How Do You Assess Students?

I don't know about you, but assessing the effectiveness of my program, specifically classroom guidance lessons, has always been difficult for me. I know how to do it, it's just hard to do with 1100 students and not spend all your time tallying pre/posts tests. Google Docs would be a fantastic way to do pre/post tests with my students, however, we don't have a class set of tablets for me to use during my lessons, and scheduling a computer lab is difficult. With these road blocks I was getting frustrated and felt like giving up. Until I heard about GradeCam in a staff meeting!

GradeCam is a program that uses a camera (either installed on your computer as a document camera or the camera on your tablet) to score tests. It is honestly a life saver! All you need to do is create a free account on GradeCam's website, upload your class rosters (which sounds hard, but these can be easily accessed through your student information system and literally takes two minutes to do), and create your test/quiz/pre/post test. GradeCam will generate an answer sheet for each student in the class you choose and all you have to do is hand it out to the students. I usually have the teacher do this so it saves time. Once the students complete the answer sheet (bubble in their answers) you collect them and one by one stick them underneath the camera. GradeCam will automatically score each students answer sheet and generate several reports for you. BOOM, your assessment of how well your lesson went is done in 15 minutes! You can do all this on your computer, or do it on your tablet through the app. It has been a game changer for me. Below are several screen shots to give you an idea of what it does:

 

This is the dashboard when you first login,

 

This is the average score of the students taking the test. You can filter this by all students or by class.

 This will give you the item analysis of each question.

A sample form. If you select a class, it will put each kids name on it and generate a four digit code for them.

It's a few steps to get it set up, but once you do, it saves you SO much time. I can't wait to utilize it even more this year.

How do you assess your program and your students progress? What tools do you use? Please share below!

#ASCA14

It's been several days, and I'm still trying to come down from the #ASCA14 high! This was the first time I have attended an ASCA conference, and it was AMAZING! If you've never gone, I highly encourage you to. I didn't know anyone going, and ended up meeting several people and getting so much information to take back to my school. If you haven't downloaded the conference app, you should. So many presenters put their presentations on the app.

Every workshop I attended was awesome! I got some great ideas for branding and marketing my school counseling program (i.e. I am going to ask if our counseling department can have a Twitter account). The presenters made an excellent point: many times we only have one shot with the kids so we need to be on our game.

I also got some great ideas from Barb Micucci's presentation Work Smarter, Not Harder. I loved the idea of having a parent book club but only have them meet twice. Once to introduce the book and then once to wrap it up.

I also got some great ideas from the Data Driven School Counseling program. I can't wait to start collecting data to prove my effectiveness. Dr. Z made an excellent point: we have to do interventions that address the underlying problem, not what the data is showing. The data might be showing low reading scores among boys, but we need to find out what the underlying issues are that are keeping the boys from achieving and address that. Mind. Blown.

The First Lady's speech was amazing. Being in the room while she was speaking was an experience I will never forget. To have someone with her visibility advocating for us is incredible. I walked away from her speech revitalized and energized to get to work! If you weren't able to hear her speech, you can read a transcript here.

Also, I've added so many books to my summer reading this. Stedman Graham challenged us in his keynote to read one hour a night about something you love or your passionate about. I'm going to take on that challenge by reading these books:

Masterminds and Wingmen by Rosalind Wiseman (also at our conference and was AMAZING!)
You Can Make It Happen by Stedman Graham
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck
Mistakes I Made at Work by Jessica Bacal
Hatching Results by Trish Hatch

I've got a lot to do, but after attending ASCA 14 I'm much more energized to do it! Can't wait until #ASCA15 in Phoenix!

Were you at #ASCA14? Share what you learned below. If you were #notatasca14, what's on your reading list this summer?

Brushing the Dust Off!

I can't believe I've neglected this blog for as long as I have. I'm committed to changing that. I want to connect with other school counselors and be a part of the wonderful PLN that is developing. Plus, this school year, I am going to begin the process of creating a comprehensive school counseling program at my school, and this blog is going to be my way of holding myself accountable. Stick around, it's going to be challenging, but so worth it!

First, though, I'm excited about the ASCA National Conference in Orlando! This will be my first time attending the national conference, and I am beyond excited. I can't wait to learn new things and network with amazing counselors across the country!! If you're going, let me know. I won't know ANYONE there and I'd love to meet up and have someone to venture into the parks with as I'm a HUGE DISNEY FAN!

To prepare for the conference, I've been doing some research. I've read blog posts about preparing from awesome counselors such as The Counseling Geek and Andrea Burston. I've also watched the School Counselor On Air Google Hangout on preparing for the conference. If you're going and haven't watched or read these yet, I highly recommend you do! I feel so much more prepared!

I'll post more once I get to the conference, but for now, I must pack!

Follow me on Twitter @ms_counselor02. Let me know if you're going to #ASCA14!

R & R

I hope everyone's Thanksgiving break was restful and happy. I don't know about you, but I definitely needed a break to recharge my batteries. No matter how hard we try to fight it, sometimes negativity and the super fast paced nature of our jobs can weigh us down. If we don't take some time for ourselves (and many of us don't because we are too busy taking care of everything  and everyone else) we won't be useful or helpful to anyone.

I was able to recharge by spending time with my large family and getting my house decorated for the Christmas holiday. This is my favorite time of year; the magic and joy of the holidays seem to rub off on everyone!

How do you recharge your batteries?

Election Day Reflections

Happy Election Day! I hope everyone has exercised one of the greatest rights afforded to us by our Constitution, the freedom to chose our leader!

As my husband and I are sitting here watching the results of the election start to come in, I started thinking about the results of something extremely important in my work, our Needs Assessment. One of the first things I noticed after we completed our Needs Assessments with our students was we needed a divorce group for students. A large number of our students were dealing with the divorce or separation of their parents and a small group seemed to be the best way to address those issues. After scouring several counseling blogs and online resources, I created my own curriculum for a small group for divorce. I used several books (which are referenced in the curriculum) which I think create a fairly straightforward group for 6-8 grade students. I am in the middle of implementing this small and group and the students are really engaging in the sessions. I'm really excited about how the students are responding and can't wait to share evaluation data from it! For my Divorce Group Curriculum, click here.

As I meet with teachers once a week to discuss student issues (which gives invaluable information and will be discussed in another post) another need has presented itself; an organization group. I'm currently looking for resources to create this group fairly quickly, as I'd like to get it started ASAP. So anyone with ideas, please share!

Welcome to my Counseling Blog

Welcome to my little space in the blogosphere!

I decided to start this blog to connect with other school counselors and share ideas. I've searched the internet for resources specific to middle school counseling and did not find many. Hopefully this blog will help other middle school counselors find resources/ideas. Stay tuned, I have a lot planned!