School Counselors looking for courses to take for recertification that coincide with our ASCA standards and are interesting and beneficial for our counseling program should look at the “Connecting with the Arts” course for recertification!
The course was a welcome surprise in that I did not know how the arts would be communicated for me to utilize it in my counseling sessions. It was helpful to see actual classroom lessons and watch the students enjoy utilizing the arts as an expression of the topic they learned. In other words, the course did a fantastic job in enhancing my knowledge of how the arts can be utilized to help students grasp and comprehend material that is taught.
It was also very interesting to watch the teacher’s collaboration in action and see how they supported each other’s endeavor to utilize different subjects to teach lessons. I wish more schools could adopt this mindset!
As a school counselor, I struggled to find classes that supported my counseling curriculum and endeavor to teach social emotional skills. The arts education courses offered through SCETV (*https://www.scetv.org/education) can help us gather ideas for delivering our message through effective creative lessons. Therefore, I would definitely suggest taking these arts education courses to gain insight into how we can supplement our standards. For example, utilizing puppetry in my small counseling lessons and implementing the book “Weirdo” as a teaching tool for tolerance and acceptance stood out to me as materials and concepts I would like to put into practice immediately.
Whether it be for recertification or just for enrichment purposes, I feel these courses would be an asset for obtaining techniques that could help enforce our lessons and make them interesting!
(*This is link to SCETV Education home page. To find ETV Teacher Recertification course information, click “Teacher Courses” section and then “Teacher Recertification” box. For direct access to ETV Teacher Recertification: http://www.scetv.org/teacher-recertification.)
Leslie Cox holds a Master of Education in School Counseling and a Master of Fine Arts from Savannah College of Art and Design. Presently, she is a School Counselor serving 3rd through 5th grade students, though has worked in all levels of education as a teacher and counselor.