Often, school counselors encounter multiple problems, including an excessive student ratio, to reach all children with educational needs, not to mention that most students spend their days in school without anyone having identified their difficulties and real needs.
Counselors are overwhelmed, often even ‘tired,’ or they estimate that some needs are more important than others, but the truth is that every child is important; for every family, their child is the most important thing. It’s complicated when they tell you that there are other children in greater need and you have to wait a year. (Zaira Santana, Ph.D. in Psychopedagogy from Psicotogether)
Many times, despite the difficulties a student presents in keeping up with the class, no intervention occurs unless the child has a diagnosed disorder. The important thing is to help with the child’s real needs; it is not necessary for them to have some type of severe emotional, motor, or sensory problem to have difficulties. The reasons or causes can be very varied and usually do not occur in isolation, which is why it is very complex to understand them and propose personalized solutions that fit the individual needs of each child at home and at school.
“Take a look at this student”
This phrase commonly resonates in the ears of school counselors who dedicate their efforts to the most relevant and visible cases as a result of poor school performance or inappropriate behavior, “prevention is not practiced, only fires are put out. Many cases escape us ”- lament the counselors. Other times, they focus on looking for some indicators with more incidence in the student, ADHD or Dyslexia. The truth is that there is a wide variety of factors and comorbidities that can influence the child’s learning, development, and well-being, including high abilities.
Meanwhile, crucial time passes, during which demotivation and disaffection for school take their toll on the student.
To approach the student’s needs, the counselor needs information from the child’s environment, that is, they need to ask the family and teachers through interviews, with the material time that this process entails, in addition to performing a series of standardized tests on the child to detect or rule out some indicators –why are they doing this to me?– many children who have to leave the classroom for this type of introspection ask themselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phDTlTo-NR8
Analysis of the classroom and the needs of the students
How is it possible to carry out a preventive exploration to have a global vision of each student’s profile and work on what they really need?
New technologies echo a reality: the need to facilitate the mechanization and optimization of the usual work of educational guidance in schools and psychopedagogical offices in order to detect the difficulties and needs of all students and from an early age. Specifically, the dide tool represents a great advance for the early identification of almost any factor that interferes with the child’s learning and development.
How?:
- Streamlining the process of collecting valuable information from parents and teachers (through online questionnaires) that facilitate psychopedagogical assessment.
- Preventing, exploring quickly and easily a large number of students
- Facilitating a global vision of the child to understand the context of the difficulty (taking into account up to 35 indicators that interfere in the child’s learning and development, not only dyslexia and ADHD; there is much more to explore)
- Detecting early even before the problem manifests itself (at 2-3 years and up to 18)
- Saving time to invest it in the intervention and solution of the problem
- Saving costs on unnecessary tests and batteries
- NOT bothering the child in the problem detection phase, since they do not intervene in the questionnaires but their parents and teachers do; for this reason, early and preventive detection is possible
- Automatically having guidelines for parents and teachers, modifiable by the counselor
Psychopedagogical tools do not mean replacing the work of counselors, but quite the opposite, offering extra help in early detection to make cases visible and act as soon as possible
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