Starting Groups

Entering the world of school counseling, one of my greatest interests is in facilitating groups. There are endless possibilities for potential groups and it is a key way to be able to serve multiple students. However, I entered an internship site where there are no groups currently in place.

Bummer dude.

So what have I done? Well, besides talking about how I want to have at least one group at my site, I will begin a Girls Lunch Group this week! I am uncertain on if it was because I was an intern and had limited time or if it was because there has not been a group at this site in who knows how long, but this has been an intense process. With a plan of intention, and multiple conversations involving both my counseling supervisor and our administration, I have finally reached the point where I have approval, a few participants and a plan to proceed!

I am excited to provide an opportunity to build relationships and inner resilience with these students. I will keep you updates on how the group goes but for now I'm wondering what group experience you have and have stuck with you?

Intentionally Incorporating Careers

I have been incredibly fortunate to be invited to present with my peers and professor at Idaho School Counselor Association's Annual Conference this past week. Our presentation focuses on incorporating career guidance into the elementary level and was an updated version of a presentation we facilitated at the Washington School Counselor Association Conference last year.

We discussed different strategies and techniques to better incorporate a career focus into the school counseling program. These strategies primarily included becoming more intentional about using "career" as a category. For example, one of the activities we presented was the game Scattegories. In this game you have participants think of as many things as possible within a category that start with a specified letter. At ISCA we played a round where participants worked in team to come up and write down as many careers as they could think of that begin with the letter "N" within 2 minutes. The true exposure to different careers comes when you go around the room and everyone reads off their lists. Once a career has been stated, everyone with that career crosses it off. The final "winner" is the group with the most answers left. This encourages students to be creative and realize that there can be a lot of career options in the world.

We used the same strategy of intentionally focusing on careers for other "games" as well. Between the two presentations we altered the following games:

• Get to know the class Bingo - Find Someone who is an Expert on... 
• 2 Truths and a lie - Have each student pick a career that they get to research and use the 2 Truths format as a way to present the information. 
• Would you Rather - Question Handout
• Alphabet game - Come up with a career for each letter. See who can be most creative/fastest.

  

  Found Here

We also suggested strategies such as creating a "Career Library" where the books are all about different careers, or working with math teachers to do a lesson on how much different careers make.

There are many options for integrating careers, and I would love to hear what you do in the comments below!