Summary
This semester I have been at Blythe-Bower Elementary School. In my experience I have had the busiest season of my life in the job as a school counselor. The elementary school experience has also been the most growth-oriented experience I have had so far. Since the start of the semester my mentor and I have filled out roughly 25 DCS reports, called crisis response four times, had countless individual sessions with students, and lead classroom discussions on empathy and growth mindset. My mentor has been working at Blythe-Bower for the past 15 years. She is responsible for a little over 630 students this year which make up over 28 individual classrooms. Her high volume of students and number of classrooms make it difficult to circulate to all classrooms and makes our position more of a reactionary as we respond to student referrals and crisis moments. We also run group counseling during lunch time when we have time and run a student of the month program. We are also responsible for the school healthy program, which helps us to give the teachers resources for self-care.
Personal Reactions
Thus far, I have been adjusting my mindset to an entirely different student population than I have experienced previously. This is the first time in my internship experiences where I have felt stretched outside of my comfort zone. In middle and high schools, I find it easier to connect with students and create meaningful relationships. I had to really open myself up the experience in elementary school and get down to the level of elementary school students. In all honesty it took me a couple weeks to find the sweet spot. To change my thinking and the language I chose to approach the students with. I do still find myself correct word choice when talking with a student, and I also make sure they have an understanding of the words I am using in a moment. Now that I have really bought into the elementary school, I love it. I feel as though I am actually a school counselor now. Whether that is because my mentor has put a larger amount of trust on me to do my job or if I found if it is because I found my niche with the students, I feel like I am actually doing the job. At GOAL Academy I knew how to connect with the students. It didn’t force me to learn to connect with students in different ways. This experience in the elementary school makes me feel like I have found the missing piece to the passion I have to be a school counselor. I almost felt like an over-qualified youth leader when I was at GOAL. Now I feel like a professional and capable. I feel like I am able to emotionally connect with all of my student this experience. This is a new experience for me, and honestly it is exhausting. I have felt small amount of empathy fatigue and the weekend is my times to recharge. I am not discounting my experience at GOAL, but I feel like my experiences are really building on each other and I am feeling ready to graduate and take on the role myself in a school.
Integrations of ASCA Model
So far at Blythe-Bower we have done mostly of delivery of services for students. We have done a lot of direct counseling services as well. We are also currently working on an assessment tool for a specific classroom in the school. We have been having reports from a student of another student threatening to hurt fellow classmates. However, a lie was revealed recently, and we are beginning to question whether these claims are true. So we developed an assessment about finding out if other students are scared and have heard these claims themselves being made. We are hoping that the assessment will reveal the truth about these claims and whether we need to take further steps with the student saying being want to hurt classmates.
Counseling Theory
I have been using a lot of solution focused brief therapy techniques, such as scaling questions. I have also been using some of John Gottman’s emotional coaching and Sue Johnson’s emotional focused therapy techniques with students. I know that a lot of elementary school students do not have the emotional vocabulary that they need to communicate what is going on inside themselves. I try to affirm all emotions I see and help them to label them. I have also been incorporating a lot of dialectal behavioral therapy techniques. I try to incorporate mindfulness into every session I have with students so that they have tools to use when they begin to feel overwhelmed at times. The final theory that I have been really focused on is psychodynamic that is incorporated into art and play therapy. I use mediums of drawing, water color, play dough, dolls, games, and Legos to counsel students on a daily basis.
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