Day 47 - Focus on Freshman - Joe Attubato - BHS Director of Guidance

This post first appeared on the BHS Guidance Blog

As in years past the BHS Guidance staff puts a tremendous amount of focus on incoming freshmen.

An incoming 9^th grader faces many new challenges with the transition to high school. Freshmen are dealing with a new environment, new teachers, more freedom and responsibility, etc. The Guidance staff makes every effort to be in tune with this process and to serve as a resource.

Each year Guidance Counselors meet with freshmen in small groups within the first month of school. We call students to the Guidance Office and introduce ourselves, and discuss the many resources available to them. Although we have found this process useful, we also feel it is not enough. In fact, what we have learned from our freshman over the past several years is that they prefer to hear about graduation requirements, academic expectations, how to go about making a level change, etc.

For a second year the BHS Guidance staff worked with Ms. Sullivan in the health department. Ms. Sullivan allowed the BHS Guidance staff to teach a lesson during her Freshmen health class. The Guidance staff covered and discussed BHS graduation requirements and the importance of identifying resources. One teaching practice that we used again this year was a “ticket to leave”. The ticket to leave is simply a form that we ask freshmen to complete at the end of the lesson so we can gauge if students understood what was covered. Based on the data, we felt our message was clear to a vast majority of freshmen.  We look forward to continuing and refining this practice in years to come. 

Day 34 - New Frontier for the BHS Guidance Department

This post originally appeared on the BHS Guidance Blog

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As in years past the BHS Guidance staff puts a tremendous amount of focus on incoming freshman. As an incoming 9^th  grader many challenges in the transition to high school can occur. Freshman deal with new challenges such as: new school, new teachers, more freedom and responsibility, etc. The Guidance staff makes every effort to be in tune with this process and to serve as a resource.

Each year Guidance Counselors meet with freshman students in small groups within the first month of school. We call students to the Guidance Office and introduce ourselves and make them aware of the many resources available to them. Although we have found this process useful, we also feel it is not enough. In fact, what we have learned from our freshman over the past two years is that they prefer to hear about graduation requirements, academic expectations, how to go about making a level change, etc.

Last year Guidance staff members met with the Burlington High School Health teachers. Our purpose was to discuss how the Guidance Department can integrate Guidance Curriculum in the classroom. After much discussion and planning, we developed guidance related topics that we felt was most applicable to freshman students. That theme was around understanding graduation requirements and knowing how to take steps when academic intervention is required.

With this topic two Guidance staff members, Ms. Diozzi and Ms. Minty, worked over the summer to develop a lesson plan. During summer professional development the Guidance Department reviewed and finalized the lesson. We are happy to say we saw all this planning come to life in freshman health classes last week. We crossed the line as Guidance Counselor to classroom teacher. As a department we are very happy to be seen in the classroom setting and hope that the freshman class found our lesson useful. Moving forward our hope is to improve and expand the classroom model and teach a lesson at each grade level.