In college counseling, effectively
utilizing assignments can turn the complex journey of college readiness into a streamlined and manageable process for both the student and the counselor. In scenarios where one counselor manages multiple students, optimizing the counselor's time becomes essential. Standardizing any part of the workflow inevitably enhances clarity and efficiency. The most time-consuming aspect of this process is often the "readiness" phase, where communication and task management are most intensive. By structuring assignments strategically, as vehicles that carry information back and forth and containers that hold all associated assets - the counselor creates a uniquely organized file system for each student. Counselors can better manage this critical phase, ensuring that both their time and their students' efforts are used most effectively.
By conceptualizing assignments in this way, the counselor was able to reduce redundancy, maintain clarity, and ensure that all necessary resources were easily accessible to the student - let's see how through use-case discussion below.
A key aspect of college admissions involves students obtaining letters of recommendation. This task can become cumbersome due to multiple deadlines, varied requirements from different colleges, and coordination with teachers or other recommenders. In this study, our counselor faced a common challenge: students often struggled with:
To address this, the counselor reimagined assignments not just as tasks but as vehicles to guide students through each phase of college readiness. The goal was to use assignments to consolidate all related information and resources into a single, easily accessible location.
Here’s how it worked:
The counselor created an assignment titled “Gathering Letters of Recommendation,” which was made a “live” assignment on a specified date. On that date, the assignment became visible to the student. As well, an assignment summary email was sent to the student, providing an overview of instructions and a link to their Student Portal.
An Explanation: What letters of recommendation are and why they are important.
Detailed Instructions: Steps on how to request a letter, including templates and best practices.
Relevant Resources: Provide direct links to a document prepared by the counselor, or survey questions from the high school, or links to high school instructions, and so on... to help the student draft their request.
Call to Action: A specific task to be completed with an estimated time to completion.
Completion and Feedback Loop: Upon completing the request, the student marked the assignment as done, triggering a notification to the counselor. The counselor then reviewed the assignment, added feedback to the description or the comments section or added additional resources, and, if necessary, marked it as “un-done” , thus re-setting the assignment for the next phase or instruction. Along the way the student and counselor are linking to and adding resources to the single assignment regarding "gathering letters of recommendation" - anytime the college readiness topic comes up for this student, all stake holders will return to one centralized location for all things related to letters of recommendation for this student - the one assignment - vehicle.
Our counselor in this story is in the middle of grocery shopping, when they receive a notification on her phone that a student has replied to a broadcast text message. The notification lets the counselor know the student has replied and the contents of the reply:
“Mrs. Smith will not write my letter, what do I do?!” the counselor is now aware of the message. The message has also been recorded in the student's CounselMore portal > messages tab.
In this story, the counselor resists the urge to reply back to the student because the counselor maintains good professional boundaries. In this story, the counselor has the benefit of experience and recognizes there are very few emergencies in college counseling and doesn't set a text-messaging precedent with their student communications.
When the counselor is prepared to begin working again, the counselor notices a red bell icon in the top right hand corner of their screen, when selecting the student's text messages from the notifications window, the counselor's screen automatically changes to the Messages tab. The counselor reviews the message and replies from within the messages tab: "No worries, we will discuss the alternatives in our next meeting"
The counselor navigates to the student's Assignment's tab and uses the search filter to search by key word for the assignment regarding gathering letters of recommendation.
To efficiently handle this task within CounselMore, the counselor should:
By treating assignments as comprehensive containers, the counselor achieved the following:
Improve Student Engagement: Students found it easier to follow instructions and complete tasks when all resources and instructions were clearly outlined in one place.
Reduce Redundancy: There was no need to create multiple assignments or send repeated reminders. All necessary resources were linked within a single assignment.
Streamline Counselor Workflow: The counselor saved time by consolidating communications and resources, allowing for a more efficient review and feedback process.
Once the student has gathered all letters of recommendation, these documents can be evaluated by the counselor to determine which letter best suits each specific school application. Until the process reaches the application phase, the "Letters of Recommendation" assignment should serve as a convenient storage folder that travels between the student and counselor, housing all relevant materials in one place.
Avoid diluting your services or creating confusion by maintaining multiple communication channels, meeting notes, and scattered documents. The more documents and channels you create, the more time you’ll spend searching for information. Some counselors rely heavily on meeting notes alone, but without standardized workflows, they can waste valuable time. The practices shared here are data-driven and refined for effectiveness. If you have a better approach, we would love to hear about it in a future blog post!
For additional insights on optimizing the college readiness process, check out CounselMore’s resources on College Counseling Strategies and explore more case studies and best practices in the counselor resources section of the customers knowledge base. For live peer-to-peer support - join us at live events.
Related Resources from CounselMore:
Margaret Rothe, MA Higher Education Student Affairs Specialist,
is a CounselMore Peer Mentor and one of the original members of CounselMore. She is a practicing educational consultant for All College Pros and HighergroundED counseling services. She lives in the SF Bay Area.
