Is it Not Now? : School Counselors’ Training in Tanzania Secondary Schools

Abstract

Counseling is currently becoming a necessary service for  school learners in the developing world, this is due to fact that, the challenges facing learners in their learning process results into both internalizing and externalizing problems which affect student’s learning in terms of social, psychology and academic. This paper explores the status of school counselor’s training, knowledge and skills in Tanzania secondary schools. It attempt to assess school counselor’s perception towards the existing school counseling services and the degree of readiness to attend a counseling training in order to improve their counseling skills. The sample for the study included 62 school counselors from 16 secondary schools in Dar es salaam and the data were collected through questionnaires and interviews. The findings indicate that, there is less training among school counselors in the studied secondary schools. It was also noted that, though some school counselors attended some trainings, their knowledge, skills and awareness to school counseling principles is very limited. However, school counselors’ perception towards counseling services in schools is good and their degree of readiness to attend counseling training is positive (M=1.39, SD= 0.554). It was therefore concluded that school counseling services need to be enhanced through provision of school counseling trainings to teachers who are appointed to serve as school counselors in various secondary schools. With the support from these findings, it is recommended that, seminars and workshops for raising awareness as well as long term trainings are important in order to make school counseling services effective. Therefore, future research can also observe the extent to which the counseling component is taught in teacher colleges and universities so as to test the rationale for appointing teachers to work as school counselors even without any specified training on counseling.

Key words: School counselor, Training, Perception, Knowledge