Elva Cankat picked up a new strategy at a workshop about the developing adolescent brain: play music during a small-group discussion and turn it off to indicate the time is up.
“I’m planning to use the music trick in my lesson on Monday,” said Cankat, a school counselor at Cypress Hills Collegiate Preparatory School in Brooklyn.
The workshop was one of 15 offered at the UFT’s 15th annual School Counselors Conference on March 9. About 350 counselors and aspiring counselors — the largest turnout ever — gathered at UFT headquarters for the Saturday event to hone their professional skills, meet their colleagues and peruse a vendor fair with 38 exhibitors.
UFT President Michael Mulgrew welcomed the conference participants. “If you want a better climate, there should be a school counselor in every school,” he said.
Before the busy day started, School Counselors Chapter Leader Rosemarie Thompson reminded her members about the importance of self-care. “If we’re not OK, we can’t make sure the kids are OK,” she said.
The subjects of self-care and mental health peppered conversations and presentations throughout the day. Gillian Alleyne, a counselor at IS 211 in Brooklyn, said she and the other participants in a mindfulness and meditation workshop were enjoying it so much that they didn’t want to leave.
“We always think about others, but we need to take care of ourselves, too,” she said. “When we develop those mindfulness skills for ourselves, we can teach them to kids.”
Anthony Taylor, who had attended the conference during graduate school, came back for this year’s event in his first year working as a counselor at the HS for Public Service in Brooklyn. He said he found the workshops about cyberbullying and supporting LGBT students to be especially helpful. “Bullying is everywhere, and we have a huge population of LGBT students,” he said. “The more tools I have to support them, the better.”
Other workshop topics included social media pitfalls, postsecondary choices for students with disabilities and the role of school counselors in Functional Behavior Assessments and Behavior Intervention Plans.
The keynote speaker, Dr. Carol Dahir, a professor and chair of the School Counseling Department at the New York Institute of Technology, gave an overview of new State Education Department regulations for school counseling, which school counselors must implement starting in September. Dahir explained that the regulations were created to ensure all K–12 students have access to a certified school counselor. As she explained the new requirements, she offered plenty of reassurance and advice about how to prepare.
School counselors saw the day not just as a professional learning opportunity, but as a chance to stop and breathe.
Sonia Christie, a counselor at MS 484 in Brooklyn, said she appreciates union events such as the conference because she doesn’t often get the chance to catch up on relevant information or reflect on her work during the week. “You sit down with a kid and the phone rings,” she said. “You deal with a crisis, and now the student in front of you has to go back to class.”
Alleyne, the counselor from IS 211, said she appreciated both the high-quality professional development and the opportunity to network with fellow counselors.
“I wish I’d started coming to UFT events sooner,” Alleyne said. “I now see the meaning of a union.”
