Academic Counseling: Enhancing Motivation to Achieve

The focus of this interactive, skill-building workshop is to provide school counselors with additional models and strategies for fulfilling their roles in the academic development domain of the ASCA National Model, including the use of motivational strategies in individual and group counseling for academic achievement and parent/teacher/system consultation and training regarding academic motivation issues.

Learning Objectives:
After attending this workshop, participants should be able to: 

• Use Stages of Change to understand how people change and how to determine which change strategy will have greatest efficacy when matched with each stage of change
• Explain the fundamental conditions necessary to elicit “Change Talk”
• Use the style and spirit of listening required to motivate students to change and achieve.
• Ask open-ended questions to elicit "willing to change" talk, "able to change" talk and "ready to change" talk
• Employ readiness rulers, confidence rulers and commitment rulers in eliciting change talk
• Reflect, affirm and summarize change talk
• Address strategies for working with resistance

About the Presenters:
Kathy Biles, Ph.D., NCC is the school counseling program coordinator at Oregon State University Cascades Campus in Bend, Ore. In addition to her program leadership, Biles teaches coursework in social justice and advocacy, school counseling, career counseling and addictive behavior counseling. Biles also facilitates workshops in motivational interviewing for schools and groups across the country.

Gene Eakin, Ph.D. worked as a school counselor for 27 years and is now the School Counseling Program Lead at Oregon State University – Corvallis. Eakin used these strategies in individual and group work with his students at the high school at which he worked in 2006-08. 

Schedule: Full-day training; 0.6 CEUs available to attendees

Cost: $3,750* for full day  

To bring this professional development workshop to your district, email Jennifer Walsh.