Curtis WestbayIt's very quiet...
Every day of school, Grade 12 students have a class called College Counseling. Typically, it's very quiet. It kind of sounds like a study hall. Students are working independently on college application materials. A student might be having a private conversation with a counselor about their writing or about finalizing an application. This is how the College Counseling Seminar should be: productive, quiet, and individualized.
We don't lecture a lot. Usually, counselors only address the group for a few minutes at the beginning of class with announcements and reminders. It's not a typical course. It's a writing seminar. And there's a few reasons for that.
Common advice produces common writing
Sure, we could sit and lecture about writing the perfect personal statement. We do provide how-to guides and examples of great writing. But if we as counselors spend too much time giving the same advice to our students, we will see a lot of the same kinds of writing. We don't want students writing the same essay as their peers. At worst, it would appear unethical (even if it was unintentional). At best, it's boring.
Students have to take the reins
We need students to be in charge of their own application progress, setting goals and deadlines alongside counselors. We won't track down each student and sit beside them to make sure they meet deadlines. Instead, we set internal (counselor) deadlines for review of writing. The consequence for missing those deadlines is the risk of not receiving timely, thoughtful feedback. If students want feedback so they can produce multiple drafts of an important essay before the deadline, all they have to do is give their counselor time to help. The College Counseling Seminar provides students with 50 dedicated minutes for applications and writing every day, so there's little excuse for students to not make progress.
Every part of the application needs to be authentic
Counselors provide feedback. Counselors help students brainstorm. But with too much input from anyone, student writing ceases to be their own. At our school, we don't abide this. Students must write their own applications. There have even been times when a student's writing is inconsistent with their language level and it seems as though they've been receiving too much help outside of school. In this case, counselors have to address the situation. The authenticity of student writing reflects on the reputation of our school, and colleges take notice when a student's writing doesn't align with the language fluency of the student who arrives on campus less than a year later. For the sake of our students across the BASIS network, counselors must ensure that students write their own essays based on their own ideas.
Adults make terrible teenagers
Let's say that colleges were aware of and comfortable with students receiving substantive help with their writing (they're not). Even still, adults would write awful essays from the teenage perspective more often than not. Colleges don't want students to be polished and perfect and blameless. They don't want students to write like they're applying for a job. You would be amazed how obvious it is when an adult's voice takes over a student's essay. Accordingly, our counselors can't put too much of their own voice into a student's writing— we just help them come up with their own thoughts, structure their writing, and revise. All of the essay has to be the student's, not just because of the principle, but also because adults are bad teenagers.
Every student has College Counseling Seminar class in Grade 12. This time will provide sufficient space for students to develop their own ideas and put them into writing. Students in Grades 9-11 needn't worry about essay writing, they just need to lay the foundation for the component parts of the college application: grades, test scores, activities, and English fluency. Our parent event for this month will address these distinct pieces of the college application.