Preparing School Counseling Trainees in Professional Legislative Advocacy

Professional legislative advocacy is a pathway to improve the field of education as it may lead to policy changes that impact schools and the profession directly. Higher education educators have the opportunity to infuse in their students the skills and confidence to become advocates for their respective disciplines. In this study on an approach to teaching, we developed a training intervention to teach and build school counseling trainees' confidence for engaging in professional legislative advocacy and evaluated its effectiveness in an initial study. Compared to pretest scores, the participants had significant gains in knowledge, skills, and attitudes related to professional legislative advocacy after the training intervention. Their posttest scores were also higher than a sample of school counselor trainees who did not participate in the training. We discuss the implications of these findings and suggested research directions.