How to Use Attendance Data to Form School Counseling Groups

Listen to the full episode below: 

Attendance is important. You may be surprised to learn that even a small number of days missed can put students at risk of struggling academically. Even though we know it’s important, sometimes it can feel like we’re fighting an uphill battle when it comes to improving attendance for students who struggle. Beyond offering incentives, what more can we as counselors do to help? 

In today’s episode, we are talking about how to use attendance data to support students. As counselors, we need to do a little work to uncover why students are missing school and then intentionally address those issues.

This crucial information helps us form groups and create individualized programs that can improve attendance and give our students a better chance for academic success. When you’re able to show parents, teachers, and administrators how your counseling program is impacting student attendance, they will become some of your biggest fans.

Being a school counselor can be lonely at times, and it’s important to make sure you aer getting the support you need. I’d love to have you join us in IMPACT, my school counseling membership program. It’s an awesome community where you’ll receive monthly curriculum plans, ready-to-download resources, and video implementation guides…everything you need to best support your students and make your counseling life just a little bit easier!

We have a fun and active Facebook group where we all hang out and collaborate and do fun giveaways and challenges. We do Facebook live and Zoom calls every month where we all get together kind of like a round table, troubleshoot tough cases, and pick each other's brains. It's a lot of fun! If this sounds like something you need or something you're interested in, send me a message on Instagram or head over to stressfreeschoolcounseling.com/impact.

Some topics covered in this episode are:

  • Importance of attendance and how you can use attendance data to help come up with the services you’ll provide to support students

  • Difference between services provided data and student progress data and why you need to collect both types

  • The 3 primary categories for conceptualizing data and some examples of each

  • Tips for digging deeper to find out why attendance is an issue for students and ways to address those problems

  • Using a data wall to display your outcome data so parents, teachers, and admins can see how your counseling program is impacting students

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More About School Counseling Simplified:

School Counseling Simplified is a podcast offering easy to implement strategies for busy school counselors. The host, Rachel Davis from Bright Futures Counseling, shares tips and tricks she has learned from her years of experience as a school counselor both in the US and at an international school in Costa Rica.

You can listen to School Counseling Simplified on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and more!

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