Online counseling to Greek teachers: Advantages and disadvantages

Abstract

This study focuses on the online counseling experience of the participants. In the research participated 3 school psychologists, as counselors and 6 teachers, as clients. The main research questions are: what are the difficulties that teachers face at school? What are teacher’s perceptions about school psychologists and the perceptions of teachers and psychologists about online counseling before and after the experience of online sessions which held in an internet- based application that created for the purposes of the research? The research is qualitative. The method that was used for the analysis of the data is the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. The main findings of the research are summarized as follows: a) the participants regarded the online session as helpful and as an interesting approach, b) the advantages of the online session according to the participants were the anonymity, the flexibility, the ability to retain a history of the sessions. On the other hand, as disadvantages the participants reported dehumanization, confidentiality and security issues, absence of non-verbal cues, delayed communication due to typing, c) a pattern of ambivalence towards the school psychologist and the online school psychologist emerged by the participants teachers, d) also emerged a concern of the participants psychologists for the loss of control during the online sessions, e) finally, the participants psychologists reported feelings of anxiety due to the lack of training in online counseling.