Unfortunately, the coronavirus pandemic is not over as I write, but Australia has been quite successful in containing its spread, albeit with much economic pain. We look forward to a better year in 2021. We have a diverse offering again in this issue, with three articles on refugees, trauma, and bullying, followed by three articles on classroom implications for school counsellors, and then four articles on counsellors themselves. I hope you enjoy reading the contributions and that they are helpful for your practice
The first article, by Nigar Khawaja and Glenn Howard, looks at assessment of three cases of refugee students from Iran now schooled in Australia. This paper ties in nicely with the article by Azucena Velasco Leon and myself on assessment of academic difficulties in culturally and linguistically diverse school students in the first issue of the journal this year. The second article, by Georgina du Mello Kenyon and Jim Schirmer, is a systematic review of studies that identified common practice elements within evidence-based school trauma interventions. As many of our refugee students have endured trauma, as well as abused children, this is a timely paper to see what evidence there is for these important interventions. In the third article, Esra Tekel and Engin Karadag examine the effects of peer bullying in schools, finding an unfortunate effect of negative consequences on both school mindfulness and academic performance. The problem of peer bullying, despite all the research, does not seem to be easily resolved, and yet bullying has been shown to adversely impact so much of an individual's life
The next three articles examine grade repetition, memory, and mental health. Robyn Anderson and Carla Anderson studied grade repetition in Queensland state schools. Despite the fact that many studies have shown that repetition offers few benefits to students, it was found that many 5-year-old boys are repeated in Prep as a solution for them not being ready for school. Policy and practice recommendations are made for education departments. The following article, by Susan Colmar, Nash Davis, Linda Sheldon, Natalie Phillips, Matthew Cheng and Sophie Briddon, used a quasi-experimental research design to see the effect of the implementation of the Memory Mates program, designed to improve attention and working memory strategies within academic contexts. Thirteen Year 4 primary classes in six schools either served as a control or intervention group. The intervention group students showed a significant improvement in mathematics and spelling but there were no differences in reading comprehension or academic engagement. The next article, by Courtney Wolk, Jill Locke, Eduardo Salas, Ricardo Eiraldi, Peter Cronholm and David Mandell, looked at the factor structure of an instrument designed to measure improvement in school mental health teams. Although this measure was originally designed for use in hospital settings, the instrument gave valid results for school teams, although not as consistently as in other settings.
The last four articles present studies about school counsellors' work in different countries. First is Deniz Guler and Esra Ceyhan's article in which they describe interviews with 10 school counsellors in Turkey about resilience when working with at-risk students. The results showed that school counsellors working in schools with at-risk students experienced a variety of occupational stresses and that their experience of happiness and satisfaction, or helplessness and burnout, depended on levels of strengths or weaknesses with reference to personal factors. The next article, by Fatih Aydin and Hatice Odaci, deals with school counsellors' job satisfaction. A survey of 176 school counsellors found that counselling self-efficacy and trait anxiety were both significant predictors of job satisfaction. Rahsan Sivis-Cetinkaya writes an interesting article on what factors Turkish school counsellors consider when deciding to report students' risk-taking behaviours to school administrators. The final article for this issue is by Fàtima Vega, Marta Gràcia, and Carles Riba, describing a year-long collaboration between a teacher, a teaching assistant and a speech therapist in a Spanish special education school, together with two school counsellors. The aim of the project was to promote changes in the participants' approaches to working on communication and language in the classroom. Using collaborative counselling, it was found that the educators' conceptions about how to develop communication and language, classroom interaction, the educator's role, and organisation of context and curriculum planning changed.
We are also pleased to be able to include four practitioner articles in this issue. Thank you to the practitioners who took the time to share their work for the benefit others. I wish you season's greetings for the upcoming holidays and that you keep safe and well.
