Forging a Relationship Between School Counseling Students and Inner-City Schools: Part 1

| By: Committee for Children

by Kathleen Marie Barrett, Associate Professor of Counselor Education, University of Saint Joseph, CT

It seems like only yesterday that I was an elementary school counselor, bustling down the hallway to one of our school’s five kindergarten classrooms to deliver my weekly Second Step lesson. It was always a highlight of my day; the children loved my weekly classroom visit and engaged with enthusiasm in every aspect of the program, from role-plays to songs to puppet fun.

I smile even today, more than a decade later, as I recall their faces. Moving through each lesson, I witnessed their learning and growing and felt the reward that comes from doing the work I became a school counselor to do. I knew without a doubt that I was helping to level the social-emotional playing field, and to ensure that all our students had foundational understandings about getting along, a common language, and tools to understand one another and solve the inevitable social problems that arose. 

I loved my work as an elementary school counselor. Since finishing my doctorate and becoming a professor, I’ve never forgotten the Second Step program. I also never expected it to once again become such a prominent part of my professional path.

When I became a school counseling professor—teaching school counseling students about their critical role in developing and implementing prevention programs to foster prosocial development—I’d always recommend the Second Step program as a tool. But it was in the course of responding to a local urban school’s call for help several years ago that I found a whole new way to use the Second Step program, and I’ve never looked back. 

I remember the day our counseling program was approached by a local inner-city elementary school, which had no counselor on staff and was challenged to find help working with a small group of girls who were demonstrating troublesome behavior and difficulty getting along at school. Seeing an opportunity to give one of my students some hands-on experience in using my favorite tool for social-emotional development, I arranged for her to hold a weekly small group to deliver Second Step lessons. 

While I wasn’t surprised to hear that the children loved and benefitted from the lessons, I was a little taken aback by how much my own student took away from the experience. In supervision, I saw her make the same discoveries that I’d made in using the program years earlier. I saw her gain so much in understanding how children make sense of and respond to their worlds. I knew intuitively that this experience would help her become a better counselor.

A light bulb suddenly went off for me; I saw an incredible opportunity to create a mutually beneficial and collaborative relationship between my university’s school counseling program and this little inner-city school. I could see immediately that by using the Second Step program as a vehicle, the children would gain all that comes with receiving this acclaimed program and my graduate students would significantly benefit from meaningful field experience.

From that moment to the present day, our collaboration has flourished and the Second Step program has been a central component.  Since our beginning steps, we’ve grown from working with a few students with some extra need to a whole- school implementation that extends from Pre/K to Grade 8.  It is hard for me to say who benefits more, the youngsters who receive their weekly Second Step lessons or the graduate students who volunteer. So far, dozens of graduate students have participated and been transformed by the experience.

Read Part 2 of this post.