As I wrote previously, I am very interested to learn how guidance counselors are involved in helping students and their parents better deal with living in our digital world. The counselor and instructional technologist roles overlap beyond the digital citizenship curriculum schools offer, especially for digital wellness. Looking at the school counselor’s role, I wonder what a forward-looking counselor job description looks like.
We work to help students develop Habits of Mind, dispositions, a growing internal locus of control (self-regulation), agency, mindsets, and character strengths. Thus, it is more important than ever to prepare them to handle and utilize technology’s many ways to enhance learning. A part of this process is instilling the mantra that technology should not control us; we should control it.
How do we design learning experiences where students can apply their habits and strengths in their lives? As an instructional designer and counselor, I design learning activities to make the habits, dispositions, and character strengths “sticky” for kids so they become a part of their lives. Counselors help to lead the way in this personal growth process, especially when incorporating wellness as an overarching theme. With smartphones and social networking making their way into younger and younger hands, our counselors have their hands full.
My current position teaching 5th-grade social studies puts me back into student services team (SST) meetings. As I observed how the process works at my current school, I was reminded of my job description as a counselor in international schools many years ago. My role now is as a teacher instead of a counselor/SST coordinator.
In recording the following listing of responsibilities from my experiences, I am adding my take on how technology can support the roles and responsibilities, looking to a more forward-thinking and whole student-body approach to community wellness.
________________________________
Individual and Group Counseling: Supporting students individually in counseling sessions and groups is at the center of guidance counseling. Tech Take: Much as I do with my Web Resources for Learning site- Student Section, I can see developing a similar one for students to access information on wellness, (digital) citizenship, third culture kids, and topics specific to one’s international student population. One might call it the “Web Resources for Life” site. 🙂
SST Coordinator and Grade Level Team Member: The principal at my current school manages the SST. In my time overseas, I led the meetings for various reasons, one being that the principal often had unexpected events preventing them from attending the meetings. My job also focused on student advocacy, while the principal had many other responsibilities. I worked to be seen as a member of the grade-level team, which supports the team approach to help students grow physically, intellectually, emotionally, and socially. Also included in our meetings were the specials teachers and the learning support teacher(s). Tech Take: Having a sound student information system with an easy-to-use interface that can be adapted to the school’s needs is critical in building student profiles, documenting support strategies, parent meetings, assessment of interventions, etc. Constructing a structure and system that guides the process to include timely reviews and accountability check-ins for students, teachers, and parents is vital.
Guidance Curriculum and Lessons and Staff PD: Counselors should provide services and advocacy for all students. This sounds so obvious, but as we know, the tendency is to focus on students struggling, whether it be academically, socially, or behaviorally. A strong wellness-focused guidance curriculum using the tenets of Positive Psychology integrated into the regular curriculum taught by teachers with some co-teaching with counselors is one way to ensure all students benefit from the program. A part of this process is providing teachers with resources and the latest news on child development. It is also essential to assess the wellness status of the “student body” and individual students. Tech Take: Teaching life, study, wellness, etc. skills via online learning modules can lead to blended and personalized learning opportunities for students. Students thus have control over the place, pace, and path of their learning. Using a blog, Twitter, and Instagram to share news along with examples of guidance and fully integrated lessons and initiatives gives staff and parents a choice over how they wish to stay connected and expand their understanding of topics affecting our children. Using a survey creator, one can design a wellness survey for students and staff. Younger students would need an analog approach. The survey data could then be used in instructional technology fashion by designing a wellness program based on the school community’s needs.
The building of a Web Resources for Life listing of topics and resources fits nicely with empowering students to be self-directed and independent learners. One of my passions is helping students develop what I call their Personal Learning Systems (PLS). I am in the first stages of creating a PLS course that can be taught face-to-face, blended, and adapted to be taught virtually. I can create other courses to be taught after school through after-school activities or virtually. Creating a web resources site for teachers and parents around child development, recent news, and research is another way to build understanding and provide strategies to support our students. Running Teachers Teaching Teachers (TTT) learning sessions with partner staff members is another way to provide professional learning opportunities. The TTTs can be developed as online learning modules to offer a more personalized approach to PD.
Advisory Facilitator: A team approach to advisory development and implementation is crucial to the counselor’s job. Tech Take: In creating advisory programs, one of my goals was to work with teachers to assess our students’ needs to set learning goals. We then developed the lessons so that teachers had a standard curriculum and didn’t find themselves asking, “what will I do in advisory today?”. Google Docs or posting lessons on the learning management system (LMS) makes this sharing process easy and allows teachers to post their reflections and insights after lessons are taught.
Family Support: A counselor’s job is to coordinate people and facilitate processes. We work with teachers, learning support specialists, and administrators to design and implement student learning plans. Parents are a huge part of this partnership. We work with families to provide structures and strategies to assist their children in the home. We provide information and resources around wellness, learning, parenting in the digital age, etc. Tech Take: As mentioned, using social networking tools to get news and helpful hints to the community is another part of the counselor’s communication and teaching toolkit. Just as we create web resources for students and teachers, we do the same for parents. As an instructional technologist partnering with counselors, I do this from parenting in the digital age angle, but we can do much more. Companies like Eduro Learning offer parenting courses around various topics for parents who want more than resources from organizations like Common Sense Media. Counselors can give face-to-face presentations and mini-courses while providing them online for parents who cannot attend.
Crisis Team and Plan Development: Helping create and manage a crisis management plan came into play in several of my international schools. Revisiting the plan and doing practice runs are critical to the process. Tech Take: Posting the plan to the LMS along with supporting videos (e.g., information and procedures for students, staff, and parents) is another way to make the plan easily accessible but also visible. I smile, thinking back to the hand-washing video that the nurse and I created during SARS in Hong Kong. 🙂 A big part of running our virtual school at Hong Kong International School (HKIS) during SARS was about keeping our community virtually connected (article).
Administrative Team: I was a part of the administrative team in my schools, helping with planning, program development, staff support, and other topics around student and staff support. Helping teaching teams with their health and internal communication was another part of my job.
Admissions: If we had an admissions facilitator or if it was me, my role was to review student records and provide insights to help with the admissions process. Once students entered the school, I placed them in classes and introduced them to our new student orientation program. Tech Take: Leverage the heck out of the student information system, streamlining the information sharing and admissions decision-making process.
New Student Orientation: Start of the year orientation day for new students was developed with the help of and led by current students. Each new student was assigned a buddy for the coming year. For new students during the school year, we had mini-orientation after-school sessions led by the student orientation core team—students connected to their buddies during an orientation day and continued the engagement throughout the year. At one school, we provided online orientation materials and a WebQuest orientation and study skills module integrated into regular classes. Tech Take: I can see one’s student orientation team putting together welcome and “life as a — grade student” videos to be posted on the orientation website.
Staff Orientation: Counselors partner with other staff members to design and create an orientation site for new staff. We did this at one international school as it is essential to help incoming staff transition to the school and country. Orientation and onboarding needs continue through the year; we provided ongoing check-ins with new staff members to better understand the school culture. It is also important to provide support around dealing with loss and change, especially in validating the various identities new staff members bring with them. Tech Take: Creating an orientation website is the obvious way to go, but in our day of social networking, one could also use Facebook, Instagram, etc., to communicate with images and videos about one’s school and country. This could be an extension for ES and MS teaching teams and HS departments to add their sections to the website. Here is an example of what our tech department did at one of my schools.
_________________________________
The following topics were outside my job description, but they did come up to some extent. They are prominent today, especially with the nature of technology in our lives and the increased academic pressure on students seeking admission to college and university.
Wellness: See previous entry of Guidance Curriculum and Lessons and Staff PD for information. Wellness, including finding balance in one’s life, is a big part of the guidance curriculum and counseling program. I am separating it because it is so crucial in our information-overloaded world to find ways to help our students, staff, and parents strengthen their well-being. It is exciting to see public schools in my area include wellness through mindfulness as part of their mission. And wellness is for all the community, including the parents. As an international counselor, I did a lot of counseling staff and parents dealing with the ups and downs of being in a new school (teachers) and country. I can work with interested staff to develop a mindfulness program if one isn’t already in place in my next school. Tech Take: It could be a good idea for counselors to build a learning portal for the greater community that includes information on wellness, including digital wellness. An extension activity for interested students is to have them help produce videos, slideshows, etc., to curate within the portal.
Student Personal Learning Plans: Back to the theme that counselors provide services for all students, I believe all students should have a “personal learning plan.” I remember reading about schools having individualized education plans (IEPs) for all students. While educators construct IEPs, I am thinking of personalizing the process by putting students in charge of their plans. Working with students to be the designer and implementer of their learning plan entirely puts ownership into their hands. The plan goes beyond the learning in school, with the students setting goals for “life learning” and creating action steps to reach them. Dispositions, character strengths, life skills, and related life-learning aspects of the child’s life go far beyond academic learning in school.
Tech Take: With our goal of students learning how to learn and direct their learning, I see digital portfolios as the mechanism for creating and ongoing management of one’s learning plan. Portfolios set up with students setting goals around all aspects of their lives, including developing their personal learning system, further put students in charge of their learning. Documenting their learning through reflection sections for each inserted learning product with scaffolded reflection questions supports the process. Students sharing a journal/blog with teachers and parents to offer a more ongoing formative self-reflective assessment process keeps the focus on learning, not just the finished products. While there are commercial products like SeeSaw, schools could also use Google Apps or other free tools.
Life Coaching: I have written and shared on podcasts about the technological shift from tech tool support to learning support for instructional coaches for technology. I have advocated for renaming and rebranding the job title from tech integrator, tech coordinator, and tech person to titles such as innovation integrator, learning coach, and tech and learning coach. This shift has been taking place for several years.
The term “coaching” is used a great deal today regarding how some people hire coaches for guidance in different areas of their lives (e.g., personal finance, fitness, etc.). Guidance counselors have always been life “coaches.” We are members of a team that is passionate about helping our students grow physically, intellectually, emotionally, and socially. It may be time to drop the title of guidance counselor and replace it with life or wellness coach. 🙂
