Rising Above: A School Counselor’s Journey

Youth Voice and Advocacy Intervention Summary

In alignment with the school district mission statement “Each Scholar: A Voice, A

Dream”, an intervention was designed to address the needs of a small group of students as well

as the needs of a whole school. 15 students were selected based on their communication styles to

participate in an assertiveness and advocacy training group, with the goal of teaching them how

to assess, research, and problem solve issues within their school community. By engaging in this

work, using the Community Advocacy Training curriculum provided by the Non-profit

organization World Vision, the intervention group had the dual role of teaching assertiveness as

well as gathering and presenting youth voice and youth stakeholder perspectives in how policy

and procedures were shaped at Lakota Middle School. This intervention group was carried out in

cooperation with my mentor counselor, my building admin, and district stakeholders.

The training group consisted of three phases of lessons and activities, taught every other

week. Phase 1 included the foundational work of group norming and forming, instruction in the

Giraffe Talk Protocol, and conducting a community scan as a group. Phase two consisted of

brainstorming problems and issues within the school community that came to light during the

community scan or because of the observation protocol learned to do the scan. To critically

evaluate the issues identified, a root cause analysis protocol was taught and practiced. Phase two

concluded with students working through a protocol to identify their own inherent skills that

could be of use when advocating for change. Phase three was the research, solution generation,

and presentation phase. Having done the work to scan their community critically for issues that

were important to them as students, established root causes for those issues, and evaluate their

own change making skills the students split themselves into groups in order to tackle 4 issues
that were important to them (bullying behavior, a culture of fighting at the school, youth mental

and social health, dress policy). Groups would present these issues in a Shark Tank style format

to the administrative team following a protocol; giving their community scan synopsis, their root

cause analysis, their research and data on the issue, and finally the details of the solution they

had come up with to either solve or bring awareness to the issue.

As a result of the COVID 19 pandemic and the school closures that it caused, the SVC

intervention work had to be called off before phase 3 could completed; before the policy

recommendations the students were working on could be finalized and presented. In addition,

neither the post-assessment of assertiveness, advocacy skills, and self-efficacy nor the spring

counseling needs assessment could be administered resulting in no data being available to

empirically evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention.