Counselors | Carol J. Carter

Google’s CEO Shares the Best Advice He Ever Received

Professionals and athletes aren’t the only people who can benefit from a coach, students who participated in an academic coaching program found increased retention and graduation rates. Through the process of coaching, students deepen their learning, take responsibility for their actions, improve their effectiveness, and consciously create their outcomes in life.

How can you use coaching to improve student outcomes? LifeBound’s Academic Coaching Training is a great professional development option for professors, teachers, administrators, counselors, and other education professionals who want to learn to be a coach for their student by listening, asking powerful questions, and encouraging problem solving. Our next 3-day coaching session is June 24-26. Let me know if you would like to learn more about our Academic Coaching Training in the comments or by sending an email to contact@lifebound.com.

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Upcoming at LifeBound: Now on Huffington Post, Summer Reading, Academic Coaches Training & More

This spring we’re definitely not sitting still at LifeBound. In the next few months we have many new events, trainings, blogs, and more that will reach communities who are dedicated to improving learning opportunities for students, teachers, and professionals. One initiative we’re supporting all summer long is to get more students involved in productive learning activities over the summer months.

Research shows all young people experience learning losses when they do not engage in educational activities during the summer. That’s why LifeBound is offering summer enrichment workshops at Lighthouse Writers Workshop for students in middle school through high school that foster self-awareness, critical thinking, and practical know-how. You can find out more about our week-long workshops for teens at our website. We are also encouraging students to read over the summer with our book display at the Tattered Cover Book Store on Colfax.

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Finding “Fit”: Aligning Your Gifts, Talents and Interests with Purposeful Education and Work

Half of employees were either ready to leave their jobs or unhappy in their position, according to last year’s Mercer survey.¹

As we discuss how to get more students graduating from high school and college and into a career, it’s important individuals, schools, and businesses align their definitions of success so that an individual’s strengths and abilities are maximized. In school, success is largely measured by class standing and grades. In your career, success can be measured by status or money. But what about fulfillment? Purpose? Meaning? Contribution?
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Aligning K12, College, and the World of Work

K12 communities want students to have higher scores and higher graduation rates. Colleges want active students and successful grads. The working world wants a bigger talent pool and more creative minds to fuel innovation and job growth.

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How Teachers Can Reinvent Themselves This Summer: Idea Soup

The most effective teachers, like the most effective students, are lifelong learners. While many schools require educators to have ongoing training and professional development, many educators can craft their own learning experiences just like the most motivated and active students. Teachers like this provide a model for students of vibrancy, imagination, and active learning; they prove to all of us that learning doesn’t end with a certificate or degree.

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Start Planning for a Summer of Learning

Summer vacation will be here before we know it, and while it is an exciting time for students to take a break from academia, it is also where students experience the largest learning losses. No student is safe from summer learning losses if their brains aren’t kept active throughout the summer months. However, students in lower-income families are generally at a much higher risk to suffer from learning losses which continues to increase the achievement gap between lower and higher income youth.
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Crucial to Build Critical Thinking Skills in K-12 for College, Career and Life

In 2011, an unprecedented study found forty-five percent of students made no significant improvement in their critical thinking, reasoning or writing skills during the first two years of college. Many were stunned by the number of college students entering and graduating from college without critical thinking skills, a core 21st century skill necessary for making smart personal and professional decisions.
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Peer Mediation Helps Extinguish Behavior Issues

It is estimated that 160,000 children miss school every day due to fear of attack or intimidation by other students.

1 in 7 students in grades K-12 is either a bully or a victim of bullying.

71% of students report incidents of bullying as a problem at their school.

www.makebeatsnotbeatdowns.org/

Bullying and cyberbullying have been high profile stories in recent years. There isn’t evidence that points to bullying being on the rise, but rather that awareness is on the rise due to a combination of variants like bullying getting more dangerous, new forms of digital bullying emerging, and too much/lack of parental vision, according to education.com.

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How Should Schools Identify Gifted Students?

Carol’s Summary:
The method by which to identify gifted students at a New York City high school is now being challenged, as the school admits students based on the results of a single test, which is written by a teacher at the school. This test ultimately determines a student’s eligibility to attend, and has sparked a debate about what qualifies a student as gifted, particularly because this test has caused a decline in black and Hispanic student enrollment at the school.

Critics say that the test gives certain students an unfair advantage, whereas many others who come from less fortunate backgrounds may not be as well-prepared to take such a test. The cost of prep materials and tutoring gives wealthy students a good chance at being accepted, while students who come from less fortunate families may not be able to pay for the preparation.

Therefore, they may not be as well-prepared to take such a test. They say that the admissions tests should utilize several kinds of evaluations, including portfolios of students’ past work, essays, and interviews.

There are currently 3 million students nationwide who are identified as gifted, and it is believed that there are many more who have not yet been noticed or who have undergone one-sided tests such as the one previously mentioned. It is necessary to employ various strategies to identify gifted students, so that they may receive the education they deserve.

To hold back a student who is gifted may make the student likelier to grow bored with school and possibly even drop out, because their abilities are not being recognized. At LifeBound, we believe it is incredibly important to tailor teaching to individual students, their abilities and their needs. In our curriculum that accompanies each of our books, we have included activities for both gifted and at-risk students, so that no child’s needs are left unattended to. Visit www.lifebound.com or e-mail contact@lifebound.com for more information about our books and curriculum.

Article:
Identifying Gifted Students
By Walt Gardner

The latest chapter in the gifted student saga was on display at Hunter College High School in New York City when a graduating senior delivered a commencement address that called into question the basis for admission to the storied school (“Diversity Debate Convulses Elite High School,” Aug. 5). The school uses a single, teacher-written test that has not changed for decades. Although the test is defended by Hunter College, which oversees the high school, as “very valuable in terms of preserving the kind of specialness and uniqueness that the school has,” it has resulted in a decline in the percentage of black and Hispanic students enrolled.

To read the full article: www.edweek.org

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How Should Schools Handle Cyberbullying?

Carol’s Summary:
An estimated one in five middle school students has been affected by cyberbullying. Bullying has always been an issue that teachers and principals have had to handle. However, in middle and high schools lately, the problem has evolved to involve technology. Schools are now finding ways to cope with issues of cyberbullying, in which children are harassed through text messages and social networking websites.

Much of cyberbullying occurs after school and on weekends, when children are not under the guidance and care of the school system.

Cyberbullying can affect a child’s academic success, self-esteem, social skills and emotional growth. While this is a relatively new problem that students, school officials and parents must deal with, it is spreading fast and has proven to be dangerous.

Many school districts are conflicted with whether or not they have the right to inspect students’ cell phones and social networking accounts, unless the issue deals directly with a conflict within the school. There are legal issues involving privacy which makes many school officials either nervous or leery about doing so.

Many administrators are concerned about the possibility of looking through a child’s cell phone and finding compromising photos and text messages that could bring about child pornography cases. There is also the issue of how students should be punished if they are cyberbullying other students.

Cyberbullying is growing into a major conflict in today’s schools, and not only for the students involved. Teachers and parents are finding themselves concerned for the well-being of children, but are not always able to get involved since technology is the medium for these behaviors.

LifeBound’s Making the Most of High School, 2nd Edition and the accompanying curriculum shows students how to use technology in a beneficial and safe manner. To find out more about Making the Most of High School and other LifeBound materials, visit www.lifebound.com or e-mail contact@lifebound.com

Article:
Online Bullies Pull Schools Into the Fray
By JAN HOFFMAN
June 27, 2010

The girl’s parents, wild with outrage and fear, showed the principal the text messages: a dozen shocking, sexually explicit threats, sent to their daughter the previous Saturday night from the cellphone of a 12-year-old boy. Both children were sixth graders at Benjamin Franklin Middle School in Ridgewood, N.J.
Punish him, insisted the parents.
“I said, ‘This occurred out of school, on a weekend,’ ” recalled the principal, Tony Orsini. “We can’t discipline him.”
Had they contacted the boy’s family, he asked.

To read the full report: www.nytimes.com

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