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Mrs. Kirschman, K-5 School Counselor's Classroom Edit display name

  • Highland Elementary School
  • Billings, MT
  • More than a third of students from low‑income households Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education. Learn more

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During the historic Covid-19 school shut-down of 2020, I had the opportunity to attend several weekly Zoom sessions led by Linda Metcalf (Solution Focused Schools founder) along with hundreds of school counselors from across the United States. We were all searching for better approaches and methods to help students who suddenly had a new reason to feel anxious, out of control, scared and isolated. Solution-focused brief counseling is a therapeutic method that focuses on helping students to create solutions in a straightforward manner. In problem-focused approaches, too much time is spent on identifying what is not working, instead of looking in a variety of contexts for times when things are working. Using the solution-focused approach, empowerment takes place in the very first meeting and keeps everyone focused on the direction of choice (Linda Metcalf). It was during this time that my interest in the Solution Focused approach piqued and I saw value in using it to help my students; especially as in-person learning resumed in the fall of 2020. I used several of the strategies throughout the 2020-2021 school year but realized that I need more in-depth training and guidance to be effective with this technique. Attending the Solution Focused Schools virtual conference October 29-30, 2021 will provide me the opportunity to learn from the world's leading Solution Focused clinicians. In turn, I will take my newfound knowledge and use it to support my students, in a more effective way, to discover their coping skills that are working and to build a foundation of affirmation and empowerment so that each student feels safer, becomes a better problem-solver and values their worth and potential even more.

About my class

During the historic Covid-19 school shut-down of 2020, I had the opportunity to attend several weekly Zoom sessions led by Linda Metcalf (Solution Focused Schools founder) along with hundreds of school counselors from across the United States. We were all searching for better approaches and methods to help students who suddenly had a new reason to feel anxious, out of control, scared and isolated. Solution-focused brief counseling is a therapeutic method that focuses on helping students to create solutions in a straightforward manner. In problem-focused approaches, too much time is spent on identifying what is not working, instead of looking in a variety of contexts for times when things are working. Using the solution-focused approach, empowerment takes place in the very first meeting and keeps everyone focused on the direction of choice (Linda Metcalf). It was during this time that my interest in the Solution Focused approach piqued and I saw value in using it to help my students; especially as in-person learning resumed in the fall of 2020. I used several of the strategies throughout the 2020-2021 school year but realized that I need more in-depth training and guidance to be effective with this technique. Attending the Solution Focused Schools virtual conference October 29-30, 2021 will provide me the opportunity to learn from the world's leading Solution Focused clinicians. In turn, I will take my newfound knowledge and use it to support my students, in a more effective way, to discover their coping skills that are working and to build a foundation of affirmation and empowerment so that each student feels safer, becomes a better problem-solver and values their worth and potential even more.

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