This is an update on the educational counseling need or practice that is of higher relevance for me. I have been interested in how the political and global events, such as wars, disasters, refugee streams and massive migration affected the learning environment. It is relevant to the upperclassmen much more, than it seems. How do counselors deal with such global events and help the student sto navigate their possible future in such unpredictable times. A study was carried out to see how educational counselors work during the COVID 19 pandemic. The study was carried out among the Israeli school counselors in schools, from which many students had dropped out. They had to deal with transition to exclusively systematic work instead of individual work with students and with lots of stress. 

Counselors had to redefine the nature and the goals of their work in order to adapt to the current circumstances. But most of them agreed that the nature of the work did not change, only the methods did. The ultimate goal remained the well-being of the individual student.

However, the work became much harder and new issues emerged. The research findings showed that, similar to the survey held during the pandemic in the United States, school counselors reported they did not manage to put the same effort into direct work with students on social-emotional issues, and they were often compelled to meet logistic or administrative needs. But the counselors participating at that study did not feel too overwhelmed and shifted their focus. They were actually grateful for the systematic work. Most of them didn’t feel that the lack of direct contact with students was detrimental to their work, as they made a transition to guiding teachers on how to maintain contact with all students, particularly students at risk. Even though the veteran counselors felt that lack of touch with the students resulted in the lack of efficacy, the majority argued that shift to the systematic approach helped them to help students to solve their issues.

It seems that because of the similarity and global scale of the crisis, the systematic approach was more useful because it allowed to make universally useful decisions.

References 

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1330259.pdf