By: Mallory Zolinas (IMPACT Member)
The beginning of the school year is a great opportunity to get organized and prepare for the year ahead. If you’re feeling overwhelmed thinking about returning to school and you’re looking for some guidance on how to prepare for the upcoming school year, here are 10 tips for you to try:
1. Self Care
As the saying goes, “you can’t pour from an empty cup.” Just as you teach your students about self-care and coping strategies, make sure you are practicing what you preach by practicing self-care and using coping skills too. Make a list of things you can do to take care of your physical, mental and emotional health and start incorporating these things into your daily routine now so when the school year starts, your healthy habits will already be a part of your schedule. For me, I enjoy reading (or listening to audiobooks), taking walks, listening to podcasts and journaling!
2. Get Organized
Getting set up at the beginning of the year
The beginning of the year is a great time to get organized. Use this time to organize your office space, your filing cabinets, your digital files, etc. Get rid of anything you don’t need. This will make things so much easier when you need to find something for an individual session, group or class lesson or even a meeting!
Decide how you want to keep track of your schedule, meetings, duties, etc. Do you feel like you were not as organized as you could have been last year? Consider if you want to use a paper planner or if you prefer an electronic schedule. I use a combination of both. I have paper copies of my daily schedule that I find easier to make changes to as needed during the day. However, my to-do list is a working google doc that I can keep up on my laptop and edit throughout my day. This is just what works for me so think about what works best for you!
Passwords
Keep all of your important passwords organized in a safe place so you know where to look when you need them (if you don’t save them into your computer).
Paperwork
Make sure you have copies of any important forms ready to go before the first day of school. Forms can include: counseling referral forms, a list of community resources, HIB forms and screening forms (if you are responsible for these roles at your school) etc.
3. Welcome Back Newsletter
At the beginning of the school year I like to send out a newsletter to all families with a reminder of my role, how to get in contact with me, and other counseling related information.
4. New Students
At the beginning of the school year, I get a list of all new students and reach out to the families to welcome them to our district and let them know I am here if they need anything.
New Students Small Group
I also invite all new students to be in a new student group with me (one group per grade level). To make the group more engaging, I created a jeopardy style game show with questions related to my school with questions like “what is the name of the gym teacher,” “what is our school mascot,” etc.
Here’s a blog post from The Helpful Counselor: Fun Ways to Welcome New Students that includes a New Student Autograph Book that I use during my new student group.
5. Referrals
Establishing a School Counseling Referral Process
Does your school have a school counseling referral process/ form? If not, the beginning of the school year is a good time to create a plan and/or form before the referrals start coming in.
How will you keep track of your referrals? Will you use a file in your filing cabinet or store referrals electronically? I’ve been using a google sheets counseling caseload template to keep track of my referrals, caseload as well as counseling logs.
Organization Tools for School Counselors
If you’re not sure where to start in terms of organizing your caseload, check out these Counselor Organization Tools.
6. Separation Anxiety
It’s important to be prepared on how to support families when their child(ren) is/are having a hard time leaving them in the mornings. Check out this free separation anxiety handout from Counselor Station. A good book for separation anxiety is “The Kissing Hand” by Audrey Penn.
7. Class Lesson Topics/ Curriculum Map:
Not sure where to get started with your class lessons? A good starting point is a meet the counselor lesson. I have used the Meet the Counselor Escape Room and I’ve also used the following books: Mrs. Joyce Gives the Best High Fives by Erainna Winnett for upper elementary classes and The Rabbit Listened by Cori Doerrfeld for lower elementary. These are both great books for teaching the role of the counselor in developmentally appropriate ways!
October is Bullying Prevention Awareness Month so possible lesson topics can include: bullying prevention, being an upstander, respect, kindness, etc.
Another good starting point is using this awareness calendar which provides a list of awareness days, weeks and months that you can use as a reference for your lessons.
You can also share a needs assessment with staff or just have teachers reach out with specific topics their class needs help with. (Be careful with this option though because I did this last year and sometimes needed to plan 5-10 different lesson plans).
8. Scheduling Class Lessons:
I have been using SignUpGenius to schedule my class lessons. SignUp Genius is a free website that allows you to customize a schedule that works best for you. I create a Signup Genius then send it out to teachers so they can pick a day/ time that works best for their class.
9. Counseling Library:
Having a list of counseling books can be helpful when planning lessons. I love incorporating books into my counseling sessions, but it can be hard not to want to buy every counseling related book out there. I started using my local library to borrow books for my lessons. This has been a great resource to enhance my lessons instead of using read alouds online (which are great too in a time crunch).
Check out these blog posts to start forming your own counseling library: “Must Have Books in Your School Counseling Library” and “School Counseling YouTube Video Resource Guide”
10. Set goals for yourself:
What are your school counseling goals for the year? Think about what worked last year and what didn’t and set some realistic goals for yourself. For me, my goal is to run more small groups!
And of course you can always reference ASCA’s Back to School: The School Counselor’s Role guide.
Have a great school year!
