Indian Country School Counselors Institute
Professional Development Program:

 

The Indian Country School Counselors Institute (ICSCI) attaches great importance to the process of writing a curriculum unit. A Guidance Curriculum Unit must be written by each School Counselor in the program. The purpose of the curriculum unit is to share your learning about culturally responsive best practices through writing, and to demonstrate how this learning will inform your work as a School Counselor. The curriculum unit should be relevant and
immediately useful to you in your role with students. We recommend that you select a topic that you can do a classroom-based guidance unit about; think about the particular grade level that you will be using the unit with and write the unit focused on that grade level and guidance topic. The process of developing a curriculum unit includes completing significant background reading, and various small writing assignments before submitting the full, complete unit at the end of the program. By writing the curriculum unit, you are planning to use it in your role as a School Counselor. You are also contributing to the online repository of curriculum units that are freely available to other educators looking for resources to better serve Indigenous students and communities.

 

The ICSCI curriculum unit is different from other resources you may use because it is – first and foremost – culturally responsive and original. What we mean by culturally responsive is centering and leveraging of the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, language, and performance styles of diverse learners to make your classroom more relevant and
effective.