Counseling Volunteers/Overview

	Project Overview
	CATEGORY	Community Groups
	Description of Our Community
	Our school is located in the neighborhood of Taoyuan Cultural District. The parents are in the comparatively high socio-economic status, so they stress much more on children's education. Many parents are willing to be school volunteers to help establishing a better educational environment for the children. A group of moms join the school counseling team to promote children’s education of both emotion management and character in the classrooms. In addition to getting familiar with the course content, they need to spend a lot of time learning presentation/ teaching skills since they didn’t go to education-related departments in school. There is more manpower in the school’s counseling office than that in any other school. There is a psychological consultation teacher and a professional social worker in the office. Both of them are willing to help volunteer moms to improve themselves through improving courses. Teachers and volunteers help each other to give hands to students in need of help.
	Summary of Our Project
	School volunteers with the red uniform walk around every corner of the school. The volunteers we are the most familiar with are the counseling volunteers coming to the classrooms and giving courses every Monday and Friday. Every time when we saw they share their knowledge and present exaggerate performances on stage, it’s hard to believe that they are just parents, not teachers, from their confidence and eloquence. Some moms join the small-group counseling group. They accompany some children to play games at the self-study time in the morning to find the strength to become better. To we students, volunteer moms just come to take classes. However, we don’t know they spend their own time improving themselves to give classes better, even discuss some cases with the school’s counseling teacher to make their own progress. We hope that we can make an in-depth exploration to understand the counseling volunteers’ efforts and dedication through this project.
	Our Computer and Internet Access
	A. Percentage of students using the Internet at home:more than 50% B. Number of workstations with Internet access in the classroom:more than 6 C. Connection speed used in the classroom:dedicated connection Internet access (Optional): With Chunghwa Telecom’s FTTB infrastructure, the school net is connected to TYRC(Tao-Yuan Regional Center) with full duplex 100MB bandwidth. There are 64 computers in 2 computer classrooms for IT and thematic teaching.
	Problems We Had To Overcome
	A.The ability to make an interview
	Making an interview is quite different from having a chat at the daily life. It’s not necessary to think about what we need to say when we talk to our classmates. We just say what came to our mind. But it isn’t the case when we make an interview. We need to make the interviewee understand what we ask and get the information we desire. In order to help us to fit into the project theme, Mr. Lin asked us to draw a mind map, list our questions, and rehearse the interviews to lower our anxiety.
	B. Time Management
	All of us are fifth graders. The time we had to work on the project was limited within the school time because we had other learning tasks arranged by our parents after school. All the work of the project needed to be done at the break time (including the lunch break) at school. We needed to make the interviews and discussions as well as organize the data in the very limited time. We had to use part of our class time to complete the survey and interviews required to complete the project because we found some counseling group activities were near the end when we set the project theme. We still enjoyed in exploring the project even when we felt very exhausted.
	C. Information Ability
	We usually draw or color pictures on paper. But we had to do them with some graphics software in computers when the scan results of them were not as good as we expected. Making correction in computer application was not as easy as we did on paper. In addition, some photos were shot too bright or too dark. We needed to adjust them in computes so that perfect pictures could be presented in the project. We searched online to learn the retouching techniques. We believe our computer skills can greatly improved by the training in the project.
	D. Data Collection:
	The counseling volunteers provide help to the students in need in each class. Our teacher said that most of the personal data were confidential due to the personal data protection law. So we needed to collect the data we need by ourselves. We could only take the silhouette view of the volunteers or students when we took photos. To make it even worse, many photos we took were not clear enough to be used. It’s fortunate that Ms. Mei-show Yen provided us some photos to supplementour data.
	Our Project Sound Bite
	It took more than 3 months from deciding the theme to completing the project. We feel the progress we made. In the beginning, with our heads down, we could only read our draft in whispering to ask questions. Then we could make interviews without any haste. At last, we even could confidently and eloquently share our project with the lower graders in their classrooms. Our parent also noticed our progress. In the process, in addition to the improving the ability to solve problems, we changed our view about volunteers. It requires the "will" not only to help but also to get improved constantly in order to help more people. Although we still cannot help others like the volunteers, we share with our classmates the spirit of the volunteers and hope more people can join to be volunteers to help others in the future.

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