Mapping Out Your Best Year Ever: A Guide for School Counselors

Reverse Engineer School Year for Success

Well , hello , school counselor , welcome back to the School for School Counselors podcast . I'm Steph Johnson , so excited to be back with you for another episode . And hey , you know we've had an amazing week this past week in School for School Counselors . If you have not been part of our Facebook group this past week , oh , my goodness , you have missed so much awesomeness . We held our free annual best year ever event this past week . It was incredible so much time with amazing school counseling colleagues from all over the country , a great chance to learn together , to collaborate together and to share ideas and information . Hands down the most powerful event that we hold all year long . It was absolutely freaking amazing and I decided that for this week's podcast , I might give you just a little peek or a recap of a piece of our best year ever event , depending on whether you were there or not . Right , if you weren't there , it's going to be a peek into what happened , and if you were there , it's going to be a great reminder for you of some things that you want to do as you prepare to start your school year .

Before I jump into that , I do want to share a super awesome review that was left for us on Apple Podcasts , courtesy of Chet and Amy , and the podcast review says Spot On One of my absolute favorite finds this summer . If you were like me and always searching for relatable information , look no further . I stumbled upon this gem of a podcast recently and it has quickly become my go-to source for insightful and down-to-earth content . Steph is engaging , relatable and easy to understand . The wealth of knowledge she has shared , along with the topics covered , left me wanting more . So now I'm not only a listener , but have joined the Facebook group along with the School for School Counselors Mastermind program , and can't wait to attend the best year ever workshop .

Thank you for sharing and providing a space for school counselors everywhere to hone their craft and be their best self . Oh my gosh , you guys , my stars . What a wonderfully humbling review . I just can't thank you enough for that . It's so great to know that what my team and I are endeavoring to produce for you here is hitting home , and I just can't appreciate your kind words anymore . Thank you so much for posting such an incredible review . If you're listening now and you haven't posted a review yet y'all , we would really appreciate it . It's kind of the currency of the podcasting world . It helps us get shown to folks that might need to hear what we have to say in the podcast . Just hop on over to Apple Podcasts . Leave a quick review . It doesn't have to be as intricate as the one I just read Just a few sentences would do . But , man , it would mean the world to us . Thanks again , ched and Amy . That was a fantastic review and so glad that you're in our School for School Counselors world with us .

As the review mentioned , the best year ever event just happened . It just finished up a couple of days ago and , like I said , it was amazing , our favorite time all year long . So if you're not in our Facebook group , make sure you're in there so you can learn about the next one . I'm going to give you a little piece of what we did in that best year ever workshop . This is , from night , one kind of the basics of what we did when we talked about reverse engineering your year for success . And it does start a little bit basic . It does start with some things that you're going to be thinking , oh my goodness , for real . But it builds . Give it a chance , it's going to build and it's going to give you some great ideas and inspiration for your school year coming up .

You may also hear me in this clip , reference some printable resources , pdf resources , as well as an online portal . All of that can be accessed on our website , schoolforschoolcounselorscom . You're going to go slash b y e replays . B y e replays that stands for best year ever replays . If you hop on over there , you can get access to all of these materials , all of the replays of all the workshops , and we only charge you five bucks to do it . It's just enough to keep an host on the platform . This is not trying to make any money off of anybody . We just want to be able to share these ideas and continue to collaborate . So if you hear something that strikes your fancy , you can hop over there and grab what you need . All right , I'm going to now bring you a little clip from our Best Year Ever event . I hope you enjoy . If we haven't met , I'm Steph Johnson , of course . You see me all over the School for School Counselors Facebook group . You may have heard me blathering on in the School for School Counselors podcast . I want you to know that this organization what we're building here has been a passion project since day one .

We got started during the COVID quarantines 2020 . The reason that we got started was twofold . Number one I had been in a lot of Facebook groups trying to help people with job interviews . That was kind of originally how it got started . Covid was a weird time . They were freezing a lot of positions . We had a lot of people graduating that didn't know what to do . They weren't able to interview in person . I was able to help them with the online interviewing thing .

It started to grow so big that we had to start condensing everything in our own group because I was just going everywhere all the time . As we were visiting in that group and again during COVID and talking about going back to school , we noticed that no one was really talking about how to serve students . Once we got back , that was when those Bitmoji offices were a really big deal . I don't know if any of you guys were around and remember that stuff , but everybody was fitting together Bitmoji offices . That was kind of the extent of the guidance in online counseling . That was pretty much all anybody had . We were linking to games and things like that , but there wasn't a whole lot going on . We got all of our folks together in our school for school counselors group and we crowdsourced a guide it was called Counseling . During COVID , we pulled everybody's best resources together and made I can't remember how many pages it was , but made a guide to try to help things along . As we did that , we built a core group .

What I call my inner circle started talking about some other things . One day I said you know , I really feel like we need a library of all of this stuff that grad school didn't teach us . We need to just compile it in one area . From there , everything went crazy . Here we are , just three short years later . We're exploding and we're so excited to be doing that .

This is not a side hustle . You'll hear me say that many times . This is not our side hustle . This is a passion project . We're being very mindful of what we're doing within our organization because the ultimate goal is for advocacy . The ultimate goal is to be able to throw a lot of oomph behind advocacy efforts on a larger mass scale , while we're teaching school counselors to advocate from the inside out . You'll hear me talk a lot more about that in the future , if you haven't already . I just kind of wanted to give you a framework for understanding what it is we do here in school for school counselors , because we're a little bit different than other school counseling groups , for sure . All right , so let me jump into the meat and potatoes then .

Tonight we're going to be talking about reverse engineering your year . Even when we start the school year , we wait . I wait until the day I go on duty . I don't want to think about going back to school until it's time , but part of that is because I've been out this for a little bit . Then I get in my office and I'll sit down and think about my schedule . Then , all of a sudden , my calendar invites are blowing up . Things are blowing up . I need you to do this . Can we do this ? Let's set this up and things start to go crazy . We don't even wait for the students to get there before we start rocking and rolling . So it's really helpful to kind of have a framework in mind before you even get started and surprisingly , it doesn't take a lot of time to make that happen . That's what I want to show you today .

Streamlining Planning and Reducing Cognitive Load

It's also a really good way to reduce your cognitive load when you're learning , particularly if you're new either a new school counselor or new to your campus . There's a lot percolating up there as you're getting started . I would say probably the first three years are really kind of a mental overload where you're learning not only how does this campus work , what are kind of its guiding principles , who do you go for what down to like , where's the copy machine , where do kids go to pay their lunch accounts , all these little random things that people expect you to know . You're working really hard to try to remember where that information is , how do you access it , where you go , that kind of stuff , and so when we have some of our year already lined out and streamlined a little bit , it reduces a little bit of that cognitive load . It just takes the edge off a little bit . And I think another great benefit is making some boundaries for yourself .

It is very easy to get in the work of your school year and get very busy and start to push things off to the side because you want to help students . That's why we got into this line of work , because we want to build relationships with students , we want to help them , we want to make sure they have what they need , and so we tend to try to push all that other stuff off to the side and we think , yeah , yeah , I know I'm expected to observe Red Ribbon Week , but I don't have time to plan that , let me just push it off . And then you keep pushing and you keep pushing , because more and more stuff comes and then all of a sudden it's the middle of September or the beginning of October and you're like dang it . I wish I would have preplanned that . And so this is going to reduce some of that . Typically in those situations at least for me I would take that stuff home and work on it at night and I would try to plan events at night , spend my time during the day with students , but all that's doing really is kind of just moving your boundaries around a little bit , and you may be okay with that and that's fine . But if you're not , if you want a little bit more definition between your workday and your home life , this is going to help you do that too , because you're going to have those things in mind , in line and ready to go . Does that make sense ? Okay , so let me show you what we have for you tonight . And again , these resources are in your portal already , but I'm going to be putting them up here for you so that you've got them .

Okay , we're going to start here with creating a yearly plan . This is going to walk you through all of the components of this pre-planning and , again , there may be other things that come to mind as you're listening , and if you think of something , shout them out , help us out and we'll add it to our list as well . All right , okay . So starting with basic dates , as we get started with this , some of the things that you hear me say you're going to be like really , this is what I showed up for . I promise you we're building to something better . We've got to get the fundamentals in place so you can really see the whole picture , so that you'll be able then to do some of that higher level planning . So bear with me for just a minute . We're going to start with our basic dates , our campus non-negotiables , the things that have to happen state testing dates , acts , sats , any of that kind of stuff . You want to go ahead and put it on your calendar and have it in mind your local testing windows , if you're doing gifted and talented testing , if you do special education testing within a certain timeframe not a lot of campuses are lucky enough to have that flexibility anymore , with sped rates just skyrocketing , but some still do Map testing , benchmark testing , finals , whatever it is go ahead and find those dates and put it on your calendar . Even if you're not responsible for testing you're not a test coordinator on your campus you want to have those testing dates down so you know when students aren't going to be available . Those are going to be great times to schedule other things in your day . You'll notice we've kind of made this in a checklist fashion with bullet points , so that it should be really really easy to follow as you start doing this for yourself .

Local celebration dates . So when I talk about local celebration dates , what I mean is anything unique to your location or to your campus . If you have any district-wide events , that are a big deal . I used to work in a tiny little district that had a big track day for all of its students from pre-K all the way through the 12th grade . That was a big day for us , so that had to go on the calendar . I had to know that was coming up . And then any local events , college and career weeks , red ribbon weeks , those kinds of things . You want to just put all of those down . Anything that you're celebrating on your campus , that you have it on your calendar . Easy enough , right ? Easy enough , okay . Then we want to go to our meeting or professional development days for our campus and for our district . Sometimes you don't get those until you get back on duty , and that's okay , but once you get them , go ahead and put those on your calendar so you have them . And then any professional organization conferences or trainings we're talking national organization here , state organization , maybe a local chapter . I put the ASCA conference date for next year being Kansas City , missouri , july 13th through 16th 2024 . I'd love for you to come join me . I did not go to Atlanta this year . I was doing something else that , I have to say , was a little bit more cool even than ASCA , which is saying a lot . Maybe I'll tell you about it later , but next year I plan on being in Kansas City , missouri and would love for you to join me there .

Any large due dates , registrations , deadlines , any kind of anything like that Just kind of walk through what you have already and say is there a due date , is there a deadline of some sort ? Plug those in . If you have grading period dates or deadlines , plug those in . Even if you're not responsible for grading In the high school , grading periods are going to be a big deal . You're monitoring failures , you're monitoring transcript stuff . But even in elementary and middle school those are going to be big dates for us . Teachers tend to test very heavily around the end of grading periods , trying to get the rest of those in . It may be harder to pull students because of that .

And then last on this page any awareness dates that you'd like to observe Red Ribbon Week , national School Counseling Week , random Acts of Kind this week we went ahead and put those three up . Those seem to kind of be the big three as far as our audience is concerned . Those are the ones we hear the most about throughout the year . Go ahead and plug those in on your calendar Doesn't necessarily mean that you have to do something for them , but you might want to . So it's good to know that they're there , all right . Any questions about that ? All right , and I'll give you a caveat , just really quickly , as we're talking through meeting days , professional development days and you'll hear me say this , I'm sure , again tonight those tend to also be the days when you have to be off campus , that somebody decides they're going to make an outcry , they're going to have a crisis of some kind , and I'm being flip about that . Of course they don't decide . It's just one of those things . But those meeting dates , dates you have to be off campus , those kinds of things can be kind of tricky , so it's good to have those on your calendar just to kind of be thinking of some backup plans for when you're away . So that's another helpful use of that kind of information . Let me stop real quick and see Everybody doing okay so far . Like I told you , this is pretty basic , right , but we're going to be moving on up into some better stuff here in just a minute . I'm checking my chat comments . I want to make sure that I'm not missing anything . All right , tell me before we

School Counselor Calendar Management and Planning

move on .

How are you keeping your calendars now , or how do you plan on keeping your calendar ? Is it going to be online ? Are you going to keep an electronic calendar outlook , google calendar ? Are you going to use paper ? Are you going to use a hybrid , or you just have no idea yet ? Kind of pop it in the chat and be interested to know . Let's see paper , google , outlook paper , online paper .

Looks like most of us are kind of doing a hybrid of most of them . Awesome , I'm old fashioned paper . I saw that go by . I feel the same way . Awesome , so I've seen lots of folks do on hybrid , seen a couple people using our School for School Counselors planner . You haven't grabbed that yet . That's a cool resource . We've in the past charged for that , but we decided the last couple of years have been pretty tough . We wanted a way to love on everybody . We put our heart and soul in that planner . We work on it for months and months and months , constantly refining it , constantly taking everybody's suggestions into account and trying to make it better and better every year . So if you need a copy of that , please know you can hop over either on our website maybe we can throw a link in the chat here you can hop over and grab that . We're not charging you anything for it , we just want you to have a great year . All right , I'll tell you .

I was counting up this morning I was thinking about getting ready to talk to you all the planners that I use . How many calendars do I have going in my life ? So I have to look at my list . There's a lot . I have my Outlet Calendar at work . That's where my admin team sends me all the invites . We keep everything straight . We know who's doing what .

I use a SCUDA calendar for documenting my time . That's required by my school district and it's been a great change that we've made in the last few years . It's been really telling . Then I have my personal school counseling calendar on paper the planner that we put out for all you guys . I use exactly the same thing . I have a home planner at home that helps me keep track of all my home activities , what I need to do when I get home , because I don't wanna look at the work stuff anymore . And then I have multiple school for school counselors planners going also . It's crazy , but I bet you guys are pretty much the same , right ? You have kids in extracurricular activities . You have your own interests and things . We have calendars everywhere , so the trick is just figuring out how to make those work together in perfect harmony . All right , let me get back to our PDF here and let me show you a little bit more . So now we have those basic dates , we've gone through page one and we're done with that . We're gonna go to page two . Now this is some of the stuff that sometimes people forget , and again it's gonna sound a little basic getting started out , but it's also stuff you don't wanna miss , because this stuff is going to kind of catapult you up into next level relationships on your campus .

There are always huge debates in Facebook groups , and I don't really know why . Maybe I just have a different viewpoint than a lot of people about whether or not you should recognize your staff or whether you should stay away from that . I am very much of the opinion that the more we can lift each other up on a school campus , the better off we're all gonna be . Education is hard work and everybody on your campus is stressed , everybody feels overwhelmed . It's just the nature of the beast that's just working in schools , and so if I have the opportunity to encourage someone , lift them up , I'm gonna do that . That doesn't mean that needs to be a big , grand gesture , doesn't mean it needs to be expensive , but I do wanna do something . So mark those staff recognition days in your planner . Mark birthdays . If you're lucky enough to get a birthday list from your administrator hopefully they have one , hopefully they're building that positive culture for their staff go ahead and jot everybody's birthdays down . I have a staff on my campus of close to 85 , 90 people now , so for me to go out and buy something for everybody for their birthday if it was something big I wouldn't be able to do , but I can't go seek them out and intentionally tell them happy birthday , right , and the important thing is just that they're remembered . That's what most people want anyway .

National School Psychology Week is one that you don't hear about a lot in a lot of schools it kind of gets overlooked School sites kind of work in the background . So we really wanna make sure we've got that in our planner . Diagnostition appreciation those are some of your other folks that do some of your testing for you If you have dags in your district , usually the first full week of March not always , but usually the first full week of March . Administrative professional , state teacher appreciation week , school nurse , school principals . Of course there are more custodian appreciation , bus driver appreciation .

For brevity , here we didn't include every single thing . Asca puts out a calendar you can go grab . We didn't wanna repeat that , all right . So now that we have those basic events down , this is when we want to start kind of the more intense work . We wanna go in and reverse engineer our events . We want to start looking at school-wide activities , the things we know we're going to be doing .

For instance , I know I'm gonna be hosting a career day every year . I know I'm gonna be hosting a college week every year . I know that Red Ribbon Week is expected every year those kinds of things . I've already noted them in my calendar . I'm gonna go reverse engineer those dates . I'm gonna walk backwards through the process to figure out what are the things that need to happen , what are the materials I need to make that possible , who are the people that need to be involved , how far ahead do I need to start really getting this together so that when the date gets here , I'm ready to go ? I don't want you to be stuck with a week and a half left and you're scrambling trying to put something together . That's never any fun , so you're just gonna reverse engineer those events .

Same thing for testing dates or testing preparation . Some of you are still responsible for coordinating testing on your campuses . Reverse engineer those dates . If you're not in charge of testing , you still might want to reverse engineer those dates , particularly if you have students that you're working with . With respect to testing concerns , test anxiety , those kinds of things grow with mindset to make sure that they're really set and ready to go by the time the testing date gets there . So you could note that in your calendar End of year duties , if you're responsible for any kind of graduation coordination awards , assemblies , end of year transcripts , end of year grade reports , anything like that , your end of year data report if you're running your use of time data , go ahead and note those on your calendar and reverse engineer those . It could be something as simple as just giving yourself a reminder .

When I started reverse engineering events , I would put you know , red Ribbon Week , october 27th , through whatever I don't even remember the dates this year , but Red Ribbon Week . And then I would go and say two weeks till Red Ribbon Week . And then I would go back a few more weeks , four weeks till Red Ribbon Week , just so that I had it in my mind and it didn't escape me . And then , once I went through those events a couple of times and I knew pretty much what I wanted to do , then I could sit down and reverse engineer the particulars . So don't feel like this is something where you're just locked in and you have to do it a certain way . It's whatever works for you . The point is just having them in mind so that you're prepared . I don't want them to come up and bite you later because you didn't have them on your radar . Rftr , all of that stuff has been entered . After you've gone through all of these things you've done your basic dates , your non-negotiables , your professional development dates , large due dates , awareness dates , staff recognition dates , other dates , all the things you put all those in there , you reversed , engineer and all of them . Then add your other availability .

School Counseling Scheduling and Planning Tips

This conversation is going to hurt some of your hearts and I'm sorry , but I just want to be real about it . Some of you are working on campuses where you do not yet have the latitude to determine when your lessons are taught , which is a shame and is a big part of some of the advocacy initiatives that we have kind of in the pipeline . We're thinking through how best to confront this , because it's a huge concern If you don't have the autonomy to determine when and how your lessons happen . Just kind of take a breather on this one . If you are able to do that , this is when you would plug that lesson availability in .

Don't forsake the nuts and bolts of your program for trying to get in . I've got to get every grade level in twice a week until the end of time , or however it is you want to do it . Be intentional with scheduling your lessons If you're not able to get to them as often as you would prefer and it's just really bothering you . It's way easier to bump it up later than it is to dial it back . Start conservatively and then kind of work your way up as you work through your year . Small group availability same thing . Don't overwhelm yourself stacking things back to back to back to back to back , trying to fill every hour of every day with all this stuff . You also want to intentionally schedule some white space in your calendar because you know you're going to have stuff coming up . I would say even the bigger your camp . This is personal opinion , this is not a research base , but anecdotally I would say , the bigger your campus actually , the more white space you need to schedule , because there's a greater probability of something coming out of the blue that you didn't expect .

Availability for individual students if you like to kind of schedule those in chunks . You would do that at this time , as well as any school-wide data efforts . If you're going to be doing minute meetings , if you're going to be doing needs assessments if it sounds like I'm speaking another language right now , don't worry , we're going to talk about that . We're going to get all up in minute meetings and needs assessments and everything you need to know about those . So don't panic , but do know . If you're going to , if you're going to implement some of those , this is the time . You would put it in your calendar . Alright , any questions about any of that ? So far ?

I do want to warn you , before we move on to the next thing , just be a little careful and cautious Again , if you're new to school counseling or if you're new to your campus , about jumping in and scheduling all the things , that's what we always want to do when we get started . We want to come in , we want to make these huge changes . Secretly . I think we really do want everybody to love us and be like where is this person been all these years ? We're so glad they're finally here and so we jump in and we start throwing all this stuff in the campus and what we end up doing is overwhelming ourselves , completely overwhelming ourselves , and then , when we have to step backward later , we have to kind of pull out of some of the things that we'd implemented . It makes us feel bad . It makes us feel like we're not making the grade . Perhaps it gives the appearance that we couldn't handle it right . We couldn't handle the heat in the kitchen kind of a thing . We do not want to do that .

So as you're planning for your year , just be very mindful of how many things you are putting in that calendar . My advice is to start with the bare minimum and I know that sounds so anti overachiever and you guys are all overachievers , that's why you're here . But just be really , really careful . You can always build up later . It's really hard to dial it back with that added cognitive load that we were talking about earlier , trying to remember all the things Whose room is where , which grade levels are on which hallways . This person likes this but doesn't like this . I go to this person for that . The copy code is this all the things we don't want to be adding all this extra stuff on top of it . You'll have time . You'll have time to start that stuff .

I would say your first two years , in particular perhaps your third , depending on how they're going are really your watch , listen and learn years . If you can really just kind of hold your I'm not saying don't work hard , but just don't overreach you will learn more about your campus . You will be able to build stronger relationships that are foundations on that campus . If you are intentionally and mindfully watching and listening . I'm telling you that is like the key to the kingdom on a campus . You can be ready to help , you can have great ideas , you can be a go-getter , but just don't go too hard . Think of it as a marathon and not as a sprint , if that helps .

I used to back before I had kids , 100 years ago , I used to run marathons . I don't really know why I did it , because when I signed up for my first marathon , I couldn't run around the block Literally could not run around the block . I came home and told my husband I signed up to run a marathon and he laughed at me . He was like there's no way you're going to do this . I'm like , oh yeah , but this is happening because I just wanted to see if I could do it , or maybe you like that , you just want to take a challenge on to see if you can do it . I started training for this marathon and it was great . I ended up running . I had five or six of them loved it . I was not a fast runner , I was a slow runner and we're talking like 18 minute miles .

I got passed up one time in a race . This is a true story by a lady who was seven months pregnant , and also by a man that was celebrating like a 75th birthday or something like that . He was an elderly dude and he just passed us right up , but we didn't care . I had a best friend that ran with me . We ran as a team and we did not care because the party was always in the back of the race . That was where people were cheering each other on . We were getting to know the people that were running around us . We were encouraging them .

When things got tough , that's where , to me , the best part of the race was was in the back Up . In the front of the race . People were pumping it out right . They were competing . They weren't the extreme athletes or whatever . They didn't have time to pay attention to what anybody else was doing . They were literally running their own race , but in the back . It was such a great time and we were able to really enjoy the race . And even now , years later , my best girlfriend and I will tell stories about .

Remember that race , that time that thing happened . Remember when we got passed by that lady that was seven months pregnant and she waved at us . That's where all your greatest experiences , relationships and things come from , so don't forget that as you're starting your school counseling year even if you've been doing this a while don't forget to enjoy the party in the back of the race . You don't always have to be running at the front . Nobody's gonna give you a prize for being ultimate endurance school counselor of the year . Typically that's not gonna happen . But just run your own race and don't feel like you have to keep up with all the people in the front who are supposedly doing all the things , and I can tell you firsthand that a lot of things that you see reported in social media , in the emails that you get and that kind of stuff are not necessarily happening the way that you're being led to believe . So just don't worry about anybody else and just enjoy the party . Enjoy getting to know the people around you . It makes it all worth it , I promise . Hey there , school counselor , I hope you enjoyed that little taste of our best year ever event .

From that little workshop that we started off with on night one , we dove into so many more things like student confidentiality , the confidentiality principles that you weren't taught in grad school and definitely need to know . We talked through how to create a jump file of resources for your year at your fingertips so you're never left scrambling looking for things . And we talked through needs assessments , minute meetings , social emotional screeners , the legalities and caveats of those all of the things you need to know before you administer any kind of a survey on your campus . Y'all it was all in best year ever . If you'd like to grab a copy of the replays and the resources again , just head on over to schoolforschoolcounselorscom slash B-Y-E replays . We would love for you to take a look , take a listen . Let us know what you think .

We are always striving to do better and better for you year after year . We wanna be your biggest cheerleader and your biggest source of inspiration in your school counseling career . You may also want to know , as we're wrapping up this episode , that we have another amazing event coming down the pipeline . We strive to over deliver all the time and this year will be no exception . We are gonna be opening our new counselor academy here in just a couple of days . You can go , hop in the waitlist schoolforschoolcounselorscom slash academy . We'll get you all the information once

New School Counselor Fundamentals

that's open .

But we're gonna be walking through the fundamentals for new school counselors Anybody in their first , second or perhaps even their third year of school counseling . We wanna show you the ins and outs , the ups and downs , and all the little things that you can do to help your year go more smoothly . So if you're interested in that , hop on over to the website for more information . Schoolforschoolcounselorscom . Slash academy . All right , my friend , that's all I have for you this week , but keep listening . We're gonna be back soon with another amazing episode of the School for School Counselors podcast . Until then , I hope you have the best week ever . Take care .