By Hope Poʻo Kula Scott De Sa
Hope Poʻo Kula Scott De Sa shares his insights about creating conditions for a thriving K-12 data-informed counseling program. The following is a synthesis from a conversation that captures his manaʻo about our campus counseling program redesign efforts.
“…we started to see perception data that was trending away from haumāna wanting to attend college. …census data highlighted the out-of-state migration of Hawaiians due to the rising cost of living and housing. That signaled to us that college should be an aspiration for our students to be able to earn a livable wage in Hawaiʻi and contribute to the lāhui…”
Drawing inspiration from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education Post-Secondary Success Institute, we began our efforts in 2019 by engaging in professional development with our leaders. Our goal was to build a shared understanding of our trending campus and community data and the need to rethink our schoolwide approach to strengthen a college-going and completion mindset starting with our youngest learners.
Role Transformation and Reimagining Structures
We partnered with Hatching Results, national experts in improving school counseling programs through evidence-based practices and data-driven decision-making. During their first on-site visit, the team from Hatching Results invested time to deeply understand the role of counselors in achieving ʻŌiwi Edge. They collaborated with all counselors and administrators to assess kuleana, structures, and counseling programs. While they highlighted the existing good work our counselors were doing, they pointed out critical opportunities to elevate outcomes for haumāna by disrupting our current system.
Through this partnership, we were introduced to a Multi-Tiered Multi-Domain System of Support (MTMDSS) Framework that addresses the following domains:
Academics
Career/College and Life Readiness
Social/Emotional
Our continuum of support begins with a developmentally appropriate core curriculum designed to be preventative, proactive, and comprehensive. With a strong emphasis on student-centered learning, our counselors offer personalized instruction tailored to the unique needs of each student. As additional support is required, it progresses to more complex, evidence-based interventions.
MTMDSS was a significant disruption to the old counseling model. Counselors’ roles were redefined to focus sharply on supporting students’ academic, social, and career exploration needs. Emphasis was placed on college and career readiness, with the goal of preparing students for higher education and ensuring they could earn a livable wage and contribute to the lāhui.
At the high school, the previous structure assigned a counselor to follow a class from ninth grade through their first year in college. This model allowed counselors to build deep relationships with their students over the years. However, it also meant that counselors had to spend time reacclimating themselves to key activities, such as student transitions and college applications, after being away from these tasks for multiple years.
Our high school principal and counselors examined their use of time to reimagine their counseling program. In the new structure, counselors specialize in grade-level bands, allowing them to deepen their understanding and skills specific to each stage of student development. This ensures that counselors possess the latest and most relevant knowledge and expertise, enabling them to provide the highest quality support for academic guidance, social development, and college and career planning at every grade level.
The high school counseling program now includes two higher education transition specialists who support our students as they matriculate to college. This support encompasses not only college enrollment but persistence toward graduation. Another key feature of the redesigned counseling program has been to actively expose our high school students through organized trips to post-secondary campuses locally and on the continent. These firsthand experiences help students make informed decisions about their future paths.
College and Career through a Relevant Tier 1 Curriculum
Over the course of the first two years, a strong emphasis was placed on strengthening our Tier 1 curriculum for all learners. An inventory of our existing curriculum revealed a division-specific approach emphasizing what they determined to be most relevant for their haumāna using different resources and curriculum. Our goal was to create a scaffolded, coherent curriculum and K-12 approach for college and career planning, and academic and social-emotional counseling education.
“…our initial efforts focused on strengthening our Tier 1 curriculum.”
“If your third grade data point is showing haumāna trending away from college at that early an age, then we expanded what was happening in elementary to expose learners to conversations about college and career.”
The redesigned curriculum attended to identity formation, self-reflection, exploration, goal-setting, and planning at all levels from elementary to high school. We knew we had to tighten our social-emotional learning (SEL) curriculum because, based on our research, a strong SEL curriculum was a key lever to college success. We engaged a task force of counselors and administrators to research SEL programs aligned to ‘Ōiwi Edge. The task force chose the Wayfinder curriculum, allowing for contextualized modifications while keeping fidelity of implementation. Specifically related to identity and goal setting as core aspects of the curriculum, students engage in self-reflection as learners and explore their passions to navigate their path to college and career.
"...counselors have had to significantly shift their roles, transitioning from delivering guidance lessons to designing curriculum, reflecting on their lesson plans and delivery, and assessing their effectiveness through pre- and post-measures."
“…what you are seeing now with all of the data that we have…using Wayfinder as their core curriculum and building out from there…it’s pretty awesome!”
Data-Informed Approach
To understand the impact of their lessons and revised curricula, counselors began to collect data starting with a baseline at the beginning of a unit and then at the end. Hatching Results emphasized the importance of collecting this type of data as well as using it with other information related to our larger goals. Purposefully using the pre- and post-data to understand the impact of their instruction and setting specific goals based on data sets and student groups led to more strategic interventions or instructional adjustments.
“As an input into all of our efforts around college & career, we conducted research to understand the possible indicators for college and career success. While many of these may be common understanding in most schools, for Kamehameha Hawaiʻi, it was important to ensure that we were also intentionally strengthening a student’s ‘Ōiwi (native) identity and their SEL competencies. On the flip side of that, we also included understanding potential risk factors that could impact a student's path to college and career success.”
Targeted Tier 2 Support Tied to Post-Secondary Indicators
Counselors used division and campus data to address specific risk factors such as attendance, GPA, academic probation, reading and math proficiency, and ʻohana engagement. We presented data for all current students to our division administrators and counseling teams, focusing on these priority areas. This data highlighted students with flags in two or more areas. Based on this information, our teams prioritized their efforts, resulting in the creation of their Tier 2 SMART goals and action plans.
For example, our elementary school implemented Personalized Learning Agreements (PLAs) between ʻohana, Kumu, and haumāna in a collaborative effort to support individual learners’ needs focused on reading and math. Results from this focused effort included improved scores on NWEA MAP assessments.
The data is updated quarterly, and we meet as a K-12 team to share progress, reanalyze the data, and adjust our plans for the next quarter.
K-12 Structure for Counseling Leadership and Quarterly Convening
Five years into our redesign, we have an established counseling leadership team that helps to shape schoolwide programming, build meeting agendas, and support the advancement of the work in their respective divisions. K-12 counselors meet quarterly along with administration and coaches for a half-day to share their progress on their Tier 2 goals, share ideas around common efforts like SEL implementation, analyze data, and strategize next steps.
These meetings have become a safe, valued space where participants can both challenge and support one another, cross-pollinate ideas, share success and learning, all with the collective goals of supporting our haumāna on their personalized, postsecondary pathways.
“…and then figured out across their divisions, who are the groups of kids in need of Tier 2 services and how to deliver those services creatively to achieve our outcomes…these are practices that weren’t regularly happening…”
“Every time we pull our counselors together, I walk out of that space completely inspired because of their level of commitment to the work.”
Success and Contribution
Because students have the vocabulary and skills to reflect and identify their passions, they can articulate their own pathways toward a successful future. I feel proud of our counselors and the results when I see our data or talk to our students, especially our seniors. Our haumāna are informed and very clear on their direction post-high. They can tell you what their first, second, third, and fourth choices might be and the reasons for each choice. When I sit in conversations with our students about college and career topics, I am so inspired. Hearing our students talking about their futures and contributions to the lāhui fills me with hope and excitement for the next generation.
“…I don’t ever remember myself being that prepared as an eighth grader to talk about what my dreams were or what my post-high plans were…”