Part a

While everyone would agree that the best perk of becoming a teacher is the
opportunity to help children become self-aware individuals and instill them
with a life-long love of learning, you don't hear much about the other perks
and benefits of being a teacher. Being a teacher, we might be facing with lots
of problems that occur among our pupils. Be it behaviour problem, learning
problem and many more.
Teachers who can draw on a range of responses when dealing with
common classroom misbehaviors are more likely to keep those students in
the classroom, resulting in fewer disruptions to instruction, enhanced teacher
authority, and better learning outcomes for struggling students (Sprick,
Borgmeier, & Nolet, 2002). Therefore, it is very important for a teacher to
integrate the basic counseling skills in assisting the process of teaching and
learning.
According to British Association of Counseling 1991, counseling is the
skill and principal use of a relationship to facilitate self-knowledge, emotional
acceptance and growth, and the optimal development of personal resources.
The overall aim is to provide an opportunity to work towards living more
satisfying and resourcefully. A good teacher is a teacher who can understand
and inspire the students.
Mastering the basic counseling skill will enable the teacher to help
pupils exploring many aspects of their life and feelings, by talking openly and
freely. This is because talking in such a way it is rarely possible with family
or friends, who are likely to be emotionally involved and have opinions and
biases that may be detrimental to the success of the counseling. It also gives
pupils the opportunity to express difficult feelings such as anger, resentment,
guilt and fear in a confidential environment. Besides that, it will also help
teacher providing the love, safety and attention necessary for the pupils to
feel her/his feelings and discharge them.

Teacher will be able to understand pupils world. By learning the basic

counseling skill, it helps teacher to prevent and overcome the problems arise
during teaching and learning process. Instead of punishing pupils, teacher
should understand the reason of pupils misbehavior. This will prevent the
problems from being repeated. Pupils on the other hand will be feeling safe
as they know teacher is with them. Pupils will learn that teacher would not
punish them without a concrete reason. They also know that their teacher is
being fair to everyone by identifying the real reason why the problems occur.
Another importance of basic counseling skill is it can help in improving
pupils relationship with the community. Almost all the pupils are having
problems in relationships with other individuals. This problem has a close
relationship with the self-concept, (low self-esteem). This is where teacher
should help his/her pupils to improve the quality of the relationship with
others, such as family relationships, friends, and society. The effective
relationship helps them in improving the quality of lives.
It can also help to foster pupils talent. Teacher can help pupils identify
the abilities and talents and at once take appropriate action. counseling
emphasizes certain changes but the overall change in the individual to cause
him to feel prosperous. The main objective of counseling is to inspire clients
to evaluate, create, receive and take action on choice or decision he made.
For them, counseling to help clients learn the process of making decision,
until finally he can make decisions without sentiasamengharapkan help
others. Various purposes has been put forward by those who a lot of
experience, knowledge and skills in this area. The real fact is that the goal is
not the same in all people. In the development of the counseling process, the
purpose of a client that may be modified from time to time. building efforts
must aim dianggapsebagai an action that is not rigid, static or fixed = and
evaluation should be made jointly by the client and the counselor according
to client needs.

add skills when clients make important decisions. 6lien expected to

assess a situation, make the selection wisely, know how and why certain
decisions must be made, what are the possible consequences or effects, and
ready to face any risk due to the decision.

Part b
Lesson plan

IMPLEMENTATION OF THE BASIC SOUNSELLING SKILLS IN THE TEACHING

I have produced a lesson plan for Year 3 pupils that implemented 3 basic
counselling skills. There are empathy skill, unconditional positive regard skill and
genuine skill. The two major problems that I want to overcome are the difficulties of the
pupils to cooperate with each other in classroom activities and improving pupils selfesteem.
1. Empathy skills
For the first skill, the empathy skill is been integrated. According to Meriam
Webster, empathy means the ability to share someone else feeling. Empathy is also
gaining attention as an important component of emotional intelligence and as a way to
reduce bullying. When a person learns to understand and share the feelings of another,
the pro-social behavior that results shows up in better relationships, closer friendships
and stronger communities. It uses a technique to help children understand other people
feelings and to communicate meaningful insights, values, and standards of behaviour to
children so that they can produce acceptable behaviour.
Through the use of storytelling, pupils can put themselves into characters
situation. Storytelling is one of my strategies to apply this empathy skill. This can help in
building their relationship with the teacher. As the pupils eager to know about the story,
it will shorten the gap between the teacher and pupils. Pupils and teacher will become
closer as they both want to get to the end of the story. Besides that, the story used will
stimulate pupils self-exploration. According to Ryan Howes, Ph.D, self-exploration
involves taking a look at your own thoughts, feelings, behaviors and motivations and
asking why. Its looking for the roots of who we are answers to all the questions we
have about [ourselves], Self-exploration is an ongoing process that includes collecting
information about your interests, abilities and skills, values, personality, and career
readiness. Pupils were able to explore themselves through this story. They able to
respond to the questions asked by teacher such as The hen is a good character, isnt?
What would you do to be good as the hen? Teacher was able to collect information

about the pupils especially the misbehaviour ones. Teacher also able to check pupils
understanding at once providing support to the low proficiency pupils to ensure that they
were not falling behind. The use of this story did help in assessing communication. At
the end of the story, pupils were asked what can they learn from the story, why do they
think the hen did not share the flour with her neighbours? This has been done to reflect
pupils feeling about the story.
Focus attention was on the pupils instead of the story. This story teaches pupils
to experience vulnerability and helplessness first-hand. The pupils can learn through the
difficult situation encountered by the main character and emotionally grow as the
character develops. The pupils therefore become empowered as the character does the
same, through a sense of identification with the primary character.
Based on my lesson plan, I have chosen The little red hen story as a material for
story-telling to integrate empathy skill. I used picture cards as my props. Apart from that,
I also used my body gestures, voice as the medium to aid my story telling session.
This story is about a hen and her friends. They live in a farm. One day, she found
the seeds and asked a help from her friends to plant it but everybody are refused to
help. Nobody wants to give cooperation even though they are aware that the foods are
for them also. Surprisingly when the seeds are harvested, everybody want the flour but
the hen just their friends and only eat with her chicks.
After delivered the story, I asked them randomly what they can get from my story
and there are several of them said if other animals help mother hen to plant the seeds,
they can share and enjoy eating bread together. This showed that pupils tried to
understand what the hen feels. The pupils were able to be in the hens shoe and walk
around with it. The pupils also were also asked what would happen to the hen if the hen
shares the food with her neighbor.

I highlighted to my pupils that we must help each other and always work in a
team because friends means no one is left behind. I also tell my pupils to believe in
whatever they are doing.
2. Unconditional Positive Regard Skill
UPR is a short for Unconditional Positive Regard. It is used to a client so that it
can be a relief to talk about their problems without someone saying why did you do
this? Or do think that was a good idea? Unconditional positive regard (UPR) is a term
credited to humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers and is used in client-centered therapy.
Practicing unconditional positive regard means accepting and respecting others as they
are without judgment or evaluation. UPR allows the client to open up and speak about
their difficulties without a fear of being criticised or judged. This is a good skill to be
integrated as I want to solve the cooperation problems among my pupils. It also a way
to teach my pupils that mistake is a part of learning. They should not be afraid to do one
and every friends is the same regardless their shape, attitude or anything.
I let my pupils wrote about their best friend and their enemy in the class. Each
pupil was given a piece of paper. After I collected the papers, I assigned my pupils to sit
in the group. The reason why I gave them a piece of paper was to know their
relationship among them. It was also been done to investigate the cooperation problem
among them. From the paper received, I was able to draw information on which one of
the pupils is preferable and which one is not. Thus, I highlighted every one kindness in
front of the class. I also highlighted to them that it is okay to make a mistake as they do
have friend to help them be on the right track back. There is no such thing as biasness
in the class as everyone is the same. Everyone is special in their own way and having
friends make them become more special. They should be proud of themselves. As a
result, pupils feel free to try things out and make mistakes, because they know that they
will be accepted no matter what.
This skill can help pupils with issues regarding communication, attention, and
motivation, as well as with behavioral problems. It also helped me to overcome the
cooperation problem between them. The UPR skill is corresponding to Rogerian

Argument and it also known as the "common ground" argument. This method requires
my pupils and I to identify the ideas, beliefs and arguments that we share in common.
The assumption, therefore, is that we as the whole class will share common ideas,
beliefs and arguments. A negotiating strategy in which common goals are identified and
opposing views are described as objectively as possible in an effort to establish
common ground and reach agreement. My goal was that everyone should solve the
problem together. All of my pupils should qualify their arguments and understand the
validity of the other side.
To help me implement this skill, I had used a children song to my pupils. It is a
song that highlighted the friendship value in the lyrics. The lyric stated that the more
they get closer with their friends, the happier they will be. I use the story back to let
them know why having friends is important. I also explained the benefits of having
friends to them. Friends can offer an excellent way to get rid of stress and depression.
The company of friends makes they forget their sorrows and any unwanted pressure
that they burden themselves with. Plus, they can openly ask their friends for
suggestions on how to solve their problems and they would be glad to help out. After
that, I asked my pupils to sing the song while holding their friends hands. I purposely
asked them to do so, so that they can strengthen their bonding and building a good
rapport between them.
Nevertheless, the integration of UPR skill teaches my pupils about love
which I believe are very important in their social emotion development. It is,
in essence, a way to learn to love the world through appreciating whats
around them. And though many may disagree that all people deserve our
unconditional positive regard, it's hard to argue that loving the world won't
make us happier than hating it. Carl Rogers once said We need to believe
every person was born with the potential to develop in positive, loving
ways,". "When doing person-centered therapy, you become their next
chance, maybe their last chance, to be welcomed, understood, and
accepted. Your acceptance may create the conditions needed for change."

Therefore, I do believe that the skill that I chose was a way to help my pupils
working in group together and making friend without any misunderstanding.

3. Concreteness Skill
Concreteness skill in counselling involves helping the client to identify and work
on a specific problem from the various problems presented. It might also involve
keeping the client on track with that problem in this session, clarifying facts, terms,
feelings, goals, and uses a hear and now focus to emphasize issues in today's session.
Concreteness serves three important functions which are to keep the therapist
response close to the clients feeling and experiences. In this case, I let myself
response to my pupils feeling and experiences through game. The second important is
it fosters accurateness of understanding in me, allowing for early pupils correction of
misunderstanding. Once I already understand the core reason for their problems, I
slowly try to clear it among my pupils to make them realise that nobody should be left
behind and being confident is nothing to be afraid of. The third importance of
concreteness is it encourages my pupils to attend to the problems. It helps them to see
that the problem is a part of their growth. They are the one who responsible in
determining the problems. They have to learn oh how to solve it either verbally or nonverbally.
The last resort to integrate this skill is through the game session. It is also related
to the play therapy. It is a therapy using selected materials, toys that are specifically
selected with guidance of someone, therapist who respond appropriately. Therapist
uses childrens fantasy and the meaning of symbolic play as a medium to understand
and communicate with the children.
Basically, I could say that the activity that has been carried out to integrate this
skill is more likely as an evaluation stage. The reason why I said so is I could clearly see
that my pupils somehow could really work in a team after been reminding for many

times. The game that I asked them to play is called Chain game. It requires them to be
in a small group and passes the rubber band using the straw from the 1 st pupil till the
last one without drop it. I purposely jumble up the pupils and put them in a group with
mixed ability and background.
In a way, instead having fun they can instil the togetherness and cooperation
among them. I was so happy to see that everybody working in one team. I really hope
they can still have it till forever.