What I have learned so far

Hello all!

It is hard to believe the leaves are already starting to turn! The return to fall for school social workers is always a mad dash, and I thought I would take the opportunity to reflect on the past couple of months.

I went to a really incredible conference this summer, hosted by the Family and School Partnership Program of Loyola University at Chicago. I learned about being the school social worker I want to be, and was given incredibly valuable tools to add to my skills and practice. I also started work on a fun new project, but more about that below.

A lot has changed at my school, with a brand new principal and some restructuring of special education. I have had the chance to put into place a number of new practices to better collect data, build my caseload and serve students. Here are the top four things I'm working on incorporating in my second (kind of third?) year of practice:

1. Work smart not hard when it comes to data collection. I feel like as school social workers, we are frequently preoccupied with proving our worth or success with data. This can feel harrowing for those of us who feel like we are constantly looking for the right kind of data, and so we search for just the right assessment instrument to show exactly how and what we are doing is helping. It is important, however, to employ secondary data appropriately to demonstrate one's success. Did your student's attendance or grades improve after you started working with them? Did he or she have fewer office referrals? These are excellent ways to show how your work is affecting your students. I intend to look for more data that is already being collected and use it to show my efficacy, rather than relying solely on what information I personally can glean.

2. That being said, a helpful assessment is a helpful assessment. Sometimes, you just want a clear picture of what is going on with your students, and you want to know if your work is concretely carrying over to the classroom or at home. I have started using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire or SDQ. It's a reasonable length (25 questions plus an optional supplement), it's evidenced based, and it's free. What's not to love? Oh, and there are versions that cover children from age 3 to 16. And it comes in almost every language imaginable. Check it out.

3. Give kids a chance to prove their need to be on your caseload. I did a thing this year that I probably should have done last year and simply released all my non-IEP students off of my caseload at the beginning of the year. Some (about a half dozen) have already come back, but now there is an official referral process I have put in place with quantitative and qualitative data required in order for students to become a part of my official caseload. For those of us who have students who genuinely just need outside counseling and aren't adequately served by seeing the school social worker, but are functional in the school building, this one is for you. Take care of yourself and your practice, and move those kids off your caseload until there's proof that they need to come back.

4. Finally, stop pretending that you need to operate on an island. I am trying to embrace teamwork more this year than I have in the past. If something needs to get done for a student in the classroom, I start by consulting with teachers instead of jumping right in. It is hard for social workers of all stripes to walk the line between being helpful and being saviors. We are always a resource and a help; in the words of one of my best graduate school professors, however, we can't fix anyone. If something needs doing, try to grab some colleagues before getting it done.

To this last point, I may not post again for quite a while. I am going to start writing and editing with Professor Michael Kelly from Loyola University Chicago over at www.schoolsocialwork.net, which was created by Illinois school social worker Scott Carchedi. We are looking for contributors to write about school social work and school mental health. If you or someone you know may be interested, please reach out! I would love to hear from you. I will be writing reviews of new programs and tools for practice that I implement, reflecting on practice and bringing together more resources for all of us to use in schools.

Until later,
Ms. OJ

Motivation and The Power of Yet

Hello dear readers!

Long time no post! It is warm out, the sun is shining (okay, not right this minute, but in general) and the kids are basically dying to be on summer break. It feels like a good time to reflect on the past couple of months. 

I have been thinking a great deal recently about motivation to change and grow. This was brought on by a student who told me about a month ago that he didn't "want to get better." 

I won't go into detail as there are coworkers of mine who read this blog, but essentially this student has been struggling for some time to develop a more positive self-image. He makes some not-so-good choices and really beats himself up for it regularly. I asked him why he didn't want to get better, and he said that healing makes him feel scared. That the unknown and uncertainty of feeling better and more positive about himself was scarier than the reliable familiarity of feeling rock-bottom.  We have talked, I have learned how to help build him up and how to help him calm down. But through it all, I have worried that we were getting nowhere. It felt like every time we took three steps forward, we took two back.

We have continued to talk. I have been something of a broken record, telling him to patiently await a feeling of confidence in his ability to manage feeling well. I have told him there would be no "ah-ha!" moment, but instead a slow growing feeling of comfort with self-confidence.  

Recently he left me a note that said that he now wants to see life "from a new perspective." The note was a series of song lyrics I wasn't familiar with, and he explained that the point was that he wanted to find a way to see himself and his life from a positive angle. Essentially, that he now wanted to "get better," or was now motivated to change. 

This was wonderful, but truly seemed to come out of nowhere. Not unlike inspiration, it is almost magical the way motivation can strike my students. Who will ever know what exactly got through or changed his mind or wormed its way into his subconscious and convinced him that positive self-image was his idea. It almost doesn't matter. At the end of the day, he has found his motivation, and it has come from within him. This is simultaneously the most rewarding and frustrating part of my experience in working with my students. I really succeed when they cease giving me credit and start adopting the skills I have taught as their own. 

As often happens, I found comfort in muppets.

I was reminded this week of a recent Sesame Street clip featuring the undeniably perfect Janelle Monae. The clip is a song called The Power of Yet, and it is, perhaps obviously, about the power of the word "yet." We can change the entire meaning of a sentence with yet. "I can't do it," turns into "I can't do it yet." Through song and dance, Monae gives us a message we can easily pass on to our kids. And it's crucial in terms of maintaining any motivation in the work we do with our students, too. Just because my student was having a hard time feeling good about himself didn't ever mean he was doomed. It's all just a matter of "yet." 

Our elementary special ed and speech staff put together a presentation of student work around the Power of Yet that was displayed to parents last night. It showed drawings of different activities students were not yet capable of doing, but above them were written encouraging sentences like "I can't multiply fractions yet," or "I can't rollerblade yet." I did a re-teach of the concept to a couple students yesterday, and you could tell by the way they talked about it that they were re-framing things they have always thought of as deficits. 

I hope that you can remember that, even at the end of the year, there is still a lot of power in the word "yet." Our kids haven't mastered some of these skills yet, they haven't been consistently performing on tests yet. But there's still time, and all we can do is keep helping and watching and waiting for them to grow.

-Ms. OJ

Matt and Molly and Another School Counseling Blog

Hi folks!

Ah yes, February. You long, slow, cold month, you. I will not miss you, but still I learned so much.

Just a couple quick things for you this time around.

First, a review of a curriculum I like so much!

Purposeful self disclosure time: this is my first year working with students that are this young. Prior to Giles, I worked almost exclusively with the high school set. Interestingly, I have learned that many counselors, if they had their druthers, would also be working with one age group or another but have had to become flexible in their preferences as their careers progress. But in any case, I walked into this job very, very new to the lower elementary kids, and even newer to the pre-school students with whom I work.

Enter Matt and Molly.

Matt and Molly are puppets who are also characters in a series of social narratives. They play with each other, their families and their friends. They also learn very simple lessons that translate very well to the pre-school environment. Their stories can be manipulated in several ways to provide students with an enriched learning experience, and to practice those key social skills that can be hard to pick up for our students on the Autism spectrum. Personally, I like the puppets a lot and use them as characters to tell stories, role play and review good behavior choices with students. If you are not a puppet person, however, the curriculum can still do a lot for you.

Matt and Molly are most useful for me with the much younger students, but they can be adapted for older grades quite easily. I have also used them in all of our general education kindergarten rooms mostly as puppets that role play, tell stories and teach important skills (eg. belly breathing and making up with friends). Check them out!

Second, a blog I have found useful!

Marissa Rex is someone whose blog I now have bookmarked because I really enjoy the resources and samples she posts. And they're FREE! She is an elementary school counselor who has some nice creative tips for those who work with the younger set. I did a Me-card activity with Kindergarten and 1st graders recently, as a means of learning more about them and them getting to share about themselves as a tool for friendship-making. I then played a simplified version of the game she discusses in that activity. The kids loved it, truly.

That's the update for now. Happy spring!
-Ms.OJ

Talking to kids about families and the Mad Monster

Long time no post!

I have been in the fog of the start of the new year, and as such it has taken me until now to post about the books and activities and other good stuff I am using with the kids over at Giles. It's been a great couple of weeks, and the students have finally settled back in to most of their routines.

I thought I would share two things that were successful in the past month, and give you a link to a book I really like.

First, back to before winter break. Two days before school let out, I was in a 4th grade classroom having been charged with the task of talking to children about families. I was supplementing the health textbook, which asks that we explain the ways that families can change, and gives the examples of divorce, birth of a sibling and death of a pet. The teacher was concerned in part because of the make up of her students. A little over half of the kids in her room are from families that are what I prefer to call non-nuclear. Many of them had experienced divorce, including one student whose parents are in the midst of the divorce process right now. She was concerned that bringing up the topics of family changes may be difficult or marginalizing for many of these students, and wanted my help discussing it with her kids.

I thought about this the way I imagine many social workers would. The curriculum calls for a discussion of families, and many of these students have probably at one point or another experienced some amount of pain, sadness or emotional discomfort regarding how their families have changed. So why not normalize family change? Talk about it in a way that makes it feel like they can share what they have felt because they will be understood.

I put together a lesson plan that used the concept of the family tree, in the sense of a cartoon tree with family members listed as different branches. Instead of just family trees, however, I used the idea of a "family forest." The students each got one tree to start with, but I explained that family trees are different from regular trees, because when a branch falls from a family tree, sometimes it makes a new tree all its own. That is how we get family forests. When branches leave our family tree and make new trees, we collect them together in the intricate way that human family is created. This is our own, dense family forest.

Some of the children really seemed to light up when I talked about their families this way. They were excited to add new trees to their forests and to show how big and beautiful their families are. I recommend finding ways like this to help students who may need assistance reframing their experiences and improving their outlook. Sometimes just changing the discussion a little and normalizing their lived experience is all it takes to really improve a kid's day.

Shifting gears a little bit, I wanted to share another great book I've been using. It's time to talk about the Mad Monster.

The Mad Monster comes out of this really great book called Sometimes I Like to Fight but I Don't Do It Much Anymore. It's a long title and long book, and it's all about a boy named Douglas who needs help dealing with anger.

I happened upon this book a few months ago in a thrift store when I was picking up a ton of social-emotional learning books for my room. It was a total gem of a find, as I have been working closely with a student this year who struggles significantly with anger management.

Douglas is introduced to the Mad Monster by his school social worker (ha!). The Mad Monster is the "thing that makes us mad at people who are just trying to help us." It is the part of us that says something snide to our significant other when they make a helpful suggestion or the voice inside some kids who mouth off to a parent that tells them to do their homework. Douglas' social worker says he should direct his anger at the Mad Monster instead of those people who care for him, and try punching a pillow or a blanket to show the Mad Monster just how mad he is.

I have started implementing this with my aforementioned student. When he comes to my office we talk a little bit about who might have made him mad that day, and while he talks I give him the chance to punch a pillow or stuffed animal. We work through why he is feeling this way, and I have gently started helping him redirect this anger at the Mad Monster inside him. He now requests the pillow or stuffed animal before we start talking, and is gradually getting used to the Mad Monster as a focus point. I think the symbolism is really helping him start manage his more abstract anger as well, and it's a nice coping mechanism for him. I definitely recommend the book for any student who needs help with anger and aggression.

That's all for now! Will post again soon.

Take care,
-Ms. OJ

Sesame Street's New Character Julia

Happy holidays to all!

At this time of year, it can be hard to focus on anything other than wrapping things up or moving things along. Fortunately, I was able to attend a professional development course today, which always forces me to slow down and really concentrate on one aspect of practice.

The course was on developing and deepening learning opportunities for preschool children on the Autism spectrum, and (most helpfully for me) included lots of visual and tactile ways to integrate curricula for students who may not respond as readily to the spoken word. There were tons of excellent resources offered to me during this session, which I will dig into a little deeper in a week or two. First though, something else that is exciting!

During the presentation I was reminded of a wonderful new addition to Sesame Street as of late. Her name is Julia, and she is the show's first autistic muppet. She is lovely, and her struggles are very reminiscent of many of my students. Julia has difficulty making eye contact, responding to questions and sometimes talks a little too loudly. She is funny and she likes to play with Elmo and Abby. Most of all, she is a normal and special kid.

Not only did Sesame Street introduce this new character, but they have also developed excellent resources for parents and siblings of children with Autism. There are also videos that can also be used for basic social narratives of daily routines with the youngest students.

May the warmth of this character bring a little joy into your holiday season!

-Ms. OJ

RtI vs. MTSS: Education alphabet soup!

Something new is going on at Giles this year that is being echoed in schools around the country.

RtI, or Response to Intervention, has now become (or really, evolved into) MTSS or Multi-Tiered Systems of Support.

I realized I didn't fully understand what this transition meant, so I decided to do a little digging after receiving a very helpful introductory staff newsletter in my inbox last week. Here is a little clarity for those who may be confused as I was.

RtI was, by name, a response to something that was already actively occurring. We wait until a student needs support and then we offer it to then, once they have "proven" their need (via various forms of testing). MTSS, conversely, is a support system, meaning it is pro-active and not just reactive. Wouldn't it be great if we could get students engaged in school supports before they are falling through the cracks? Well that's just what MTSS aims to do!

By seeing support staff as a part of the broader school context (and not just for "those" kids), MTSS provides every student with the opportunity to get a little extra boost. Thus MTSS is far more extensive and inclusive than RtI. It includes positive behavior intervention systems, overall curriculum design and more. It's like the difference between a major city's office of transportation and their public rail service (eg. the CTA in Chicago versus the Department of Transportation). While the CTA is a crucial part of Chicago transit, we can all agree that it's not the only component one considers when needing to get around the city. Similarly, RtI is just one aspect of a broader MTSS program.

Here is an excellent blog post about this and below is a handy graphic from that post to help explain more thoroughly the shift in thinking.

Hope this helps!

-Ms. OJ

Bullying Prevention Month Recap: Workshopping and Peacemaking

I will get to the recap in a second. First, another thing.

I did it!

I implemented a new program!

Okay, almost.

I have taken a bunch of free content from various sources and created my own version of Peacemakers, a peer mediation program for my 3rd, 4th and 5th grade students. Over the course of four days, I trained six students (two from each grade) in mediation techniques that include a peace path (which guides students in each step of the process of talking through a conflict), using "I" statements and promising to do better in the future. These students will mediate arguments on the playground between students in their grade, and hopefully build a little more self-sufficiency among the kids in solving their own issues.  I have almost finished, but I need to paint the peace path on the playground, and it keeps raining. I will update this blog with more information as it evolves.

Additionally, I did a bunch of anti-bullying with the information from the PACER Institute, and it was quite successful on the whole. Some of the activities (Above the Line/Below the Line and the Orange Unity chain) were big hits. The videos, to be honest, were less thrilling, but did a good job of introducing certain ideas about what bullying is and how students can help stop it. This is the only start of a larger conversation we need to have here at Giles. I intend to make regular mention of the subject and to be as present in the classroom as I can be in order to make sure it keeps happening.

For now, signing off.
-Ms. OJ