by Lucien Giordano
Welcome back. If you haven’t read the first instalment of the blog, track back here
We have established the counsellor as a student advocate first. If you want to best support the team as a strategic decision maker, then a subsequent and simple question to ask might be, what can I provide for my University and Careers Counselling team to support their success?
Here are four answers I encourage you to discuss with your school’s extended leadership team, especially with the UCC line manager, if that is not you, and then to align with your UCC team.
Time and flexibility.
The best counselling happens when your UCC team can create schedules that combine group lessons and individual counselling.
You never know when a student will drop into the office to have a conversation that can redirect a life. Make sure your counsellors are available during breaks, lunch and right as school ends.
You should have goals for 1-1 contact that follows up on group programs at least down to Grade 9. You should give discretion to your team to schedule contact time down through middle school/KS3. Keep your counsellors free when students are free. Let them be creative with timetables. Encourage them to work late when it is busy or when the job demands their time during holidays (AP, A-Level, and IB results week can demand huge sacrifices by your team during their time off). offering time in lieu. Reward the way the most dynamic teams work when they invite universities to dinner or join weekend events. The best results I’ve seen from UCC teams are when there is trust and accountability in flexible and strategic time management.
Culture.
Schools that encourage skill-based best practice and long-term outcomes build healthy and productive cultures. Avoid targets for short-term application results, especially when it comes to prestige, and you will do better all around, including, ironically, at the most selective universities.
It is clear from my experiences that schools that demand results for the most selective applications are counterproductive to those very aims. Less than 6% of international applicants receive offers from the universities that we might think of first in most of the major destinations. Ramping up pressure here doesn’t work. Instead, encourage a skills-based approach and foster a culture that prioritises relative aspiration and a healthy process. Over time, this will pay off in every way.
Reinforce your culture: be ready to have your team’s back when the Ivies and Oxbridges aren’t rolling in. When your school does receive those offers, celebrate them proudly, but do so with equanimity, as the most important recognition should be for the hardest work and clearest value add, which is often about finding a productive outcome for a struggling student. Celebrate also the united contributions of teachers and staff too. Everybody contributes to successful post-secondary outcomes.
Preach and practice the culture of collaboration. It takes counsellors, parents, leaders, coaches, teachers and often support networks outside of school (club sports, internships offered by local companies, community-based orgs and more)for a student to achieve the best outcomes.
As we covered in the previous blog, a UCC team doesn’t ‘get a student into university’. It is the student, surrounded by a support system, that a counsellor coordinates who gets in. The skilled counsellor knows what to ask for and how to build these networks and culture. Support that effort by building a positive, healthy, and collaborative culture focused on process rather than specific outcomes.
Engagement Resources.
It may be difficult to quantify, but your teams and consequently your outcomes do benefit from travel, networking and the build-up of your school’s reputation. This does NOT need to happen at the big global conferences if you don’t have the budget, but those sure do help (I-ACAC, IC3, CIS Forum). Most regions, countries and even major cities have a collegial network of counselling professionals and locally based events with universities. Help your teams attend. Help them host university visits and fairs. Invest in these resources.
Here is a quick side point: do not think of these efforts as “professional learning” or “professional development”. Do not ask the team to work through PL/PD budgets or, as I’ve seen too often, to secure the buy-in of professional learning leads. Attending conferences is part of the job. The learning that happens in those conferences is used to directly facilitate student aspirations. Counsellor professional learning should be focused on skillsets outside of the application process, and that is where they should go through PL/PD requisitions.
I’ve seen these commitments pay off many times. I’ll tell you when a counsellor can really GET a student into university? It’s when they apply the well-earned reputation of a school and their professional credibility to a borderline case.
Here is a real example: one of the finest counsellors I’ve known has spent years humbly engaging at conferences, welcoming universities to her city, being an advocate for all students, regardless of aspiration or ability, and establishing her reputation with admissions officers around the world. Our higher ed counterparts trust her completely. In fact, they often discuss and share notes on schools and counsellors they can trust, and this counsellor’s professional reputation therefore precedes her. She remains objective in her counsellor letters (very important!), never overselling a student’s abilities. She is the epitome of professionalism and student advocacy.
A few years ago, one of her academically strong, but not ‘top’ performing students received an offer to a highly selective American university – one where the mean scores and GPA did not align. When she shared the news with me, I knew it had something to do with the fact that she saw and advocated for such a great fit between the student and the institution in her letter.
The offer was in part owed to her skills, those that allowed her to understand and build mutual trust with that student and with the university. That student then missed the predicted IB grade by such a margin that the offer was to be rescinded (quite rare, actually, in US universities). However, the admissions team knew the counsellor and reached out to discuss the case in detail. The counsellor advocated for the student because she knew the student had serious personal reasons for missing the offer and was sure that success would follow upon matriculation. The university trusted her, and the student’s offer stood. The student is now thriving. That took resources spent and reputation accumulated over many years to support that counsellor. That took trust and encouragement and a healthy leadership culture.
Voice and backing.
This dyad amplifies impact.
The counsellor’s voice in your school should be one of the most informed and objective. Consider that from a position of student advocacy, counsellors engage with every stakeholder.
Who or what does a high-performing counsellor work with over time:
– Every academic classroom teacher in the high school
– Every specialist may be a crucial ally – visual and performing arts, coaches, externally contracted enrichment providers
– Admissions, Marketing and Communications teams
– All levels of leadership
– Parents across the entire school community
– 100% of graduating students and, depending on your answer to point 1, hopefully nearly that many down to Grade 9. Hopefully, quite a few below.
– The counsellor must know all curricular and extracurricular offerings
– Budgets
– Strategic plans for enrollment and retention, and branding
A counsellor who works to his or her best really can be the most informed colleague in the school. A counsellor who has been on-staff for multiple contracts often possesses the deepest institutional knowledge. It is therefore surprising to me when senior leadership teams do not regularly include counsellors’ voices in formal meeting agendas.
In many North American schools and North American-style international schools, the Director of Counselling position is the equivalent of a Deputy Head. In many of these schools, the Director of Counselling’s logical career progression goes to Vice Principal and then Principal.
Hire the right Director, bring that voice into strategic meetings, and reap the rewards across the schools. This will concurrently give your team strategic opportunities to accelerate the UCC program.
As an extension of this recommendation, a high-performing team benefits from being line-managed by the Head of Senior School or higher. Too often, teams report to positions such as an IB Coordinator, throwing off a crucial collegial balance, while limiting the potential for strategic impact.
As for backing, counsellors face many challenging dilemmas:
- Can a demanding parent subvert your school’s agreed policies, timelines and boundaries?
- Can a counsellor challenge a teacher who has not supported an application properly?
- Is a counsellor concerned about how many Ivy League and Oxbridge offers will come in, for fear of leadership demands?
- How and when do you have your counsellor’s back in these dilemmas and challenging situations?
These are crucial questions to ask. Give your counsellor a voice and agree clearly on when and why, and how they have your backing.
Let’s now imagine your counsellors know their job – to be a student advocate and work from a skill-based paradigm. Your team has time, resources and a voice, all of which are deployed within a healthy culture. There is one more step you should take: set strong and appropriate expectations for success.
In the final instalment of this series, Luke Devlin, Co-Founder of Amiata Co., will pose and answer the challenging and crucial question: How do we know if a UCC team is successful?
Amiata offers systems-based program design that integrates UCC practice and approach in strategic cross-functional service packages. We directly offer schools post-secondary exploration services like impactful university tours for students and educators, and parent education certifications. Please look out for our shared series of professional learning opportunities in collaboration with LYIS and leading global universities to be announced for Autumn and Spring.
Email me at lucien@amiataco.com to have a conversation.
Lucien Giordano, Co-Founder, Amiata Co.
