Rate My Professor Phillip Waalkes

Phillip Waalkes serves as department chair and associate professor in the Department of Education Sciences and Professional Programs within the College of Education at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He holds a Master's degree in School Counseling from Western Carolina University and a Ph.D. in Counseling and Counselor Education from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Following approximately five years as a K-12 school counselor, Waalkes joined the University of Missouri-St. Louis in 2018 as an assistant professor, advancing to associate professor and assuming the role of department chair. His expertise centers on counselor education, where he contributes to the training of future counselors through rigorous academic instruction.

Waalkes' research specializations encompass the development of teaching skills among counselor educators, research mentorship, qualitative research methodologies, and the career-long professional growth of school counselors. He utilizes diverse qualitative approaches, including consensual qualitative research, duoethnography, hermeneutic phenomenology, interpretative phenomenological analysis, Q methodology, qualitative content analysis, photovoice, and narrative inquiry. In the classroom, he teaches core counseling courses such as Helping Relationship Skills, Theories of Counseling, Individual Inventories, Qualitative Methods in Educational Research I and II, and Career Information and Development. His scholarly output includes over 48 publications, with notable works such as 'Aligning epistemology with member checks' (2019, International Journal of Research & Method in Education), 'Structure, impact, and deficiencies of beginning counselor educators’ doctoral teaching preparation' (2018, Counselor Education and Supervision), 'They Stay With You: Counselor Educators’ Emotionally Intense Gatekeeping Experiences' (2020, The Professional Counselor), 'A content analysis of qualitative dissertations in counselor education' (2021, Counselor Education and Supervision), and 'A national survey of school counselors’ experiences with student death by suicide' (2021, Professional School Counseling). These contributions have garnered over 700 citations, underscoring his impact in advancing counselor education and school counseling practices.