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| HeartMind e-News: Teach, Learn, Lead A monthly publication dedicated to trauma-informed, compassionate school practices that help educators, students, and families move toward a sense of wholeness and well-being
FEATURED ARTICLE School Counselors: Planning for 2023-2024 Alison Sumski, CEI Research Assistant, and Christine Mason, CEI Executive Director |
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| How are school counselors supporting children’s mental health and well-being in your school? Are they also a resource for staff who are also experiencing trauma? As you look toward the Fall of 2023, are you anticipating any differences in how they are deployed?
In planning for how to work with school counselors in 2023-2024, here are a few things to consider:
- What worked well last year?
- Did children who needed the most support get adequate services?
- How did your school counselor support teachers and other staff last year?
- Did you conduct any feedback sessions to get input from staff about their most serious needs?
- If you could make one change to better support students’ mental health, what would it be?
- Is your counselor adequately prepared?
The demands for mental health supports in this post-COVID era are huge. When you examine the above list, think of results in terms of continuous improvement – what can be done to better deliver mental health services? All the needed improvement will not happen at once. It will likely take a dedicated effort over many months to make a significant change.
Counselors’ Needs
Making sure counselors have updated skills in trauma-informed practices is one low-cost, easy-to-implement step and something that could be done between now and September 1. Related to that is how to help update the skills of counselors so that their in-class supports are effective. With more and more dysregulated students and staff, this is increasingly important.
What is your counselor saying? Did they conduct a self-assessment and did they provide input into your plans for 2023-2024?
It Takes a Team
As you plan, consider also the relationship between your school counselor and staff. In some schools, counselors meet with grade level teams and most of their “drop-in” in-class support is reserved for certain grade levels or teams of students.
In other schools, school counselors may lead some of the professional development activities, helping to ensure that other staff have the skills and experiences to help students who may be in crisis as well as students who need less critical, but still important, guidance. Teachers, by tuning into their students, play a crucial role in alleviating trauma and promoting resilience and a student’s sense of well-being and self-worth. |
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| It has never been more important to equip all educators with the resources, training, and continued professional development necessary to support students from a trauma-sensitive lens. School counselors can be the lead change agents on this front by advocating for the integration of social emotional learning competencies in their schools.
A Proactive Approach - Social Emotional Learning
CASEL (2023) suggests that there are five key components to social emotional learning development that span across all age groups, socioeconomic statuses, and cultures:
- Self-awareness - understanding one’s emotions and thoughts and how they relate to and influence behaviors
- Self-management - self-regulating and managing personal emotions, thoughts, and behaviors in a given situation
- Social awareness - empathizing with others, including those from different cultural and social backgrounds than one’s own
- Responsible decision-making - making decisions about one’s behavior that are thoughtful of others and the world around them
- Relationship skills - fostering healthy relationships across contexts and navigating challenging social situations
Just as we cannot assume that all students come to school knowing how to do long division, we cannot assume that they know how to manage challenging emotions, navigate conflict with peers, or build healthy relationships. As such, it is essential that these skills are explicitly taught in schools so that all students have access to them, regardless of their background. While students might not remember or regularly use a complex math equation or history lesson in their day-to-day lives, they will need to understand their emotions, navigate interpersonal relationships, and make decisions that align with their long-term goals throughout life.
By fostering the development of SEL skills in students, we are setting them up to be well-adjusted, well-prepared adults. Given that students spend most of their developmental years in school, it is critical that educators take an intentional look at the skills that they are equipping their students with, even and especially beyond those that are reported on state tests. School counselors can and should advocate for these changes, partnering with teachers and school administrators to develop a compassionate school culture. |
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| Practical Applications for School Counselors
While school counselors don’t explicitly teach academic lessons, they are essential team members when it comes to delivering SEL content to students and assisting teachers with strategies to integrate SEL competencies into their curriculum. Below are a few suggestions for how counselors can support SEL development in students:
- Commit to meeting with all students on your caseload at least three times per quarter to make connections, build relationships, and open the door for connection. When students feel like just a number, they lose interest in building meaningful relationships with their educators. By deliberately making time for each student, counselors foster a sense of community and support, and might be the reason a student who is struggling seeks help rather than stays silent. Support students with the discovery of their self-identity, and help them set short- and long-term goals.
- To get to all of the students, be creative in how you schedule these meetings. Sometimes a small group meeting will work well. If a student needs less support, it might mean a 10-minute monthly check in. For another student, one meeting might be after school where a parent or other family member as well as a teacher or other staff member participates in reviewing progress and goal planning. Flexibility is key.
- Offer weekly counseling (group and/or individual) to students with higher needs. Counseling should be evidence-based (such as CBT) and measurable (e.g. using mental health screening tools to track progress).
- Coordinate with community mental health professionals. In addition to their own school counselors, many schools and districts also have formalized agreements with mental health providers in their communities. Sometimes those providers also spend time in the school building, expanding the school’s capacity. Please do what you can to further coordination. One way to do this is to ensure that the school counselor is given authority and time to collaborate with outside providers.
- Establish a regular time to offer all students in school explicit and solely SEL instruction. This can be through an advisory period, homeroom, or on a designated day each week/month. Lessons can span across the 5 CASEL competencies, can tie into school or community events (e.g. pep rallies, fundraisers), and should be intentional in delivery. To ensure dedicated time with SEL, no other content (academic or otherwise) should be presented during this designated time.
- Educate teachers on how to integrate SEL into their curriculum. Rather than making additional work for them, support teachers in seeing the inherent benefits of a SEL-focused, trauma-sensitive classroom. This might mean establishing routines and consistencies with how classes are run, offering the opportunity to retake assessments, and adding questions to already existing projects/assignments about how SEL factors in.
- Teachers can encourage students to work with a partner on a challenging math problem as they work on their social skills, have them reflect on their feelings after a challenging Biology lab to develop their introspective abilities, or ask them to identify the perspective of a character in a novel or history book and make a personal connection to their own experiences to better relate to the curriculum. Rather than reinventing the wheel or taking time out of direct instruction, teachers can creatively weave SEL lessons in their already existing curriculum.
- Weave SEL competencies into culminating assignment rubrics so that students are graded on more than just their academic skills. When students get in the habit of practicing self-reflection and discovery, they are more likely to continue to do so outside of school. Asking students to make personal connections between content and their own lives and interests also makes learning more practical and relevant for students.
- Help students master needed self-help and self-regulation skills. It is one thing to “teach” SEL and it is quite another for students to actually gain SEL skills. Students with the most serious needs will need time and repeated practice and feedback to acquire skills.
- Help build community. Remember SEL does not occur in a vacuum. Students and staff, with guidance, can learn to be better supports for each other. The school counselor could play an important role in fostering a sense of belonging and well-being for each student by helping to build a school culture and community that is inclusive and goes the extra mile to enhance the psychological safety of each member of that community.
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| Implications for Further Work
As many educators know, it can be challenging to implement change on the school- or district-level. However, they needn’t do this alone. School counselors can have a hand in designing school environments that foster the growth of social emotional learning, making its delivery as commonplace as math and literacy instruction. Counselors can collect data on student needs to make the case for a dedicated focus on SEL delivery. The primary role of the school counselor is to advocate for the needs of all students, and all students need educators that are committed to their social emotional growth, especially in a post-pandemic world.
Further resources for how to implement SEL in your school can be found below:
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