Every child can be a counsellor

Aditi Mathur and Ratnesh Mathur

When a child is counselled by another child, or a group of children, or the children undergo whole-class counselling, there are multiple benefits

1. The child gets multiple opportunities to look inside herself/himself, inside others, understand the labyrinth of emotions, thoughts, opinions, behaviours, images, beliefs, etc., that people go through in life.
2. The child learns important counselling skills which he/she can use in all future relationships.
3. The dynamics of any peer to peer interaction is qualitatively different when compared to any adult-child interaction. This is why peer to peer counselling can often provide what adult counselling may lack. Aspects such as bonding, listening, relating, trusting, perspectives, etc., are all different and hence have the potential to add richness to any child’s journey in life.
4. Peer to peer counselling is free, available most of the time and in a group, there are many friends whom the child can approach.
5. We believe collaborative learning is an extremely beneficial approach – hence a peer to peer counselling system helps the overall learning environment in any school.

At Aarohi there are no counsellors, rather everybody is a counsellor. Every child realizes that he or she can be a counsellor to anybody and in turn anybody can counsel the child. And that is life.

WHO?

• One to one counselling: Children choose their partner/s or are allotted a partner. Typically the time slot is short, say ten minutes per child – so a pair takes 20 minutes totally.
• Pool of counsellors: Another option is to invite some children to volunteer themselves as counsellors – so either at class or at school level you would have a team of counsellors and from this pool, any child of the school can choose a counsellor for a one to one session. These sessions can be of any duration – usually decided mutually between the two children.
• Group counselling: This is similar to one to one – the only difference is here, a group of three to five children sit together and either counsel each other or form a panel and counsel the one child that seeks their help. The group brings diversity of views, approaches and insights into the interactions and also leads to many learnings from each other.
• Whole class counselling: Imagine a whole class counselling either one child or even a set of children (who are in conflict). This whole idea is to bring the democratic approach to solving a problem. For example, a child who is bullied can share his situation and the whole class tarries along to find a solution for the child. Many schools use circle time to facilitate the whole class approach.
• Children-adult counselling: In this format one or more children team up with an adult counsellor and both/all together offer counselling to anybody in the school. Again, the variety of having a peer and an adult in the same panel opens up interactions in new and interesting ways.

At Aarohi we call different formations as Helpmates or Heal-mates. We also keep moving from one grouping to another – again giving a variety of both counselling and learning experiences to all.

HOW?
Essentially all counselling sessions consist of four basic ingredients – listening, exploring, suggesting and planning. These need not happen in any order, nor in any specific ways and any session can only have some of it or many rounds , etc. Children need to know that these are various ingredients of helping. The rest we can either leave to the counsellors to decide or moderate where required.

We can even design sessions: A counselling session can be designed so that for five minutes, the counsellee shares and the counsellor listens, then for ten minutes they both explore – with the counsellor asking questions, getting both deeper and wider into the issue, moving onto five minutes of sharing suggestions, first soliciting what the counsellee wants to do, and then the counsellor adding his/her own advice/tips and finally a few minutes dedicated to sketching an action plan.

The above is just one example – if you explore literature and the Internet, you will find several different approaches and frameworks which can be given to children to use. In fact it is recommended that we do not get into one kind of best approach, instead embrace variety and innovation. We can also give counsellors simple tools which can help them to listen (eg: paraphrasing), explore (eg: mapping), suggest (what if?) and plan (if … then). Again schools can get these resources from the Internet, books, and workbooks, take help from school counsellors or other professional counsellors.

Needless to say, we recommend a variety of mediums too – talking, drawing, painting, guided visualizations, sand play, clay making, puppetry, story making, etc.

At Aarohi we purposefully bring various kinds of tools – one day each counsellor child had to give a written suggestion only, while on another day, we had another child acting as the inner voice of the child.

WHAT?
It is important that we train children in counselling skills. It is important we train ourselves (teachers) in counselling skills. It is also important to note that these skills are learned over a lifetime. It is important to realize that by virtue of being a social being we are all counsellors – hence let us include learning these into our curriculum design.

(see this link for a sweet, simple one page overview on counselling skills: http://www.people.vcu.edu/~krhall/resources/cnslskills.pdf)

A problem is rarely one-dimensional, which is why when we focus on different layers separately sometimes, we can understand this better. Also, sometimes, one station at a time – makes the learning journey more understandable and meaningful.

So peer counselling can often be designed to focus on one aspect of self – it could be emotions today, beliefs tomorrow, behaviours the day after and fears the next day.

Sometimes it is a big relief for the children who need counselling – that the spotlight is not on the child, rather the focus is on the topic (eg: feelings) – that way the child feels listened to without feeling inferior, that way the child can express without feeling threatened.

At Aarohi one day, we observed our feelings and how we react to our feelings. Then another day we observed what we can do when another person is angry or upset. Then, on another day we explored fears.

WHEN?
Regularly, please.

This should convince readers to seriously consider creating a peer to peer counselling system in your class/school. If you have any doubts, questions, challenges – consider asking children for solutions – they are not only great counsellors, they are capable consultants too.

The authors run an open unschool called Aarohi and invite all readers to visit and see how open learning can be an amazing way to work with children. They also conduct training retreats and online training for teachers and parents. Visit www.aarohilife.org.