to suggest that school counselors are situated as educators who are oriented by counseling has the potential to mitigate much of the role ambiguity that has persisted in the profession for decades and, more important, has the potential to sharpen practice and contribute to greater student and schoolwide outcomes.

The Hand of Professional School Counseling Meets the Glove of Restorative Practices

To introduce restorative practices (RP) to the school counseling literature, the authors explicate the hand in glove fit between the RP model for schools and school counselor identity and scope of practice. Drawing from the American School Counselor Association’s (ASCA) National Model, ASCA’s Ethical Standards for School Counselors, multitiered systems of support (MTSS), and the school counseling literature, the authors make the case for the profession of school counseling to take up RP and integrate the model into school counseling research, theory, and practice.