College Counseling
Home | College Financial Assistance | College Search Web Resources | College Acceptance
Helpful Forms and Worksheets
- College Applications Process Worksheet.pdf
- College Budget Worksheet.pdf
- Confidential Parent Brag Sheet.pdf
- Junior-Senior Rec Data Sheet.pdf
- Student Request Form for Letters of Recommedation.pdf
Community College Transfer Plan
Video Presentations (Supported browsers: IE and Firefox)
- BISS and US College Process Overview
- College Structures and Choices
- International Financial Aid
- Writing an Outstanding College Essay
Resources about Grief & Loss
Here are a couple of resource websites for helping students deal with the lost of a friend and classmate:
http://www.helpguide.org/mental/helping_grieving.htm
http://www.nasponline.org/resources/crisis_safety/index.aspx#general
http://www.americanhospice.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=19&Itemid=34
Leaving Brent Subic
Students coming and going is part of life at an international school. It is always sad for us to say good-bye to students that we have come to know. If you are leaving Brent Subic to continue your studies elsewhere, please remember to complete the clearance form. There are copies in the office. The school will not release a transcript until you have completed the form. It is also helpful if you inform your children’s homeroom teachers. Once you have done this, we can help to make transitions easier for the children involved. Thanks!
Brent Impact
Working together to make a difference
Counseling Communications
Greetings to you all. I thought it might be helpful for all of us if I was to keep you abreast of what I am doing and what I hope to do in the future. My goal is to develop a program that stays flexible and can respond to your needs and the needs of the students as they arise. I would like to move towards a preventative approach. When there seams to be an issue that is repeatedly occurring I will do some more research, ask questions and see if we can’t come up with a plan to address the issue as a group rather than individually. In this publication I would like to incorporate current research, ideas that impact education, and keep you up to date on my plans and progress, and my schedule. If you have an article, lesson, story, or professional thoughts that you would like to share, please submit your ideas to be included in upcoming issues. In addition please feel free to contact me or come and see me at any time with your thoughts and concerns about students and or the counseling curriculum. I can be reached at 252 5497, or you can stop by my office 6–B next to Mr. Wyncoll’s.
Encouraging Success
Educational thoughts, brainstorms, lessons, ideas and information for parents, staff and teachers.
The Search for Positives
When students are struggling, finding something to praise may encourage them to continue to struggle and strive rather than to let go and sink. If we see a student not succeeding day after day, seemingly not putting forth any effort, or perhaps attention during the class time seams to float away, it is a human response to react and attempt to cause change by focusing on what we see as causal to the problem. Often times what we perceive as the cause or adding to the problem may not be how the student understands it. For instance, some students can actually focus better, and take in more when they are doodling. The teacher might understand the doodling as a sign of the lack of listening or motivation. “Pay attention” or “focus” may help the student to appear more attentive for a moment. In reality the student might be hearing they are “never going to be successful at this topic” because they are struggling, and what they can do to focus themselves “doodling” is not allowed in the classroom.
One on one conversation with a student can bring remarkable incites to the table. It may be something as simple as our blocks are a longer period of time than a student is used to focusing and that interspersing lecture with hands on activity could help with focus and retention. It might be teaching the student how to “doodle productively” with a form of graphic note taking. It is important to keep in mind the relativity of our observations, talk to the students about what we are seeing and look for the positives. Especially for those students who are struggling, even if it is just the fact that they came to remedial.
Remember that it takes several positives (Studies say around 5) to overcome a single negative comment. This included when the negative is perceived rather than intended. Students are not going to melt when they hear a negative, but studies show that it does affect their resiliency and their willingness to try.
On that note: LA LA LA LA LA
Praising
“Smart” vs. “Good Work”
Most of us as educators and parents understand intuitively that praising our students is critical. Recent research is finding that it is just as important HOW we do that. Nymag.com printed an article called The Power (and Peril) of Praising your kids and I have included an excerpt below. If you want the whole article the link is posted at the bottom of the article. Keep in mind that when the author uses the word “praise” they are specifically referring to saying “you’re smart” or other references in innate intelligence.
For the past ten years, psychologist Carol Dweck and her team at Columbia (she’s now at Stanford) studied the effect of praise on students in a dozen New York schools. Her seminal work—a series of experiments on 400 fifth-graders—paints the picture most clearly.
Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles—puzzles easy enough that all the children would do fairly well. Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his score, then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, “You must be smart at this.” Other students were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.”
Why just a single line of praise? “We wanted to see how sensitive children were,” Dweck explained. “We had a hunch that one line might be enough to see an effect.”
Then the students were given a choice of test for the second round. One choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but the researchers told the kids that they’d learn a lot from attempting the puzzles. The other choice, Dweck’s team explained, was an easy test, just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The “smart” kids took the cop–out.
Why did this happen? “When we praise children for their intelligence,” Dweck wrote in her study summary, “we tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart, don’t risk making mistakes.” And that’s what the fifth-graders had done: They’d chosen to look smart and avoid embarrassed.
In a subsequent round, none of the fifth-graders had a choice. The test was difficult, designed for kids two years ahead of their grade level. Predictably, everyone failed. But again, the two groups of children, divided at random at the study’s start, responded differently. Those praised for their effort on the first test assumed they simply hadn’t focused hard enough on this test. “They got very involved, willing to try every solution to the puzzles,” Dweck recalled. “Many of them remarked, unprovoked, ‘This is my favorite test.’ ” Not so for those praised for their smarts. They assumed their failure was evidence that they weren’t really smart at all. “Just watching them, you could see the strain. They were sweating and miserable.”
Having artificially induced a round of failure, Dweck’s researchers then gave all the fifth-graders a final round of tests that were engineered to be as easy as the first round. Those who had been praised for their effort significantly improved on their first score—by about 30 percent. Those who’d been told they were smart did worse than they had at the very beginning—by about 20 percent.
Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”
In follow-up interviews, Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts.
Repeating her experiments, Dweck found this effect of praise on performance held true for students of every socioeconomic class. It hit both boys and girls—the very brightest girls especially (they collapsed the most following failure). Even preschoolers weren’t immune to the inverse power of praise.
http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/