Counseling Skills Reflection

Based on my peer review from Tape 1 I feel that I am where I thought I would be.  Recording myself is never a fun thing for me to do, let alone when it is a recording of a counseling session where I know it will be listened to and reviewed!  I am gaining a little more confidence now but I truly do not think I will be fully confident in myself until I am actually working in a counseling position on a daily basis.  I know that I need improvement but I feel that is expected at this stage.  I would like to improve my questioning abilities and just knowing when and what to ask.  I would also like to improve my knowledge on knowing which theories to use in various types of sessions.  The main way to continue to improve is to keep counseling and having individual sessions.  I feel that I will improve with practice.  I also need to study more on the theories so that I will be aware of which theory to put into practice with my sessions.  I also feel that the Practicum class sessions help with my improvement.  We have the opportunity to discuss with our professor and fellow classmates and to listen to individual sessions as well.  I am not exactly sure when I will know that I have improved other than when I feel that my time spent with the students is being beneficial to them and they are improving.  I think the best way to measure how I am doing is to see how the students that I am counseling are doing.  The class can help me to improve and reach my goals by providing and sharing what is working for them.  It also helps to have others to talk to about what is confusing me and hope that they can provide some insight to what I am struggling with.

Classroom guidance lesson

Overview of activity:  I focused on an early elementary guidance lesson dealing with personal/social development.  This lesson focuses on having students identify a variety of feelings.

Purpose:  Through this lesson students will acquire the knowledge, attitudes and interpersonal skills to help them understand and respect self and others. 

Intervention Level:  Prevention

Age group/grade:  K-2

Materials needed:  a bag, 10 note cards with names or pictures of different feelings, drawing/writing paper

Activity: 

1.       (10 minutes)   Counselor explains that 10 students will have a chance to pull a feeling from the fancy feelings bag. The student is to act out the feeling on the card. The class will have 3 tries to guess the feeling being acted out.  Students listen to the directions. Chosen students will pull a feeling from the bag, and act it out. Counselor should help students having difficulty reading card and/or thinking of acting ideas. Class guesses.  After each role-play, counselor asks students for suggestions of when people might feel that way.  Students offer examples.

2.      (2 minutes) Explain that every person has many different feelings, and not all people will feel the same way in the same situations.  This is okay because our feelings are our own…which makes them all ok.

3.      (10 minutes)  Students will be given drawing/writing paper in which they will be instructed to draw a picture that illustrates how they are feeling that day and to write a sentence explaining their feeling. 

4.      (10 minutes)  Once students have been given time to complete their drawings and sentence they can have time to share them with the class.  This can be done as a whole group or in small groups.

5.      (2 minutes)  Conclude lesson by having students discuss why it is important for people to know about different kinds of feelings.

Follow up activities with the class:  As a follow up activity on feelings I will extend this lesson.  I will have students circulate the room as music plays.   When the music is stopped, students form pairs by turning to the person closest to them. The counselor calls out a feeling (use cards from previous lesson) and the pair shares with each other a time when they have felt that way. The music starts and they circulate the room again and the process is repeated several times.  After activity students will be asked to identify similarities and differences in feelings shared.

Contingency plan:  If time is limited or if I find myself running short on time then students can complete their drawings and sentence during the next class period.  They can have time to share these at the next class as well.  If I have extra time then more students can have a turn drawing a feeling note card from the fancy feelings bag and act it out as students guess.

If I had a magic wand

If I had a magic wand and could change one thing in the school system it would be to increase the number of educators working in the school system.  There have been so many budget cuts in recent years that many people in the education field have to double up on their responsibilities and duties in the school.  If there were more teachers, counselors and administrators then reaching all students would be feasible. 

This change would influence a counselor’s job by allowing the counselor to focus on spending time actually counseling students and less time completing administrative duties.  The counselor at the elementary school that I have been at is also the gifted and talented teacher so her duties and time are split.  If there were more employees then the counselor could focus on individual and group counseling as well and spending more time in the classrooms teaching guidance lessons.   I am not sure how much influence I would have on this change in my building considering I am not an employee.  The schools have a set budget and have to hire accordingly.  I look forward to the day when schools are able to hire the amount of employees they need to better serve the students.