Oops where did #tbt go? I wanted to share this Girls Group post from the old blog. I just wrapped this group and am hoping to gather permission from parents to post the awesome video my girls made about relational aggression after finishing the book. In the meantime, here's what we did in our book club:

Oh, girl drama. We've lived it and now sometimes we live surrounded by it. If you're a school counselor, you spend at least a portion of every day dealing with girl drama. This is such a difficult topic to manage. Some days, I can remember that this is preparing our young girls for all the relationships that they will have as adolescents and adults. Other days, I just want to scream "Get over it! You'll be friends tomorrow!" Just kidding. Sort of. 

While I have certainly implemented many mediation and conflict resolution interventions, I was looking for something that would teach new relationship skills and allow for real change. Enter the book club! My good friend, Angela Poovey, over at Life on the Fly, really introduced me to the book club concept and I love it. 
I used the book The Girls by Amy Goldman Koss. In this group, we read a portion of the book and discuss the implications of the selection. We begin each lesson with a youtube video that relates to what we read previously. I put all the videos on a playlist here. 

To begin, I assigned each girl in the group a character. They each received a piece of paper with the character's name on top and two columns: What they think, What others think. Here they wrote the impressions their character had about the other girls and what the other girls thought about their character. It was really great to see each student grab their pen and add to their paper while I was reading. I think that the character pages helped the girls in the group to really connect to the characters and relate to the story. It also kept them paying attention!


To end the group, we used a technique that I picked up doing the Bullying Specialist professional development through ASCA. In this technique, I empowered each of the girls to use resources to research ways to handle a fictitious problem. In my district, we use google docs. I created a google doc with different bullying resources and assigned one to each student. Outside of group, they researched their resource and input ideas for how to handle our fictitious problem. We then discussed their resources and ideas in the group. 

You can check out all the lesson plans below (may not be visible on mobile). I hope that you find it helpful!

PS - Teachers LOVE book clubs because they incorporate reading skills and using resources to research a problem is so Common Core :) Have fun!

It's the last week before winter break and I think we're all feeling a little..... ready for break. Staff morale is a tricky thing and I think school counselors are in a perfect spot to help the school with a little pick me up. This year I have started a Staff Shout Out slide show. Staff members can email me with their shout outs for others. We used to have a shout out box but no one ever remembered to put anything in, email is so much easier! I create a slide show using Keynote on my iPad. The nice thing about keynote is that you can easily add music and make it autoplay. It's like a little shout out movie! For the December staff meeting, I created one with a holiday theme and holiday music in the background. Each slideshow takes about 5 minutes. It's a really fun way to lift the spirits at the beginning of a staff meeting! What do you do in your school to boost staff morale?

I am the keeper of the behavior contracts at my school. Each morning my office fills with 7-15 friends who need some support with behavior. They come each day to give me their contract from the day before and get their new contract for the day. I love this because it allows me to check in with them, see how their day is starting, and build a personal connection. Over the years I have amassed quite a variety of different types of charts and contracts. 

How it works:

• A teacher contacts me requesting a behavior contract for a student. Sometimes this is something they are requesting on their own but it may also come from our Student Support Team process or the administrators.
• I ask the teacher which areas of behavior they would like to focus on. For younger students, I suggest two behaviors and for older students no more than four. Sometimes there is a long discussion about choosing attainable, observable behaviors. 
• I also ask the teacher to give me the order of their day to include. For some students, they need the day broken into many parts and for others they might need only a few different times to focus on.
• I meet with the student to go over the contract and to spell out the behavior expectations. For instance, if the teacher has chosen "be kind to others," we might list what being kind would look like.
• In the first week, we are mostly focusing on getting used to keeping up with the contract and building buy-in for the process. With this in mind, I start at expecting about 50% of the points or checks on the contract and increase over time. Eventually, I would expect 80% of checks to earn a reward.
• Students choose their reward from a rewards menu that I have posted. They can choose an "everyday" reward or a "save up reward." If the student chooses a save up reward, they have to earn their contract 4 days (non consecutively) to earn the reward. To keep up with everybody, I use little post-its with tallies. 
• Students and teachers are responsible for remembering to come to me in the morning. I keep daily attendance on an attendance sheet. If I notice a student hasn't come in a few days, I will check with the teacher to see if they have been absent or are just forgetting and will make a plan if needed.
• When a student consistently earns their contract every day, I check with the teacher to see if they need to continue. If they don't, we have a "graduation" and I give the student a certificate and show them off to the office staff. They love to say they have graduated and feel so proud of themselves.
• At the end of a semester or before Student Support Team meetings, I create a progress monitoring graph using an excel file that shows the percentage of points or checks earned each day. Excel also creates a trendline in the graph that captures how the student is progressing overall. This is really helpful information for deciding if a contract is effective. Sometimes when we're in the trenches dealing with a difficult behavior, it's hard to see the improvement that is happening over time.

To help you get started on your behavior contract journey, I have created a Behavior Chart Bundle over on my Teachers Pay Teachers store! The bundle includes 15 different types of behavior charts and an excel file to use for progress monitoring. For all my lovely blog readers, you can have a copy of my rewards chart right here for FREE!