5 Core Student Success Skills 

Foundational Classroom Skills

In almost every classroom, it’s expected that students can sustain attention, follow directions, listen, and participate. As a school counselor, you can help students develop these skills and be more successful.

The key is to be explicit. I’ve mentioned this simple three-step process before.

1. Set the purpose.
2. Do the activity.
3. Reflect on how it went.

For example, say you want students to practice active listening in your class lessons.

1. Tell them about active listening - what it is and isn’t, and why it helps. Tell them how they will use active listening during the activity.
2. Complete the activity.
3. Spend about 5 minutes reflecting. How did they use active listening? When else could they see active listening being helpful?

Almost any activity will require students to focus, listen, follow directions, and participate. You can use exercises that target these directly and pair them with the Purpose-Do-Reflect approach.

Activity Ideas

1. Play a Game of Telephone: This classic game can help students understand the importance of active listening by emphasizing how easily messages can be misinterpreted.
2. Create a Scavenger Hunt: Make a list of items for students to find around the room or school, encouraging them to pay close attention to their surroundings.
3. Interviews: Have students interview each other, then give a summary of the person they interviewed.
4. Try out different ways to participate during lessons. Give students a few options that accommodate different styles, such as raising hands, talking with group members, and writing answers on mini whiteboards.
5. Simon Says or an activity where they have to follow directions step by step to reach a result.

Helpful Resources

Communication Skills

School counselors can play an essential role in helping elementary students develop their communication skills. Through various activities and exercises, counselors can help students express their thinking, ask for help, and work with others. By teaching these essential skills early on, school counselors can help students lay the foundation for successful communication.

To bring this to life in your sessions, embed these skills with simple routines. Students can share their thinking at the beginning and end of sessions. How was their week? What went well? What did they learn today?

Throughout your sessions, you have opportunities to work with other students and provide feedback about their communication.

You can give them a consistent way to ask for help. Perhaps, they use a nonverbal signal, such as a sign for help. Or try practicing asking for help with a simple sentence stem. “I’m confused and need some help.” “I don’t understand ________. Can you help me?”

Activity Ideas

1. Give students multiple ways to communicate during activities.
2. Practice and reinforce clear communication skills. You can give students sentence stems to help them get started.
3. When students have a group activity, write down and display ways they can cooperate with others.

Helpful Resources

Self Direction

So much of what makes a student successful is being goal-directed and self-sufficient. While this comes naturally to some people, students can learn these skills.

Specific lessons on setting SMART goals are a great way to engage upper-elementary and middle-school students. Taking it step by step, they can transform a wish into an achievable goal. In addition, when they learn a straightforward goal-setting process, they will be more likely to use it again.

Being disorganized can completely derail a student who is capable of achieving every benchmark. School counselors can support students by providing explicit organizational strategies. This makes for great lessons or techniques to share with teachers. For example, try giving students tasks like cleaning desks or a backpack-packing checklist.

For younger students, it can be helpful to represent the tasks visually and break them down. For example, they have to get their backpack, put their folder in, and put up their chair. You would use three fingers and edit it down to Backpack - Folder - Chair. They can repeat this to themselves as they go through the tasks.

Activity Ideas

1. Give students organizational tools, such as checklists or visual step-by-step guides, so they can complete tasks more independently.
2. Create a goal board where students can add their goals and the mini-goals they need to achieve.
3. Practice turning a wish into a SMART Goal.
4. Each week celebrate effort and accomplishments.

Helpful Resources

Self Regulation

Self-regulation is a big one. Students who struggle to understand and manage their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors have very little chance of succeeding independently. Luckily, this is school counselors’ bread and butter. You can work with students to learn and use simple calming strategies, make plans to handle stressful situations, and build their positive mindset.

Activity Ideas

1. Have students try out different strategies and decide which ones work best for them. Then have them think about when they would use them. 
2. Have students try goal-achieving strategies to overcome plateaus.
3. Expand student's feelings vocabulary to so they can name how they are feeling.

Helpful Activities

Problem-Solving

Building problem-solving skills is another area where school counselors are uniquely suited. Elementary students need the ability to brainstorm solutions, accept setbacks, and compromise to succeed both inside and outside the classroom.

School counselors can use a range of activities to help develop student problem-solving skills. A fun way to introduce the idea is through games that involve making decisions. These can include board games, card games, or movement games. By playing, students become familiar with brainstorming, decision-making, collaboration, and compromise - all critical elements of successful problem-solving.

Activity Ideas

1. Any activity that involves decision-making is great practice. Make sure to follow the purpose - do - reflect format and student's will be more aware.
2. Create a peace corner in your classroom or office with visuals for conflict resolution. 
3. Add a problem solving time to morning meeting. Give students a scenario that happened over the past week or so and have them brainstorm solutions.

Helpful Resources