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Instructional Technology - International Education - Wellness

Tag: counseling – IT partnership

The Wellness Coach (Counselor) – Instructional Technologist Partnership

December 21, 2022 / / 0 Comments

I have written a lot about what I see as the wellness coach and instructional technologist overlap of areas of services to our school community.

We describe (digital) citizenship as the purview of instructional technologists. As an instructional coach for wellness, I use the term “digital wellness” to describe the domain where I support students, staff, and parents in their lives. I need to find out where conventional guidance counselors generally stand in supporting citizenship or digital wellness. As usual, I am speaking about my experiences and ideation.

The question can arise of the difference between digital citizenship and digital wellness. One way to understand the difference between (digital) citizenship and digital wellness is that most citizenship curricula teach students to think about how their actions affect others. Digital wellness looks inward to help us think about how our use of technology affects our well-being.

Remember that a guiding principle of digital wellness is to engage the Character Strength of proactivity to help us take charge of how we use technology to support our interests, values, and wellness. 🙂

When teachers or the instructional technologist are teaching citizenship skills, instances of digital wellness also come into play. The reverse is true for teachers and wellness coaches teaching digital wellness when citizenship is a part of the learning. With all this said, it makes sense to me that the wellness coach and instructional technologist should have a strong partnership to help each other design their programs including professional learning opportunities for staff.

My focus on elementary students means building the foundational understanding that they are in charge of the tools – not the other way around. They learn how to use technology for learning and, yes, for entertainment and fun. The wellness program naturally grows student self-awareness to help them understand technology’s positive and negative influence on their lives, especially their well-being.

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Wellness Program Development and Implementation

May 12, 2022 / / 0 Comments

After writing and podcasting about wellness and sharing lots of crazy ideas over the past several years, I think it is time to take a stab at organizing some of my strategies into one post to possibly help schools when planning to design and implement a wellness program. I do this with little experience in wellness program design while knowing that multiple books, dissertations, and articles have been written about implementing new programs. And yes, there are consultants in the business and education worlds who specialize in program development and implementation, with some providing guidance specifically for wellness. What I am offering is not a set plan. It is a menu of ideas to choose from that can go into a project to be implemented as a wellness program. 🙂

Looking at starting a Positive Psychology/Education-oriented wellness program takes me to the work of the educators at Geelong Grammar School (GGS) and their Institute of Positive Education. I searched and found the following resources about their wellness program development efforts. Look to definitely read what these PosEdu pros have to say! They use the term Positive Education as the application of Positive Psychology into the field of education.

I also looked to the work of Dr. David Perkins and Dr. Jim Reese in their article entitled “When Change Has Legs,” and my interview with Dr. Reese on the EdTech Co-Op podcast to help guide my thinking on implementation strategies. Another helpful implementation article from the Harvard Business School is “5 Critical Steps in the Change Management Process“.

My approach always is to find what is practical and actionable to bring timely results for students and adults.

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-Decide on whether you will include the parents and/or staff in growing their wellness.

–Form a wellness committee with representatives of all stakeholders to design a community-wide wellness plan. Form a more focused “wellness team” within the committee of interested staff to be the drivers of the process. I have not been on a school and community-wide committee for some years that included students, but I have heard of schools bringing them on to some committees. With no such experience, I am guessing that selected high school students could be full-on members of a wellness committee. Perhaps one could put forth the case for mature and confident Middle Schoolers. Hence, I wonder if there is a way to have a side student advisory committee that also includes older elementary students where input is received on ideas from the larger wellness committee. Again, I don’t have any experience with student representatives. Still, I think students need to be a part of the process, especially to get their ideas on how a wellness program would be received and how to tailor it to the students’ lives. Along the same lines, I would think about forming a separate parent advisory group with which the parents of the wellness committee and administrators connect for their ideas and to use as a sounding board.

-Have your instructional technologists represented on your wellness committee. There is a lot of common ground between their student curriculum on (digital) citizenship and their providing of workshops for parents with what your instructional coaches for wellness cover especially with digital wellness for students, staff, and parents.

-Get your leadership organized, as in who will be the political and the practical leaders of the implementation process. Dr. Perkins and Dr. Reese list the responsibilities of each, so do look to read their article. As a practitioner, I always focus on finding current leaders and others with the potential to apply their Character Strengths of leadership and teamwork to further craft implementation strategies while building accountability for the change process.

–Define what wellness means for your community connecting to the principles of Positive Psychology (my shorthand is “PosPsych”). I think that sometimes committees tend to think too big and broad in the scope of what they want to cover. This is understandable. I know of a wellness consortium that brings financial, environmental and spiritual into the usual Physical – Intellectual – Emotional – Social (PIES) approach to how we categorize parts of the whole student. I would advise against doing this for many reasons, with one big one being that PosPsych is research-supported to describe the domains of life that, if lived well, will lead to wellness when engaging one’s Character Strengths. Schools can have a separate umbrella of life skills with some overlap that can cover financial, environmental, and other essential life literacies that school leaders wish to grow within their students.

-Bring in the components of social and emotional learning as provided by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). They overlap with the Character Lab versions of the Character Strengths of emotional intelligence, social intelligence, and self-control.

-Speaking of Character Lab, besides defining the term wellness, consider whether you will use the Character Lab names for the Character Strengths (they currently list 15 of the 24 strengths) or the VIA Institute on Character version. And will you use the term Positive Psychology or Positive Education in describing your program? I find the Character Lab names more student-friendly. I also like to use Positive Psychology as the term used in research and the acronym PERMA, which many add “H” for health. I find that using PERMAH is sticky with folks, while the Positive Education version with “positive” before each pillar title offers no acronym. And yes, I know capitalizing Character Strengths is incorrect, but I like the emphasis the capitals provide. 🙂 The bottom line is to build a shared learning language for your wellness program.

-There are many techniques to running meetings effectively, including protocols provided through mechanisms like Critical Friends Groups. It is essential to start the change process with solid foundational strategies that stakeholders are already using. A starting place is to do a plus-minus brainstorming listing of what the school has in place that already supports wellness and the negatives as barriers that will need to be overcome.

-A connected strategy is to conduct a wellness survey of community members, including students, parents, and staff, to gather data to have a baseline to refer back to once the program is in place. One aspect of the survey can be on PosPsych content knowledge regarding what the term wellness means to community members. A second survey question can, of course, anonymously gather information about their well-being status.

-Nail down what is at the core of your wellness program in a paragraph or two. Like the school’s mission statement, this core statement must be promoted and shared frequently. Here is a rough example of what my core wellness statement looks like>

I see the science of Positive Psychology guiding my work, looking past deficiencies to see and focus on the strengths of those I work with. I help others to answer the questions:  

  • What does wellness look like from a Positive Psychology perspective?
  • What is character?
  • What are Character Strengths?
  • What are the pillars of life (i.e., PERMAH) that we can engage our Character Strengths in to help us to thrive? In a figurative sense, which “tools”(i.e., PERMAH and the Character Strengths) in our “wellness toolkit” do we routinely use to live life well on a daily basis. Which tools do we apply when we face obstacles and long-term struggles?  
  • What are values?

-I would add the topic of digital wellness under the ample tent coverage of your wellness program.

-I can also see putting together a list of all the components/structures of the school where the principles of PosPsych could be embedded. From the business office to transportation to campus green space management to hiring to after-school programming, I could see a wellness filter being added to decision-making around the question of “how can wellness be supported?” when leadership makes decisions in the running of the school.

-Do a parallel implementation process by also following the School Retool model of jumping right in to introduce wellness education to your chosen stakeholders provided by your early adopters and others with enough content knowledge to get some pilots going that will provide feedback to support the wellness committee in designing the wellness plan. This goes against the Geelong Grammar School (GGS) model that is presented as being both linear in progression and, in time, a cycle. More on this topic later in the post.

-If the school currently has profiles of a graduate for ES, MS, and HS, if they don’t already have a section on well-being, add it with attributes of what a “well” student looks like at each level, including how one can observe students using their personal wellness toolkit to flourish and when needed, to overcome obstacles.

-Start scaffolding for learning and living wellness principles by having community members set wellness goals for personal wellness and school team/department and family wellness (the breadth depends on which populations are a part of your program). Wellness plan templates can be used to design the action steps for everyone to work towards their goals. 

-Decide what your curriculum will be and how it will be delivered. Will you purchase a curriculum? Will you develop your own? Will your approach be integrated into the regular curriculum (i.e., LA, SS, Sci, etc.), or will it be delivered during a set time in the weekly timetable? Who will teach the curriculum? Might you have a hybrid approach combining the integrated and purchased standalone curriculum?

-Connecting to the previous strategies, look to have a wellness web portal and wellness app, use portfolios with a wellness documentation component, and other tools to teach and embed wellness into the lives of your chosen stakeholders.

-One aspect of using communication tools to get the wellness word out there is to ponder who and how you will communicate the latest news and updates to support ongoing learning about wellness. What “just in time” conduits will you have in case of a school crisis and/or ongoing community protocols such as with Covid information sharing? Schools already leverage social networking tools from Twitter to blogs, so how might you brand/title your wellness information and news?

-If you go the route of staff learning and experiencing PosPsych in their lives, have divisional and departmental (i.e., principals, HR, business, etc.) administrators work with individuals on their annual professional growth plan to include the setting of wellness goals. The teaching staff would also set goals for teaching the wellness curriculum. A series of calendar events would be scheduled to support progress toward reaching the plans during the year. The wellness coach at each division level can offer to coach to support staff with their personal wellness goal(s).

-The divisional wellness coach partners with the teaching teams to set their wellness teaching goal(s) to design the activities to work on the team wellness goal, including setting calendar events to meet and reflect on their efforts during the year.

-Redesign your curriculum planning unit template to include a way to document either the integration of and/or the teaching of the purchased wellness curriculum into the units of study. A starting place is to have a section of the unit plan entitled something like “Wellness Teaching & Integration.”

–Ongoing professional learning/development to help individuals and teams meet their wellness goals. The wellness coach and administrator who oversees the division wellness program meet with individuals and teams to help them design aspects of the school’s Professional Learning Community (PLC) and the wider Professional Learning Network (PLN) to help individuals personalize their learning.

-Give your early adopters and passionate about wellness staff members resources and time to engage their Character Strengths of creativity and teamwork to come up with ways to support and teach wellness within your community. One starting place is to set aside time for Teachers Teaching Teachers (TTT) workshops for learning and ideation. Go-getters can also design online mini-courses for staff to take on their own time schedules. This could tie into the badging strategy listed below.

-Further support staff learning by forming learning groups based on the COETAIL efforts that include PLCs around technology integration, which in this case would be for wellness integration. One possibility is to run several groups focusing on the school-wide or divisional goals of the year so that wellness might just be one topic choice among several.

-The creation of a badging (micro-credential) certificate system containing all the PosPsych content knowledge and integration strategies that staff can work on, whether towards their personal and/or professional goals. Teaching staff members can add their badges to the wellness section of their professional portfolios and possibly use them for credit hours in renewing their teaching licenses. 

-New students and parents need to be onboarded annually into the wellness program. The same goes for new staff before their arrival in August for the normal orientation and onboarding program. Providing online tutorials, FAQs, webinars, and other resources through the wellness web portal can help with the process. Design wellness workshops as part of your orientation program for new students before the first day of school. Provide a series of workshops for parents for face to face meetings and for online attendees.

-Design wellness learning opportunities for your parents working with the Parent-Teacher Association (PTA). The PTA can help with the onboarding process for new parents for wellness and other aspects of the school and community culture. If you have a community center on campus, support your PTA in offering book clubs, workshops, small group discussions, etc., on wellness, parenting, and other topics of interest.

-I can say again from experience that the onboarding needs to be scheduled and promoted at the start of the year to continue on a monthly offering new staff and parents opportunities to grow their knowledge of PosPsych with built-in activities to support their living and embedding of wellness principles into their lives.

-The same, of course, needs to happen for students. Schools often offer a start-of-the-year orientation program for new students. Possibly have more than one day of orientation in which you introduce your wellness program. Find ways for your ES homerooms and MS and HS advisory to have start-of-the-year wellness foundational learning opportunities to build foundational knowledge of PosPsych so that the new students can feel comfortable as teachers integrate the Character Strengths and PERMAH in their regular curricula . And just as with the parents, look to have some follow-up orientation get-togethers with your new students to discuss wellness and other topics to help them transition to your school.

-Will you follow the Geelong Grammar School (GGS) Positive Psychology/Education implementation model of “learn, live, teach and embed” or draw from another framework? A lesson learned is that it can take a lot of time and effort to have your staff and parents go through the learn and live it phases before moving on to the teaching phase. It makes sense that teachers need to understand the principles of PosPsych before teaching them, just as they do with the content of their regular curriculum. My lesson learned is to power up on preparation and follow through to take the adults through the first two phases. Don’t get bogged down in these two phases knowing that adult education is complex and changing behaviors is even more challenging. Your students deserve to learn and live wellness ASAP! Get into teaching mode!

-The GGS program is described both in a linear fashion and as “four interconnecting cyclical processes” (Learn it. Live it. Teach it. Embed it.), which is supported by the graphic representation of their GGS model. The article’s authors clearly state that each school must design a program that meets its needs. Hence, it seems that one can start going through the phases in a linear fashion that then becomes a cycle that leads to ongoing reviewing and refinement of the steps as a form of continual renewal. Well, I think that is how it works. 😉 As Dr. Perkins and Dr. Reese note, look to design your framework to be flexible and adaptable to the needs of your community as a whole and to individual stakeholders as much as possible.

I am reminded that Geelong Grammar had Dr. Martin Seligman, one of the founders of Positive Psychology, present on campus for six months, so they could get rolling with the Learn and Live stages. They really had their staff’s attention and made their wellness implementation their number one priority. It should also be noted that their team “complete a four–day residential training course to discover and explore elements of personal well-being, to learn the foundations of positive psychology, and to develop an understanding of and gain personal experience in the six domains of the GGS Model. Training courses are also offered to parents of students, to be introduced to Pos Ed that is intended to directly enhance their own well-being, and indirectly enhance the well-being of their children, family, and friends.” (Learn it. Live it. Teach it. Embed it.)

So yes, it is a big step to have the aspiration that teachers live the tenets of PosPysch before they can teach it. And yes, there is the question of whether the school can reach into the private lives of staff regarding their wellness. My experience tells me that schools can get waylaid in the first two phases before the teaching begins. And again, GGS put enormous resources towards supporting the adults in their community with the “Learn and Live It” stages.

So boy, howdy, the folks at GGS really were and are committed to their wellness program! This brings up the point of not trying to manage multiple initiatives simultaneously. Implementing a wellness program that so gets at changing behaviors and lives is a huge undertaking. So really refrain from bringing about “initiative fatigue” by trying to do other new programs while implementing your wellness plan.

The article’s authors do go on to acknowledge that schools might not be able to offer such a dedicated learning opportunity for their community members. The authors go on to twice note that “staff is encouraged…” to live by the principles of PosPsych. So in my thinking, they could say to staff that they were encouraged but not expected to apply what they were learning to their personal and private lives. I think it is a big undertaking for school leaders to desire, let alone require staff to make changes in their lives guided by PosPsych.

I, of course, would love to be a member of a school where all the staff makes such a commitment to personal wellness, but I cannot see it being made a professional obligation. I can see strategies and systems being constructed that offer a pathway to engage with PosPsych in one’s life, both professionally and personally. Once teachers learn the wellness content knowledge and have the tools to integrate wellness into their classrooms, don’t let the Live It phase prevent the students from experiencing the principles of PosPsych in their lives. And also, don’t let the time-consuming work of designing a strategic wellness plan get in the way of being actionable, as advocated by the School Retool approach to program implementation.

We know that modeling is a powerful instructional tool, so it makes sense for teachers to understand the content of PosPsych and share well-being practices with their students. Character Lab makes modeling a central strategy in all of their playbooks. But in the end, we can model by asking questions about how to apply Character Strengths and how to engage them within the PERMAH framework to teach PosPsych to our students. We don’t need to share our personal lives unless we choose to. So again, don’t get bogged down in how well or how many of one’s staff truly live what they teach about wellness.

I will finish this list of strategies by offering a final point that Dr. Perkins and Dr. Reese list as the fourth leg of their process to support innovation and change. They use the term institutionalization, which compliments the GGS phase of embedding the wellness program into all aspects of the school community. I think school leaders need to construct systems that keep the program growing with mechanisms for accountability that don’t depend on specific leaders and passionate individuals who, especially in international schools, often move on to new schools. From experience, I saw a few programs quickly disappear when the individual(s) who started and ran them left the school, and/or systems were not in place to keep the program(s) going.

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I hope to learn about schools that designed and implemented wellness programs where students, staff, and parents speak and act upon the language of wellness. If you have been reading my blog, you know that these ideas were shared previously in more detail. I wish I could say the strategies come from my experiences in schools that successfully implemented school-wide wellness programs, but they do not.

By this, I mean that if I ask a third, eighth, or twelfth grader to paint a picture of what wellness looks like in their lives, they would be able to speak in terms of the Character Strengths that they exercise daily to live well along with the ones they engage in handling potential tough spots in their day. If asked which PERMAH pillars are really helping them thrive, they should be able to name them while stating which strengths assist in that effort.

I would apply the same questions to staff and parents who are open to sharing their experiences with the tenets of Positive Psychology and its application in their lives. And finally, I would be able to ask any teacher to either share specific wellness lessons and/or integration strategies that bring PERMAH and the Character Strengths into the culture of his/her class.

So if you made it to this point in the post, please use the comment tool to share about schools that are doing wellness well. 🙂

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Counseling Job Description (Counseling – IT Partnership)

December 12, 2017 / / 0 Comments

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.

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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.

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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. 🙂

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Phones in Schools (Counseling – IT Partnership)

November 30, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Joshua Johnson led a very informative discussion on his NPR 1A show about cell phones in schools. His panel included a 9th grader, a teacher, a principal, and a physician. They cover many topics worth your time to listen to the podcast version of the show. One interesting line from the principal dealt with two considerable efforts in most schools- expanding technology use and helping students experience deeper learning. She noted that it is challenging to do both with the tendency of technology to distract from focusing in depth on topics, thus impeding students from making lateral and deeper connections. And as the doctor noted, effective multi-tasking is a myth.

The high school teacher, Matt Miles, co-authored with Joe Clement the book Screen Schooled: Two Veteran Teachers Expose How Technology Overuse Is Making Our Kids Dumber.

This brings me to the theme of the overlapping worlds of technology and counseling as I explore how schools guide students to be in charge of their devices instead of the devices controlling the users.

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Parenting in the Digital Age (Counseling-IT Partnership)

November 8, 2017 / / 0 Comments

I am seeing the phrase “parenting in the digital age” pop up considerably these days. In connection with this blog series on the counselor-instructional technologist partnership, focusing on ways to support parents is an excellent example of how counseling-IT collaboration can provide needed support in the greater community.

During my first year back in the US, I was fortunate to work with a counselor who believed that it was in her job description to help develop materials to help parents come up with ways to speak with their children about using technology. Here is a post that describes the partnership and program.

Counselors and instructional technologists can provide a menu of choices for parents to further their understanding of how to parent in our digital age. My second school also supported the idea of providing workshops for parents. I created a parent resource website and an online version of the workshop for parents who could not attend the sessions.

Today many providers are offering online courses and materials to help parents as they discuss and develop guidelines on how their families use technology. Kim Cofino, Jeff Utecht, and their Eduro Learning team provide parents with materials and courses. The image above comes from their parenting page. 

I can see districts and individual schools sharing the Eduro course information with parents, who can then register and take the classes independently. I can also see individual school PTAs offering a blended version of Kim and Jeff’s coursework via face-to-face discussion groups guided by counselors and instructional technologists.

This role of the counselor as a life coach for parenting fits in well with my thinking for future posts. I see counselors rebranding themselves as life coaches working in partnership with teachers, learning support staff, instructional technologists, and principals to design life, wellness, and growth plans for all students around their physical, intellectual, emotional, and social development. While I have read of some schools doing IEPs for all their students, my focus is more forward-focused on guiding students toward attaining the habits of mind, dispositions, and general life skills that will help them move toward actualization. 🙂

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Guidance Counselor – Instructional Technologist Partnership (Introduction)

October 15, 2017 / / 0 Comments

I participated in and followed early 1:1 initiatives going back to Henrico County in VA and the Maine Learning and Technology Initiative, both taking place in the early 2000s. Henrico did their rollout in high school, while Maine started theirs in middle school. Many lessons from both, with Maine setting the gold standard on deliberately planning and implementing programs to support teachers in adapting their instruction to be enhanced by technology.

In recent years we have had the addition of smartphones into students’ hands, adding even more connectivity into their lives. International schools, especially those in Asia, were also starting 1:1 programs. In time, elementary schools also began the rollout of devices. This trend continues in the US today, with public and independent schools catching the wave.

My blogging and podcasting have been on personal computing devices’ positive collaborative, creative, and connective nature. I offer this simple review of where we were; my concerns about students and their access to devices have been growing, especially with our younger students. While schools develop acceptable use policies, have 1:1 introduction parent nights, and offer digital citizenship lessons, I am concerned that we have much more to do to prepare students to make healthy and responsible technological choices.

What jumps out at me daily is the same picture we see with adults. The picture is of the hunched-over individual viewing a screen, whether sitting alone, walking, or sitting with a group. Much is written about the adverse social and emotional effects upon children and adults regarding technology use, especially around social networks, and what is lost when we are not present in typical social learning situations. Distraction, anxiety, isolation, lack of impulse control, etc., are a few of the byproducts of our digital age.

We now have a generation in their 20s whose experience is of always being connected. Jean Twenge covers this topic in-depth with her book iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy–and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood–And What That Means for the Rest of Us. I can see parents and educators reading this book to understand better how technology influences our younger generations. The next step for families and educators is to develop family and school technology and life plans that start with the family’s and school’s mission and values. Action plans can then be created and implemented.

There is also the discussion of how smartphones are diminishing our mental capacities. On his On Point radio show, Tom Ashbrook discussed this topic in a recent episode. We know that personal learning devices can do so much to assist us as learners. How do we help students see the devices as tools they effectively use without the technology controlling the user? One approach is to help students develop their learning system to empower and skill them to use technology positively and positively.

Helping students learn the skills to work with information, create and communicate is at the core of what we instructional technologists and librarians do. Hopefully, this blog and the Ed Tech Co-Op podcast have provided educators with ideas, especially in helping students with what we call Information and Communication Literacies (ICL). What I still need to cover, though, is how to help students in their social and emotional development, especially as we put devices in their hands.

As I am also a guidance counselor, though it has been many years since I wore that hat, I have a few ideas that are probably already in the blogosphere. But as I am considering returning to counseling, my instructional technology skills overlap significantly with what I am guessing counselors are teaching and providing support in their schools. Thus, I will write a series of posts to help me construct a plan for approaching the possibility of a return to guidance counseling.

I have been thinking a great deal about how we are preparing students and helping their parents handle our connected and digital world. I will research what elementary and middle school guidance counselors in my local public school district do in their teaching of students and outreach to parents.

I suspect one big topic centers around social networking as well as cyberbullying. While we instructional technologists develop and teach digital citizenship skills, what does the guidance curriculum look like in elementary and middle school? It is a mistake to think that the technology coach/teacher needs the training, time, or responsibility to be the only leader in developing and teaching curricula to assist students as they learn to make technological decisions. This is especially the case in their social and emotional growth and development. With this point in mind, as I have written before, we might look to drop the digital from “digital citizenship” or go further with the broader term of “life skills” development. Citizenship today incorporates blended face-to-face and virtual connections, but it only covers some aspects of how technology affects our students.

Teaching life skills is an integral part of a guidance counselor’s mission. Now with technology so intertwined into students’ lives, counselors and instructional technologists are partnering to create a shared life skills curriculum for themselves and the teaching staff to teach. Advisory time can provide the structure for teachers, counselors, and instructional technologists to teach a life skills curriculum.

Being overly connected to one’s phone and computer affects the amount of time for exercise, getting outdoors, and sometimes making smart eating and sleeping choices. And if we are genuinely looking at the whole child and their physical, intellectual, emotional, and social growth and development (PIES), we need to expand our instructional team. In that case, we should consider expanding the collaboration to include the PE and Health teachers.

So be on the lookout for posts as I start a new series designated as “Counseling-IT Partnership.”

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