1st Career Cafe

I hosted my 1st Career Cafe on Friday, and it was a huge success! Thanks so much to Danielle at School Counselor Blog for sharing the idea of career cafes.  I know many of her readers have implemented this creative career initiative.  You can't tell from the pictures, but I had about 30 5th grade students come.

The man that came was extremely interesting.  He served in the Air Force for 4 years and then worked for 35 years with Aviation Week & Space Technology, the world's leading aerospace news magazine.  He spent 6 years working in Switzerland and France and manned bureaus in Washington DC, Geneva, Paris, Los Angeles, and New York City.  He served as Editor in Chief and Editorial Director of the Aviation Week group of magazines in McGraw Hill's New York World Headquarters for the last 10 years of his career.  He was able to talk to the students about being in the Air Force, learning to fly when he was 15, and both writing for and being in charge of a major magazine.  He also told amazing stories of all the planes he flew while researching them for the magazine.  His favorite flight was flying the U2.  He told the kids that it went so high he was able to see the curvature of the earth, the last layer of atmosphere, and the black of space from the plane.  He also had a picture of him and President Bush shaking hands.  The 5th graders were so impressed and they asked numerous questions.  It was awesome!  I highly suggest starting a career cafe program at your school if you haven't already.  You can read more about my career cafes here. How has Career Cafe worked for you? Who has come to speak?  Leave a comment and share.

Tracking Data with NoteCounselor

Unless you have been living under a rock somewhere in a remote forest, you have heard about the importance of accountability in the world of education.  School counseling, is no exception.  This is only my 3rd year as a school counselor, and the budget has had me worried every year about keeping my job.  My 1st year, the "higher ups" wanted the elementary counselors to show how we had spent our year; how many students we helped, parents we met with, guidance classes we had taught, etc. Luckily, I had tracked my sessions and classes the "old fashioned" way with paper and pencil notes.  After submitting our data, administration was able to see the impact we have on our school community, and thankfully, counselors were not put on the list to be cut in our county.

This year, another elementary counselor who works in our county told me that she uses NoteCounselor (created by Amanda Lee Chambers).  Three years ago, when she was asked to send in her documentation, all she had to do was pull up a yearly report, with just one click of the mouse!  The day she told me about this program, I went online at http://notecounselor.com and ordered it. Four days later, I got NoteCounselor in the mail and started using it, and I would definitely recommend it to all school counselors.  It provides a very simple format, using Microsoft Access, that allows you to keep notes, track individual and group counseling sessions, log classroom guidance lessons, and much more.  It also categorizes task as indirect and direct counseling services and prints reports accordingly making it easy maintain a comprehensive program at your school.

Take some time to visit http://notecounselor.com/.

Does anyone else use this program? If so, leave a review here and, if not, tell us what program you do use.

**noteCounselor, LLC copyright © 2004, 2007, 2010 Amanda Chambers

**Microsoft Office Access is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries.

Career Cafe

I frequently visit The School Counselor Blog.  The author, Danielle, started a new career counseling initiative at her school and encouraged others to try it out.  After reading both her blog post and her article published in the Pennsylvania School Counseling Magazine, I decided to give it a whirl. Based on her ideas, this is my version of Career Cafe...

Front Side

Back Side

I created these postcards on Vistaprint.com and got 100 for free! I just had to pay for shipping.  Career Cafe is going to be a 5th grade program at my school.  First, I plan on having every student complete a career inventory to determine what careers they are most interested in.  Then, I'm going to recruit family and community volunteers that have careers similar to the ones my students are interested in.  My plan is to have 2 volunteers come each month on 1st and 3rd Fridays during 5th grade's lunch time.  Any student whose career inventory results match up with the volunteer that is coming that Friday will receive one of these postcard invitations.  They will bring their lunch to their classroom where they will be able to listen to the guest speaker.

I think this will be a successful program because students will be learning during lunch, which means no instructional time will be used! Teachers will really appreciate this.  Also, students will only be attending career cafe sessions that they are interested in. This will increase student behavior and provide for a more positive experience for the volunteer speakers.

I will let you know how it goes! Does anyone have any suggestions??