North+Carolina+Essential+Standards

=**The Department of Public Instruction for North Carolina has issued its new K-12 Guidance Essential Standards.**=

The standards are delivered in the context of Bloom's revised taxonomy model. If you are not familiar with this educational model, the idea is that our children can learn in more than just one way, and Bloom original model maintained that there are three "domains", or types, of learning - Cognitive, Affective, and Psychomotor. His model has been revised, and you can research the evolution of the model on your own.

For counselors, this translates more into what we may call Knowledge, Attitude, and Skills or even "what is in children's heads" versus "what is in childrens' hearts" versus "what they are physically doing with their bodies". DPI has taken this learning model and calls these three learning categories S1: Socio-Emotional (SE), S2: Cognitive (C) and S3: Career (CR) when talking about school counseling.

In addition, our new essential standards are also divided into delivery levels. As much as can be learned at this point until we are formally trained at the district level, these levels seem to be correlated with FIVE developmental levels of our children:


 * Readiness/Exploratory/Discover (RED)
 * Early Emergent/Emergent (EEE)
 * Progressing (P)
 * Early Independent (EI)
 * Independent (I)

As you can infer, the first two and perhaps part of the third level would apply to us as K-5 counselors.

The link to the new model is here:

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Also, DPI offers support to these standards in two ways, a state counselor Wiki and also a "resource" board, called LiveBinder:

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Finally, our new evaluation rubric (draft for 2012-13) is available for use this year. At the very least, we will need to familiarize ourselves with it in building our programs for 2013-14:

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Debbie Kirkman attended a training on these new standards in July 2012 and anticipates delivering these to us at an upcoming counselors' meeting. So how does this all fit in with ASCA? Here is a Power Point presentation that the state held in June. It is LONG, but slides 16-29 are useful nuggets of knowledge until we get the remainder of our training from Debbie*********:



We look forward to our training from the district as to how they envision this model applying to our K-5 environment!

=**10/23/2012**= =UPDATE NOTE: We are not receiving any formal training at the district level about these standards. It looks like we are on our own for now!=