Proud School Counselor

In an earlier post I discussed my goal of meeting with all of my assigned students.  I have met with all Seniors.  As a result of meeting with the Seniors and hearing what colleges or what branch of military they were accepted to, I created this bulletin board to showcase their accomplishments.  This is not all of the acceptances and I will be adding more to this board (hopefully this week).  I am very proud of these students and consider myself lucky to work with them to reach their goals.

As for the rest of the grades, I am getting close.  The minute meetings are making it easy to reach my goal. Creating the 4-year Plans with the freshmen takes much longer than the minute meetings.  Testing and scheduling have taken quite a bit of my time lately, but I am confident that I will have met with all of my students by the end of the year.

I will post another update closer to the end of the school year regarding my accomplishment with this goal.

Good luck to all of you in reaching your goals for this year!

Sometimes We Need to Remind Ourselves

This spring has been so busy with all the snow days we had this year, it feels like we are playing "catch up" twice as much as we are normally doing this time of year.  We have testing, scheduling, making sure seniors are on track for graduation, working with our students for social/emotional issues, grades and academic plans.  I feel like I haven't been available to my students as I've been so busy recently.

I am not going to deny that sometimes I need to remind myself that I am here for the students.  When I finally make it back to my office and try to catch up on email and voice mail, it's like the students know I'm back in my office and they start filing in.  The other day I caught myself getting a little irritated that I didn't have a few minutes to get caught up.  I had to stop and remind myself why I'm really here.  I'm here for them!

The emails and voice mails can wait until the students were gone for the day.  The paperwork can wait.  The students have been waiting long enough while I've been out.  They have real issues they need help with and I feel honored that they come to me to provide them with academic guidance or help with personal issues.

As I have stated in another post, my goal for this year is to meet with all of the students assigned to me. Lately, I've been starting to feel like I'm not going to make it.  While helping students schedule in the computer labs a couple of weeks ago, we had time left at the end so I decided to use my time wisely and do the Minute Meetings with my students.  They were working on different assignments and I called them up for the Minutes Meetings.  I really enjoyed being able to use that time to meet with them and am looking forward to meeting with my Sophomores tomorrow and Wednesday.  I hope the teachers keep the students in the labs to work so I can continue with the Minute Meetings.

School Counselors need to be creative sometimes when trying to reach our goals to meet the needs of our students.  I have a feeling that I'm going to need to get a lot more creative to reach my goal of meeting with all of my students by the end of the year.  Wish me luck!

Sharing and Learning at EdCamp Columbus

Today I attended an EdCamp in Columbus, Ohio.  If you don't know what an EdCamp is, it is an "unconference".  It is a participant-driven, FREE meeting.  Participants drive the topics and are encouraged to share their knowledge.

At first, I was hesitant about attending because I'm a School Counselor. I thought it really wouldn't be beneficial for me.  I was wrong.  I'm so glad I was encouraged by my husband to attend and interact with all the great attendees.

There were several school counselor's in attendance.  One counselor lead a session on how to deal with personal/social issues in the classroom.  This was a great opportunity for us to remind teachers that school counselors can help them deal with these types of issues with their students.  Hopefully, we reminded teachers that we are there to help and they will go back to their school and connect the students with their counselors.

Not only was I able to promote my profession during this EdCamp but I was able to meet, interact and listen to some amazing, passionate and caring educators.  The students who benefit from these people are very lucky.  Everyone came out and spent their entire Saturday sharing and learning from others to improve education and learning for students.

On my way home I thought how it might be fun to have an EdCamp for school counselors.  Then  I thought how important it is that we have this interaction with teachers, administrators, technology coordinators, etc like I did today.  So instead of having an EdCamp for school counselors, my hope is that more school counselors attend EdCamps to share and learn.

To learn more about EdCamps or to find one near you go to: edcamp.org