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Throughout their school years, students are faced with an array of increasingly important and difficult choices. These range from deciding what to do for the elementary school science fair and whom to ask to the eighth grade dance, if and where to go to college, and the best occupation to pursue, to name but a few. Particularly in adolescence, students are called upon to make monumental choices that may affect their lives well into the future. Beginning in the primary school years, school counselors can prepare students to make adaptive choices by instilling in them what we call 'hope.' Hope, as discussed in this article, is that which enables people to set valued goals, to see the means to achieve those goals, and to find the drive to make those goals happen.
We have three purposes in writing this article. First, we detail a relatively new theory of hopeful thinking and discuss its implications for determining important life choices. Second, we propose a developmental model regarding the formation of hope in children. And third, we discuss counseling techniques for engendering hope and enabling older children and adolescents to make adaptive choices.
Hope Theory: A Model of GoalDirected Thinking
Most lay people consider hope to be an affective phenomenon-an emotion experienced when all practical ways of achieving a desired end have been exhausted. This notion is evident in phrases such as, 'cross your fingers and hope for the best,' and 'at least we still have hope,' both of which one might utter when feeling particularly incapable of achieving important goals through one's own efforts. In contrast, just over a decade ago, C. R. Snyder and members of his University of Kansas Hope Laboratory (1991) reconceptualized hope, not as a passive emotional phenomenon that occurs only in the darkest moments, but as a process through which individuals actively pursue their goals.
In this context, hope is conceptualized as a goaldirected cognitive process. Specifically, Snyder, Harris et al. (1991) defined hope as, "a cognitive set that is based on a reciprocally derived sense of successful agency (goal-directed determination) and pathways (planning to meet goals)" (p. 572). As such, hopeful thinking always includes three components: goals, pathways thinking, and agency thinking.
Goals are hoped-for ends. According to the wide...