President's Letter: Guidance in the Classroom
By Cameron Reny | September 2017
Greetings, MeSCA members, and thank you for the opportunity to serve as your president for the 2017-2018 school year! The board has some great things planned for this year. The new website is up and running; check it out at www.meschoolcounselor.org. The MeSCA conference on November 9, 2017, will have excellent speakers addressing current issues and concerns. In the upcoming weeks, there will be a focus on creating long-term plans to effectively serve school counselors in the state of Maine. We will have important progress updates coming soon!
This issue’s theme is classroom management. We know effective classroom management is crucial in delivering guidance lessons. We must be able to deliver data-driven lesson plans, maintain a safe learning environment, and remain approachable to our students. Successful classroom management keeps students engaged and learning, and keeps us from wasting precious time and energy.
When I was starting out as a school counselor, I worked for a short time in a middle school with no regularly scheduled guidance classes. I delivered workshops to classrooms or entire grades. I had taught some RTI lessons, but guidance was not an official co-curricular class by any means. When I moved on to another school in a different part of the state, I learned the importance of classroom management the hard way. I had found a school counselor position at a tiny K-8 school near my home, and with this new position came the beginning of my need for consistent classroom management. I do not want to say I struggled managing behavior in those first classes, and I do not want to say there was more than one class period that bordered on chaos. I will say the behavior in a few of the elementary-aged classrooms gave me seemingly endless opportunities to grow as a school counselor. I was lucky to work with some fantastic teachers who gently guided me in how to successfully manage a classroom. What a difference! Now I work in a different school district, in a K-8 school where guidance class is regularly scheduled programming for all of our 350 students. I cannot imagine this job without the use of strategic classroom management.
Contact Cameron Reny, MeSCA president, at creny@rsu1.org.
This issue’s theme is classroom management. We know effective classroom management is crucial in delivering guidance lessons. We must be able to deliver data-driven lesson plans, maintain a safe learning environment, and remain approachable to our students. Successful classroom management keeps students engaged and learning, and keeps us from wasting precious time and energy.
When I was starting out as a school counselor, I worked for a short time in a middle school with no regularly scheduled guidance classes. I delivered workshops to classrooms or entire grades. I had taught some RTI lessons, but guidance was not an official co-curricular class by any means. When I moved on to another school in a different part of the state, I learned the importance of classroom management the hard way. I had found a school counselor position at a tiny K-8 school near my home, and with this new position came the beginning of my need for consistent classroom management. I do not want to say I struggled managing behavior in those first classes, and I do not want to say there was more than one class period that bordered on chaos. I will say the behavior in a few of the elementary-aged classrooms gave me seemingly endless opportunities to grow as a school counselor. I was lucky to work with some fantastic teachers who gently guided me in how to successfully manage a classroom. What a difference! Now I work in a different school district, in a K-8 school where guidance class is regularly scheduled programming for all of our 350 students. I cannot imagine this job without the use of strategic classroom management.
Contact Cameron Reny, MeSCA president, at creny@rsu1.org.