Stay Focused

See the trees AND the forest.

Ever hear the expression, “Don’t miss the forest for the trees!” and wonder what that means? When it comes to school counseling, we can sometimes get so focused on an individual student’s issues/needs that we miss the bigger picture. For example, we might have a student who failed Algebra 1 multiple times and ask ourselves what is going on for that student. If we widen our lens, we might see that our ten off-track/off-cohort students have all failed Algebra 1 with the same teacher (which would require a teacher-level intervention rather than a student-level focus).

Digging into data and applying targeted interventions is only possible if we can easily isolate a student group with something in common. In addition to tracking your individual student’s progress toward graduation requirements, it’s a good idea to have a bigger picture of how the entire graduation cohort is doing so you can identify patterns of concern AND be able to respond to administrator’s questions such as “How are our seniors looking for graduation?" or “How many of our seniors need this class?”. One experienced counselor uses micro individual electronic checklists AND a macro cohort checklist, linking the two by dropping hyperlinks for individual checklists into the group checklist.