TExES School Counselor (252)

Erik Erikson described eight stages across the lifespan, each centered on a psychosocial crisis. Successful resolution produces a lasting strength (a “virtue”); unsuccessful resolution leaves vulnerabilities that affect later stages. School counselors work mainly with the stages of the school years, but they should recognize earlier stages in young children and later stages in the adults they consult with.

James Marcia extended Erikson’s identity stage by crossing two dimensions: exploration (has the person actively considered alternatives?) and commitment (has the person made a choice?).

John Bowlby proposed that infants form internal working models of relationships from their early caregiving experiences. Mary Ainsworth’s Strange Situation procedure identified secure, anxious-avoidant, and anxious-resistant (ambivalent) patterns, and Mary Main and Judith Solomon later described the disorganized pattern, linked to frightening or frightened caregiving. Secure attachment predicts better emotion regulation and peer relationships, but attachment patterns can change with later relationships.

Students with insecure attachment histories may test, avoid, or cling to adults. A counselor’s consistency, predictability, and patience provide a corrective relationship experience, which is one reason trauma-informed practice emphasizes relationships before content.

Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy reminds counselors that physiological and safety needs must be addressed before students can focus on belonging, esteem, and learning. A hungry, exhausted, or frightened student is not ready for an academic goal-setting session; connecting the family to food, housing, or safety resources comes first.

Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory places the child at the center of nested systems: the microsystem (family, classroom, peers), the mesosystem (connections among microsystems, such as home–school communication), the exosystem (settings that affect the child indirectly, such as a parent’s workplace or the school board), the macrosystem (culture, values, and laws), and the chronosystem (changes over time, such as a divorce or a move). Counselors strengthen the mesosystem whenever they build home–school partnerships.

The framework expects counselors to understand how students learn and construct knowledge, because guidance lessons, behavior plans, and counseling interventions are all forms of teaching.

Emotion regulation develops from dependence on caregivers in infancy to increasingly internal strategies in childhood and adolescence, supported by executive-function growth. Theory of mind, the understanding that others have beliefs and desires different from one’s own, typically emerges around age four and underlies empathy and perspective-taking. Perspective-taking becomes more sophisticated through adolescence.

Social skills include communication, cooperation, assertion, responsibility, empathy, and self-control. When a student lacks a social skill, the counselor should determine whether it is a skill (acquisition) deficit (the student does not know the skill), a performance deficit (the student knows it but does not use it, often a motivation or anxiety problem), or a fluency deficit (the student uses it awkwardly or inconsistently). Acquisition deficits call for teaching and modeling, performance deficits for reinforcement and removing barriers, and fluency deficits for practice and feedback.

Friendships evolve from activity-based play in early childhood to loyalty and intimacy in adolescence, and peer acceptance strongly predicts adjustment. Relational aggression, harming others through exclusion, rumors, and manipulation of relationships, increases in middle childhood and early adolescence and is used by both girls and boys.

Lawrence Kohlberg described three levels of moral reasoning, each with two stages, based on how people justify decisions about moral dilemmas. Development moves from reasoning based on consequences and self-interest, to reasoning based on social approval and law, to reasoning based on self-chosen principles.

Carol Gilligan criticized Kohlberg’s research for its male-centered sample and proposed an ethic of care emphasizing relationships and responsibility alongside Kohlberg’s ethic of justice. Later research shows both orientations in all genders. Counselors promote moral growth through discussing dilemmas, modeling ethical behavior, and building caring communities.