Student counseling can change pupils’ lives!
It has the power of converting introverts into those charming-confident students who can start speaking publicly without any fear. And it can also change the way students think and help them pick the best possible profession for themselves.
Here in this blog, we’ve discussed what student counseling is and why it is important. So, without further ado, let’s jump in…
What Does Student Counseling Mean?
In easy words, educational counseling refers to providing guidance or vocational training to students. Monthly or annual counseling provides personality insights to the students, which further helps them accomplish their mission. Further, student counseling nourishes professional development and lets the students know certain tips and tricks for dealing with psychological traumas.
Clear as mud? Now, let’s move on to the next step…
Impacts of Educational Counseling on Students
Why is Student Counseling Important?
Every pupil needs support and guidance at some point in his/her student life. In a chaotic planet where everybody is busy in their personal lives, youngsters are often left unheard. As a result, students lose track of their aim and ultimately fail in their professional lives. Much worse? If they are not provided with the right kind of guidance, they might start committing crimes and become terrific criminals in the future.
Let's shed some light on 5 impacts that student counseling can have on pupils:
1. Supports Personalized Growth
Exploring one’s feelings and ideologies is the key step to building a better personality. As counsellors, teachers, and online tutors can encourage students to build strong personalities by helping them identify personality traits that need improvement.
Personal development builds confidence in students, the most important quality for career growth. One will hardly find a successful man with zero confidence. Unfortunately, students who can’t express themselves usually fail in their professional lives. This is why student counseling should be an integral part of your teaching strategy. Here is what you can do to strengthen your students’ personalities and help them fight negative doubts about them:
- Conduct weekly counseling sessions for the whole class and discuss the most successful people in every session.
- Design real-life class activities that foster students’ public speaking skills.
- Study each student’s character and conduct separate meetings with them.
- Don’t feel shy to discuss their personal life and psychological traumas.
- Invite business tycoons, CEOs, and other successful people as guest speakers.
2. Boosts Academic Success
When done correctly, student counseling can highlight pupils’ academic weaknesses and help to improve them. Let’s imagine you’re an online Math tutor who has delivered 5 classes so far to a 9th-grade student. After that, you took a test, but your student scored zero marks. Sounds like all your efforts have gone down the drain! Well, if you continue teaching in the same way for the rest of the days, your student’s progress will not improve, and he will end up with poor grades every time.
How will you know your student’s problems if you don’t ask him? How will you improve your teaching strategy without knowing the root cause of the issues?
Student counseling allows teachers to understand their students well and solve the issues they’re facing. You might have to devote extra time to your students or conduct extra online lectures. But, once you find the root cause of the problem, you’ll easily figure out what’s not working for your students and how you can improve your teaching strategy.
Over time, you might notice the student’s performance improving day by day. On the other hand, schools and colleges can get student counseling services or hire specialized counsellors in order to strengthen pupils’ academic success. Further, teachers and online teachers should also be given coaching to improve student counseling skills.
3. Strengthens Decision-Making Skills
Here is a translated version of the Chinese proverb that explains the importance of decision-making skills:
“A wise man makes his own decision. An ignorant man follows public opinion.”
Students are the next generation, and to ensure that you as a teacher build a wise generation… you need to instill decision-making skills in your students.
With decision-making skills, students can evaluate certain outcomes and pick the best career option. The ability to choose the appropriate path depends on students’ confidence and their experience in decision-making. You can create real-life situations for students where they’re encouraged to make decisions. For instance, play hide-and-seek with the junior students and high-level games like monopoly with senior students. Apart from that, you can teach your students 5 simple decision-making steps, as shown in the image below:
4. Eliminates Depression
Believe it or not, anxiety can kill students’ productivity!
Depression is considered one of the deadly mental diseases that slowdowns youngsters’ daily progress and eats up their energy. The worst part of nervousness is that it severely impacts both academic and personal life. It also gives birth to suicidal thoughts.
That said, teachers and online tutors have the potential to help their students develop skills that can beat anxiety and fear attacks. Start with identifying the symptoms of depression in your students to help them out. The main symptoms are;
- Social isolation
- Yelling and crying
- Panic and anger attacks
- Tiredness and low energy
- Health complaints, i.e., headache
Once you’ve pinpointed the depressed students, you’ve got to talk to them. Don’t rush, and avoid pointing them out in the crowd. It’s best to discuss each student’s problems in isolation. Be kind, friendly, and non-judgmental. Try to solve their problems. After all, students are not just your pupils; they’re the future of your country! And you have to work to build a strong generation.
5. Builds Positive Attitude
As counsellors, teachers, and tutors can work on developing positive student attitudes that will help them fight future challenges. That said, feeling good about oneself makes an individual more confident, and he/she starts developing good relationships with others. But most of the time, negative thoughts wander in students’ minds. However, proper counseling can kick these menacing negative vibes out of their lives.
Building positive student attitudes is important because when students become confident, they start sharing their ideas with their peers. They might receive amazing feedback and criticism both. Positive thinkers will learn from negative feedback and improve their ideas. This will help them grow. However, the students wrestling with negative thoughts will get stuck in between. Negative thoughts will keep popping up in their minds, i.e., “My idea is always weird!”, “Why can’t I just come up with something better?” etc., Such students usually fail because their thoughts start overruling them.
Provide proper student counseling to your students because a positive attitude does matter a lot! Eliminate negative talk during the lectures, start praising your students, and set soft punishments for the students making fun of others. Create a friendly environment where students won’t fear to share their ideas.
How to Become an Empathetic and a Warm-Hearted Counselor
Now you know why learning counseling skills is important. So, let's discuss what skills you need to develop to become a good counsellor (as a teacher). But, before that, we'd like to tell you that to become a counsellor that students will love, you need to be patient, ambitious, friendly, and sometimes funny. Read the list below, and you'll know the secrets to becoming a good mentor and consultant.
Be A Good Listener
Listening can make you a good counsellor. To offer your recommendations and piece of advice, you need to understand the problem of students clearly. And, without listening, it’s not possible. Further, students want to be heard. They want to share their thoughts with someone who cares. If you listen carefully to your students, you can demonstrate that you care about them. This way, they might start sharing their problems, ideas, and depressing thoughts with you. And once they unveil their ideas or fears, you can easily figure out how to help them for betterment.
Conduct In-Person Meetings
What makes you think students want to publicize their fear?
When dealing with depressed students, you should deal with them in the office. Such students are very sensitive about their privacy, and it’s best to respect it. In-person meetings should not be reserved for introverts only. In order to understand every student and study their behavior for their professional growth, you should meet every kind of student in the office on a weekly or monthly basis. Because for teachers providing individual guidance to every student in a class of 30-40 students becomes difficult and sometimes impossible. So, individual counseling sounds like a great option here.
Reach out to Parents
If necessary, call or meet the student’s parents. Parental involvement can help you discover more about your students, such as their hobbies, likes, dislikes, daily routines, fears, and so much more. To be precise, contacting parents lets the teachers discover students’ needs, which further allows them to devise effective professional and personal growth strategies. A good counsellor is always the one who stays in contact with both the parents and the students.
Final Thoughts!
Teaching academic courses shouldn’t be a teacher’s only motive. Remember, students are the building blocks of every nation, and ignoring their personal growth means ruining tomorrow! Hence, provide proper student counseling to each student and make sure to follow all the tips discussed above. Because only super-confident students with the right decision-making skills can develop a future worth living!
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