Describes "A World of Difference," a camp-counselor training project designed to help youth appreciate racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity. Discusses ways and importance of recruiting minority staff. Describes how training helps counselors to become comfortable with diversity, and to initiate education activities themselves. Describes…

Compared effects of a training workshop on mental health professionals' (N=21) attitudes toward homosexuality and counseling behavior with effects of no intervention on comparison counselor trainee college students (N=31). Found treated subjects improved significantly more than comparison subjects on all measures of homosexual/lesbian counseling…

Investigates the attitudes of 91 human service counseling students toward working with an inner-city gang member. Results reveal qualitative differences in students' self-perceived ability to work with this client. Presents implications for human service education and training. (MKA)

This study aimed to advance understanding of how doctoral students perceive postmodernism's influence in the field of Marriage and Family Therapy (MFT). Focus group interviews were utilized to investigate perceptions of MFT doctoral students. Findings suggest participants are attracted to postmodern tenets but also feel liberation and confusion…

A growing body of creative curricular materials, intended to guide and support the multicultural training of psychologists, has been developed. To enhance these materials, a preliminary evaluation of a multicultural program was conducted in an attempt to understand how students develop into culturally competent clinicians, particularly in terms of…

The way in which professional counselors perceive or conceptualize clients and their presenting issues constitutes an outward expression of the counselors' philosophy, training and world view. These perceptions and conceptualizations directly or indirectly affect assessment, therapeutic methodology, and even client outcomes. This article presents…

One set of counselor behaviors that has been highly investigated over recent years has been the social influence behaviors. Despite the considerable research interest in social influence theory as it relates to counseling, there has been little attention to the demonstration of the presence or absence of such behavioral skills as expertness,…

Many factors, including changes in the family, drug abuse, high technology, crime, population shifts, and television are changing schools. These forces have already had an impact on the counselor's job or will have an impact in the future. Counselors should be prepared for these social changes and manage them better than their predecessors in the…

The law has mandated the inclusion of handicapped children in all appropriate programs of public education, including school counseling programs. A lack of preparation in the area of special education on the part of the school counselor could decrease the effectiveness of school counseling for handicapped students. A study was conducted to survey…

Because most counselors have experienced a significant amount of success, they often have difficulty understanding the impact of test scores on persons who do not perform well. Counselor educators must develop experiential awareness in an area normally outside the realm of their students. To provide such an experience, 25 counselor trainees took…

This paper focuses on burnout in the helping professions and outlines steps that can be taken during counselor training to eliminate or reduce burnout. A discussion of the way in which the internal system of the counselor trainee can provoke burnout concentrates on issues of needs, expectations, and professional philosophy. Three burnout…

This paper describes a model training program designed to prepare high school guidance counselors to meet the challenge of expanding women's career options. In particular, it addresses the role which counselors may play in encouraging young women to acquire adequate mathematical preparation during their high school years. The first half of the…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the actual and ideal roles of counselors as perceived by Wisconsin secondary school counselors and teacher counselors and to compare them with a counselor role model based on a consensus of Wisconsin counselor educators. An extensive review of the literature on counselor role determination and…

Factors limiting the effectiveness of school counseling functions include discrepancies between school counselor training and practice, lack of understanding of school counseling roles and functions, school counselor professional isolation, and the poor professional attitude of some school counselors. (MM)

Empathy has been defined as the single most important dimension in establishing a counseling relationship. This paper describes a study that compares counselor trainees' and a general population of African American males' empathy ratings of racially mixed videotaped counseling sessions. The report addresses the following questions: "Do…