TPC Journal-Vol 10- Issue 2-FULL ISSUE

The Professional Counselor | Volume 10, Issue 2 279 the school counselor at LHS was unable to support the studio co-construction process. However, to facilitate a comprehensive school counseling program, school counselors are expected to collaborate with teachers to indirectly address students’ academic, career, and personal/social needs (Cholewa et al., 2016). Therefore, the current study expands upon the implementation of the CAS model by considering the role of collaboration in the school counselor’s work, and the activation of the teacher as a key stakeholder (under the guidance of a counselor educator) in facilitating a classroom-based counseling intervention in which youth co-created a school space to support social and emotional services. The teacher and the PI also held the roles of advocates for the successful deployment of the school counseling intervention (studio co-creation). The teacher met with their principal and contacted a counselor educator (the PI), and together with the PI garnered crowdsourced funding for this project. Finally, the scholar role was also maintained by the teacher, who wished to support students’ social and emotional needs by creating a school studio, and thus called on the PI to use qualitative measures to evaluate students’ experiences during this process. Limitations There are a series of limitations to the current study. The limited availability of the school counselor to participate in this study is a limitation, despite the conscious use of collaboration in the deployment of an indirect classroom-based school counseling intervention. The use of the CAS model without a formal school counselor was difficult, albeit consistent with existing research surrounding the lack of time for school counselors to engage in multi-session group counseling work (Kim & Lambie, 2018). Consequently, the findings of the current study fail to offer support for counselors in the use of a direct school counseling intervention. Further, student reports of their experience in the studio co-construction process are subjective in nature. Had LHS provided an intervention to a larger sample of students and administered quantitative assessments, those findings could potentially have aided this study’s qualitative conclusions. The small sample size ( N = 15) of this study is a limitation, as results lack generalizability. Additionally, LHS is an urban school whose demographic information suggests the majority of youth identified as Black and/or Hispanic. Given that the present study examined a sample of mostly non-White urban youth, it is difficult to generalize findings to suburban and rural schools as well as to youth who do not identify as Black and/or Hispanic. Further, each focus group lasted 30 minutes, which could have limited the ability of the seven or eight participants to offer in-depth data. Lastly, the interactive nature of focus groups could have impacted the authenticity of responses from focus group participants (Smithson, 2000). Implications There are a number of implications for both practice and research that can be drawn from the current study. The findings in the current study align with the ASCA National Model and hold promise for engaging teachers and students in school-based interventions that promote social and emotional development and are culturally relevant. The ASCA National Model (2019b) calls for school counselors to use indirect approaches to counseling, often those including collaboration with a teacher, to provide supports to all students across the school. This study exemplifies the importance of activating teachers in the use of indirect classroom-based school counseling interventions, particularly when school counselors themselves are not available. The PI’s involvement in supporting the classroom teacher in implementation and evaluation of a classroom-based school counseling intervention serves as a call for school counselors to consider partnering with faculty at local colleges/ universities to bolster their comprehensive school counseling programs. If available, school counselors themselves are encouraged to collaborate with teachers in the development, implementation, and evaluation of classroom-based interventions that support students’ social and emotional development.