Coffee with the Counselor: What It Is and How to Run It [Episode 143]

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Here's What to Expect in This Episode:

Have you ever held a “Coffee with the Counselor” event at your school? This can be a great opportunity for parents to connect with counselors and other parents all while learning about a particular topic.

I’ve held several “Coffee with the Counselor” events in the past, and some have been a huge hit while others didn’t quite have the turnout we’d hoped for. Along the way, I learned which logistics you need to plan for and I’m sharing them with you today. I’ll run through all the details so you can get started on prepping your very own “Coffee with the Counselor”!

Running an event like this doesn’t have to be a huge undertaking. Just a bit of minimal planning can make a huge impact on parents and students. Getting parents through the door is a win in itself, right? If you’ve hosted “Coffee with the Counselor” before, I’d love to hear about it! Send me a message on Instagram @counselorclique to let me know what went well or what you’re hoping to improve on for next time.

Topics Covered in This Episode:

  • An overview of what “Coffee with the Counselor” is
  • Suggestions for how often to run this event and what time of day to host it
  • What you’ll need for “Coffee with the Counselor” and how to divvy up responsibilities 
  • Examples of high-interest topics that you could focus on 
  • How to measure the success of “Coffee with the Counselor”
  • Ideas for keeping the momentum going after the event ends

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

Read the transcript for this episode:

0:00
Y’all, I have so much to say about coffee with the counselors, and I didn’t really think about it until I sat down and thought, wow, we haven’t done an episode on this before. Let me first start out by saying I am by no means an expert on this. This is just one of those projects that I have tried, failed, tried something different, found a couple wins, and copied and pasted and tried a few more times.

0:28
Now I will say that because, like I said, not everyone has been this raging success. And I would say every single one, we learned something and moved on and created something better from it. So I personally just like to think that most things that you do as a high school counselor aren’t turning out as failures, even if they’re not what you expect. So there’s always a learning experience to be had.

0:52
So take this with a grain of salt. Decide that you’re going to do it if you feel like this is a good fit for you, your energy and your program right now, and if not, maybe save this episode and come back to it later when you think it would be a better fit for you and your team or your department.

1:09
So what is coffee with a counselor, or coffee with the counselors if you have a whole team? Let’s run the intro, and then we’ll dive on in.

1:24
You got into this profession to make a difference in your students’ lives, but you’re spread thin by all of the things that keep getting added to your to do list. I can’t create more hours in the day, but I can invite you into my Counselor Clique where you’ll finally catch your breath.

1:38
Come with me as we unpack creative ideas and effective strategies that’ll help you be the counselor who leaves a lifelong impact on your students. I’m Lauren Tingle your high school counseling hype girl here to help you energize your school counseling program and remind you of how much you love your job.

1:57
Okay, coffee with a counselor, or coffee with the counselors? I guess I should decide on one of them. For the sake of this episode, I’m gonna say coffee with the counselors, because I’m gonna guess a lot of you work with a team, or could put together some sort of team in your school to make this happen.

2:14
This what I would say. There’s a formal definition. It’s not like a thing that everyone should know about already. I would call this an informal gathering of parents and counselors, where parents can learn things that are informational about social, emotional topics, and they will have the opportunity to connect with counselors and then connect with other parents.

2:37
Those would be just like kind of my initial thoughts on what coffee with the counselors is or could be. Now, again, no one says that you have to do this, but if you are noticing a need for some parent education to help out your students, then I think that this could be a great option.

2:56
I think it takes minimal planning, and it can impact a small group of parents who could have impact on their own students and change some things in their family. And I think that anytime you get parents in a room and can teach them something that would be helpful for them, I think that’s a win.

3:15
Just because even in like highly engaged parent communities, it’s still hard to get parents in the door to come and learn something, and now I’m seeing that as a parent, I have found if I don’t know about something, if I don’t have enough information about it, I’m probably not going to go. And if I don’t hear about it enough and enough times to put it on my calendar, I’m probably not going to go.

3:36
So I do think I have a different perspective on something like this now that I’m a parent and I have an elementary school age child versus when I was in the school and I had never had a student before. I realized, as a parent, we are inundated with a lot of information, a lot of announcements coming our way, that it can be easy to miss something. And so I think I would tell myself that as a counselor in the past with no kids or not having kids who are school age, like, don’t take it personally if not a lot of people show up.

4:08
It’s okay. They have other things going on too. I think I would tend to get my feelings hurt or think that I didn’t do something well enough because not a lot of people came, or not the entire school came, and that’s okay, I would tell myself, give myself some grace, because on the other side of it, parents have a lot going on, and something like this might not make it to the top of the urgency calendar, or it just might not be the right timing for them.

4:33
So I’m going to kind of lay out my experience with a coffee with the counselors type program, and then I’m going to kind of alongside that, say what this could look like for you. So the way we did it, I’m going to think through some logistics out loud with you.

4:49
We did this quarterly in our school, and you could do it quarterly, you could do it monthly. You could do it twice a year. There’s no rule saying you have to do this at a certain time of year. I would say, depending on what you think your parents need, because honestly, they might not know what they need right now.

5:07
So first you’re going to want to decide logistically, how often you’re going to have this. And if I were you, I would go ahead and set a goal and commit to that. You don’t just want to do one and then never do it again or do one and your confidence is shot, so you don’t do it again. Go ahead and decide up front, we’re going to try this for a whole year every quarter and see what happens.

5:27
I think doing it more than once is important to get those reps in, and for you to get better at it, and for your parents to start understanding what this is. And maybe it sounds exciting, but they can’t go to the first one, and so you offer other ones.

5:40
So you’ve decided how often you’re going to do it. When are you going to do it? Give yourself the freedom to try something, and if this doesn’t work, to change it. For the most part, we found in our school that it worked in the mornings, and I don’t know, we just had so many evening time events for things like open house, or, you know, meet the teacher kind of things, or tours of the school, or curriculum nights, or PTSA meetings, SIC meetings, all of those things were in the evening time.

6:07
And so we just thought this would be a different opportunity to maybe capture the same audience, but maybe capture a completely different audience. It would be right after they drop their kids off at school. So if there are parents who are driving their students to school, then they could get to the school building after they had dropped off kids in all the carpools and all the places, park and then come in.

6:29
We didn’t want it to be competing with the drop off line, that parent pickup line. You know how crazy that gets. So it was at like nine o’clock after students were already in their first block class. If you do it in the morning and that doesn’t work, well, change it up. Do it in the afternoon or do an evening event if you do know that that works for your students.

6:48
You could pair it with something else that you have going on in the school already. But I kind of liked because this was something different. We were focusing on more social-emotional topics, instead of information driven things like financial aid night or something like that, this just felt a little different, and it was kind of fun to do it at a different time of the day.

7:07
I will be honest with you. Our lunchtime one; we tried to shake it up and do it during lunchtime one time, and that did not go well. We maybe we would have done that twice, but it was, it was a hard sell to get people in the door during lunchtime.

7:22
We thought maybe we’d catch people who were coming off of a third shift, or people who could and wanted to leave work during the day to come and we provided food, but that was a harder sell. We did not have good attendance at that so we went back to morning times.

7:37
Speaking of lunch or morning times, if you’re calling it coffee with the counselors, you probably should have some coffee for them. So if you are going to be providing coffee and maybe donuts or fruit, what do you need to do in order to make that happen?

7:52
Like, do you need to go do a purchase order ahead of time? Do you need to place an order at Dunkin Donuts before the day of and then what kind of counselor power do you need to make that happen? Do you need to have one person bring in fruit and cups and napkins and somebody else is getting donuts and coffee?

8:09
I will say, for a small group like this, like the donuts and coffee can be handled by one person. I’ve done other event type things at school where we were doing coffee for all of the teachers in the school. And you better have a big SUV with a big trunk for that, because we needed a lot. I’m just saying for this, it’s probably going to be smaller, especially if you’re starting out. So I think one person could do that pickup.

8:31
How are you going to advertise this when you have decided when and where you’re doing it? Are you going to put on email, social media, the announcements at school, the main website? Do you have parent Facebook groups or PTSA? I know that you who are listening. You’re basically a public relations manager. That should be the alternate title for a high school counselor. You’re a public relations specialist. You know how to get the information out. So this is not new news to you. This is old news.

9:02
You know how to advertise a program or a special event or something you are, dare I say, more of a professional at pr than a PR person. I don’t know. I mean, I’m just saying it could be you. So think about how you’re advertising it, because the worst thing you could do is not tell people about it so that they don’t show up. You got to tell them about it if you want them to be there.

9:24
Where will you have this in your school? Now I know real estate is hard to come by in the school. I’ve talked about that with your office. So I know running some sort of event can also be tedious to get on the calendar. Think about if you have a reservation system in your school for reserving a conference room or a special section of the library. Obviously, you need to consider if you can have food and drinks there.

9:46
I know, like, you know, some libraries say no food in there, but maybe you have a conference room or something that you can do that in. I think it’s important to consider where in the school that it is make it accessible for parents to get to easily. So if it’s during. School day, they probably have to check in through the front office and get a visitor’s tag. So how are you going to get them from the front office to wherever this is in the school?

10:08
Will you have signs? Will you have a counselor or some student volunteers like moving them from one place to the other? Is there a separate entrance that they come into from the parking lot? Just you’ll want to consider how they’re getting to that spot. Because I know we don’t do, I mean, you probably don’t do a ton of things where you’re bringing visitors onto campus all at once during the day, and the front office can get a little crazy in the morning if your school is anything like mine was.

10:34
So consider where to do it, when to do it, how often you’re going to do it, if you’re going to have food or drinks, how you’re going to advertise it. Those are most of the logistics. Oh, and then, just like, who will be responsible? I feel like that falls into the logistics category.

10:48
So is one counselor in your department going to be in charge of the whole thing for that quarter? Or are you going to parse out the work and divide it and say you’re going to go get the food? You’re going to solidify the speaker or the topic that we’re talking on. You’re going to advertise it.

11:05
Like this is another great opportunity for you to lean into strengths of your department and your counselors and what people like to do. I think it could be a lot to have one person do all of it, but if you have a pretty well oiled machine of a team dividing and conquering is a great way to do this, and obviously it makes it a lot more fun to do it with other people.

11:30
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11:44
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12:30
Okay, we can say check to logistics. Let’s move on and talk about different topics, because I think this is a big limiting belief, or big barrier to getting into running something like this. So first of all, maybe when you get people in the room for your first one and you’re going into the second one, you just tell them, we are always open to your suggestions.

12:54
But I have found that parents don’t know what they don’t know. They need you to make the suggestions, and then they’re happy to pick from them, or you can pick entirely based off of what you know that they need to know. So let me tell you about ones I’ve done in the past and give you some ideas. Get your wheels turning.

13:12
You don’t have to always be the one who speaks. Someone in your counseling department does not always have to be the one that speaks. I think this gives a lot of, I don’t know, excitement and new energy behind what you’re presenting. If you have a guest speaker and it takes a load off of you. You don’t have to be the only one doing this.

13:29
Coffee with the counselors does not mean the counselor themselves has to be doing the presentation. I think, remember, one of the objectives would be counselors connecting with parents along with parents connecting with parents. So if they walk away learning something new about a social, emotional topic. Great. You don’t have to be the one to present it. Tell yourself that.

13:47
One that we did, a presentation that we did was on teen mental health. Don’t forget, you’re an expert on this topic. You see teens all the time. You talk to them about their mental health. You do presentations in classrooms. You do so much and you see common trends happening all the time that you can speak to. You don’t have to give names of students. You can just say, this is what I’m seeing. Even make it really general, like you’re an expert in this topic. You know more about this than parents, so remind yourself of that. Preach that to yourself if you need some confidence.

14:19
They’re going to show up to that and not know what to do next. You’re going to give them a lot of information on that topic.

14:26
Growing independent young adults. We did this as counselors ourselves too. I remember using the book Love and Logic. I’ll link that in the show notes. In case you’ve never heard of it before. It’s a great I don’t know, parenting slash working with teenagers. Kind of book talking about natural consequences and what happens.

14:45
I think there are a lot of discussion questions that can come out of portions of this book, and obviously you can recommend it to them, or you could go as far as to do a book study or something, but I think you can get a lot of information on a screen and conversation flowing about growing independent young adults, because I bet that that’s a lot of parents goals for their own students before they launch them out of the home.

15:08
So as a counselor, you can also talk about just trends that you’re seeing in terms of students growing or not growing independent, and then trends happening in research. You, as a counselor have access to more research than they do, and I think that would be really eye opening to parents.

15:22
Another topic I remember doing this is one that we brought in a guest speaker for. We brought in a guest speaker from NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. And they probably have a chapter where you are I can’t speak to that. I’ll link them in the show notes so that you can either learn about them or get involved or connect with a volunteer from your community, but these are all volunteers.

15:43
And you can have a volunteer who’s a parent. You can have a volunteer come share their mental health story. You can have a lot of different people sent out to you from the local Nami chapter. They usually have different presentations already prepared for things just like this.

15:59
So I remember our person did recognizing early onset mental health illness or mental illness in children, adolescents and those give like warning signs, things to look for, areas of concern. And you know, you always run the risk of when you do a presentation like this, everyone walking away, diagnosing themselves and their children, but having that information, and giving parents ideas of how they can be allies, whether that’s with their own children or their children’s friends, is so powerful.

16:30
So use someone who wants to get out there, who’s trying to get connections with their volunteer work, and come do a presentation like this, tap into them, lean into them, and bring them into your school. You could do a conversation around the changing college and career landscape.

16:46
Now, I would not do this like this wouldn’t be my top topic to do, just because we do a lot of that informational stuff at parent meetings and open houses and curriculum nights, that kind of stuff I mentioned before. But maybe you are taking more of a social emotional spin on this, like things to consider in those future pathways. I don’t you can do a lot with this, but you could consider something in the College and Career arena that maybe they’re not getting in any of those other evening time presentations that you’re doing.

17:18
And you can bring in someone local for this too. So maybe a regional workforce advisor, someone who knows the up and coming trends in different careers and career outlooks. I think that could be really interesting for parents to hear. Another one that was my favorite was it was really practical and hands on how to communicate with your teen. And the person who did this presentation for us was our formal school’s mental health counselor, and she had since left our school building and was doing private practice on her own, but she was a licensed professional counselor, and I think parents want to hear about that kind of stuff.

17:52
Who doesn’t want to know how to better communicate with their moody, hormonal teenager? They feel at a loss for that, and they are open handedly saying, please teach me some techniques and strategies for better communicating with my child. So that was a really popular one. I felt like we had great feedback from parents with that, and great conversations around a round table around that topic.

18:17
And then the last one that I’m going to mention that I loved, that you probably have access to as well is using your school resource officer. They can talk about trends in school safety. They can talk about drugs and alcohol trends that they’re seeing just open up the floor for Q and A. Our school resource officer was a wealth of information.

18:38
To be honest, I don’t even think he had like, sort of PowerPoint or anything. He just sat down and just talked those resource officers have stories for days. Am I right? Like, do you know your person in your school? He can tell stories about what he is seeing on the weekends or in the school building, things that, honestly, like kids are getting in trouble for, or how they’re hiding things, like just equipping parents to be on the lookout for healthy and non healthy things that their students would be engaging in.

19:06
And that was eye opening for me as a counselor, to know some of that stuff, but also facilitated a fantastic conversation between parents and counselors. So those were some topics that you could I mean, feel free to take those or take them and make them your own, and remember that it doesn’t always have to be you speaking. You can be the speaker, because you are an expert, whether you think it or not. So there’s your pep talk for that.

19:32
You can bring in a guest speaker, like, don’t forget about these people, like the mental health counselor at your school, your school resource officer, some sort of a community partner, like someone who can talk about different career outlooks in your area or your state, someone who’s a grief specialist, someone from I know, at local funeral homes, there’s always people who do like grief counseling there. Bring in that person to talk about grief and how it relates to students and families and teachers even.

20:00
Bring in your social worker. You already have a social worker that is assigned to your school or working in your school building. They have topics. Just ask them, like, what is your passion topic? If you had parents in a room, what would you want to talk to them about and bring them in and let them talk.

20:14
And then, as I mentioned before, look into your NAMI representative. And I’ll link NAMI in the show notes too, so that you can just click on it and see if you have a local chapter and get in communication with them. Okay, now we get to the end. You have done your coffee with the counselors event, maybe your first one. You have run it from start to finish. How do you measure if it’s a win?

20:34
So I would say, establish your goals ahead of time before you go into it for like, why you’re doing it. Obviously, I don’t think you’re going to add something to your calendar if you haven’t thought this through. Like, will this be meaningful? Are we going to give it our all so that it is meaningful? And we look back and we say, that was worth it. But how do you measure if this is a win? Is it if people show up?

20:57
I mean, you can set a goal. I don’t think it needs to be the whole school. I think I always walked away from these saying, if we impacted one person, two people, three people, like, I actually had a really low standard for how many people were going to show up, because then, honestly, I was always impressed and blown away when more people showed up. I just had, like, a low expectation so that I could not get my feelings hurt or anything.

21:21
But even a few people, I would think, okay, now they have this knowledge, they’re either going to share this with their family or their student, or they’re going to talk about it with their friends, and maybe other people are going to come next time because that person was here.

21:35
I also would measure that it’s a win. Me personally, I would measure this way, if parents were able to connect. That was a huge win for me to see parents sharing ideas with other parents of them connecting just over parenting things. Because obviously everyone in this room has a teenager like age 14 to 18 in this room, and some parents don’t have that village to be raising their children with and to have that and see someone eye to eye and have a real conversation about things that are good and things that are hard is really empowering for parents.

22:11
So if this was a place where they were able to ask questions from each other, from the expert, or whoever’s talking, or you just being a counselor in the room, I think that is huge, and you should pat yourself on the back for doing that.

22:24
Lastly, when you get to the end of this, I would encourage you to have some sort of takeaway for your parents, or some sort of action step. So maybe you give them some books that they can read, like you could either give them a list, or maybe you have books in your office, and you know that parent pretty well, and you loan it out to them.

22:40
You could give them some podcasts to listen to, like actual podcasts that are good on this topic, or specific episodes, and maybe show them how to access it. I think sometimes people don’t know you’re obviously listening to a podcast. You know how to access a podcast, but not everybody does. Not everyone is as tech savvy or just podcast savvy as you are you listener of high school counseling conversations.

23:03
Give them some websites to visit. Maybe if there are specific apps that you have used or that you’ve mentioned that would be helpful for the parent or the student, remind them of those. You can even give them a list of conversation questions to discuss with their student around dinner or, you know, when they’re trapped in the car and the student can’t get away.

23:21
Give them a list of resources that you mentioned or that you would encourage them to follow up with. You can have those things in person ready to give them and or you could send an email to all parents with those resources. You could even work smarter, not harder, and take all of this and turn it into some sort of newsletter for your parents. Put it on your website, send it out an email to those who couldn’t be there, and thank those who did come and remind them that of all those wins like that, you get to connect with other people. The Q and A was awesome.

23:52
Maybe take some pictures and post on social media. Do some follow up to keep that momentum going after you have finished your first or your second or third or fourth coffee with the counselors. I hope this was inspiring to you, to get some ideas on a new program that you could run in your school, or a way that you could improve your current coffee with the counselors.

24:13
I’m sure there are a million different names for what you could call this, but that was just what we did, and so I was just sharing that with you. I hope that this has been a little inspiration for you. Send me an Instagram DM or shoot me an email if you have done this and what has gone especially well or what did not go well that you’re hoping to improve on next time. Thanks for listening.

24:38
Thanks for listening to today’s episode of high school counseling conversations! All the links I talked about today can be found in the show notes and also at counselorclique.com/podcast. Be sure to hit follow wherever you listen to your podcast so that you never miss a new episode. Connect with me over on Instagram. Feel free to send me a DM @counselorclique. That’s C-L-I-Q-U-E. I’ll see you next week.

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