Hatching Your School Counseling Program

On October 31, 2017, I attended a professional development conference held at the Pomona Unified School District. The conference’s material was presented by Dr. Trish Hatch and Danielle Duarte, which was called Hatching Your School Counseling Program. One of the workshop’s objectives was that school counselors will be prepared to share results of curriculum presentations and interventions with staff and school board. As a current fieldwork student at the PUSD, it was important that I attended this professional growth opportunity because it gave me important insight on the direction in which the district is moving towards and will enable me to support this shift by aligning my future work to meet our new district standards.

A significant portion of this professional development centered around flashlight presentations and marketing. The counseling techniques that were taught during this conference would be extremely useful when school counselors are scheduled to present to school staff or the school board. As we all know, school counselors have numerous responsibilities. One of those responsibilities is presenting our lessons’ results to multiple stakeholders. During this conference, Dr. Hatch focused on teaching Tier 1: Core Curriculum Action Plans K – 12. Each grade level contained the following information: core lesson content, curriculum, ASCA Domain/Mindset, projection start/end date, and evaluation methods. An important aspect of the material that was covered during this conference was how are results measured. Due to the partnership between PUSD and CCGI, the evaluation method was tailored to PUSD’s specific needs, but can also be replicated and used with other districts who are partnered with CCGI. Dr. Hatch explained that the results could be evaluated differently depending on grade level. Since there were numerous ways to evaluate results, I have attached a list that identifies various methods to measure your results by grade level. Furthermore, Danielle emphasized the importance of creating flashlight presentations so that school counselors can present their results to stakeholders. Multiple flashlights were presented, and a flashlight rating scale rubric was given to all school counselors. The significance of the flashlight presentation training was that we learned that the presentations can be used to demonstrate how the school counselors work is aligned to LCAP, Strategic Plans, and Student Outcomes. When implementing these counseling techniques, one should be mindful that the results may not always reflect growth in a certain area; however, the results can be used to advocate for additional services for students and/or highlight the steps that are being taken to meet the needs of the students. Moving forward, I plan on using these skills to market my school counseling program and to showcase the work that the school counseling team and I have been doing. 

-Jonathan Flores 

CCGI Lesson Action Plans