Helping College Students: Developing Essential Support Skills for Student Affairs Practice (review)

In a field sometimes seemingly characterized as much by our differences in priorities, functional areas, and belief systems as by our commonalities, one of the attitudes that binds student affairs professionals together is the intent of helping college students. It is ironic, then, that the concept of helping—as distinct from counseling or other forms of intervention—has received relatively little focused attention in our literature. In Helping College Students: Developing Essential Support Skills for Student Affairs Practice, Amy L. Reynolds sets out to address that gap.

The book is organized in two major sections: "Understanding the Helper's Role" and "Essential Helping Skills." The first section creates context for the student affairs practitioner's role as a helper, provides an overview of current mental health realities on campus, discusses ethical issues inherent in helping, and describes underlying and relevant theories.

Part 2 focuses on essential helping competencies and subsequent strategies for their application, using the framework of awareness, skills, and knowledge, and applying them to functional area clusters (e.g., counseling-oriented positions, leadership development and educational positions, administrative positions, and academic affairs positions). These groupings are used throughout the chapters to provide illustrations of how the various competencies can be useful in different areas. The section also includes a chapter on multicultural competence, which is crucial to effective practice yet is often not addressed sufficiently in other similar books, as well as chapters focusing on microcounseling skills, conflict and crisis management, group dynamics and skills, and supervision and mentoring. The book ends with an overview and discussion of themes related to the role of helping in student affairs practice.

As a book focused on such an essential area of practice, Helping College Students is successful overall in bringing together information and topics that are clearly related in practice but not often presented collectively. The context here is student affairs specifically—not all helping professions and not counseling. This focus is particularly helpful for use in graduate preparation programs, when students are in the process of developing their own professional identities.

Beyond that contribution, which is important, are several points of particular strength. Chapter 1, "Student Affairs Practitioners as Helpers," begins with realistic and useful examples that help the reader quickly understand the nature of the ideas to be discussed. The concept of helping is situated in both historical and competency-based contexts, and the subsequent discussion of the benefits and challenges of being a helper creates a strong and well-developed rationale for the book.

Each of the subsequent chapters offers a well-grounded overview of its topic and, as appropriate, uses the framework of competencies and functional area clusters to bring consistency to the approach. The chapter on microcounseling, written by Marcia Roe Clark, offers a clear and straightforward model that effectively synthesizes other approaches (e.g., Egan, Parsons, Winston, Okun), identifying their commonalities and illustrating applications. The section on challenges for new helpers, focusing on temptations and fears, is an especially good way to offer both validation and caution to beginning practitioners.

The chapter on conflict and crisis management includes attention to both larger-scale critical incidents and individual crises, the latter of which too often gets lost in the current focus on emergency preparedness and other important institutional issues. The chapter on supervision and mentoring is also crucial in the consideration of the student affairs helping role, although, as Reynolds notes, they are too often overlooked, especially in graduate preparation.

The book's last chapter provides not only an effective summary, but also a helpful discussion of the three themes that emerged: conceptualizing the helping role more broadly, training student affairs professionals as helpers, and making a commitment to advocacy by taking helping beyond the individual level. The chapter serves well to review and integrate the ideas presented throughout.

In any book that attempts to cover as much as this one does and to keep it accessible enough to...