Praxis People Episode 1: Eunice at the Counseling Desk

Ten Months at the Counseling Desk

Praxis People is a series that profiles the people who work at Praxis, one person at a time. Our first subject is Eunice, who handles ELA counseling at the Epic Prep counseling desk. When we handed her our interview questions, she sent them back as a self Q&A, saying she would be more comfortable asking and answering on her own. The fact that half the questions came back to us as questions already showed the habits of a counselor.

“Please be honest with me. Is my child behind?”

This is the sentence she says she has heard most often while handling four or five consultations a day since her first spring at the company. The answers below are kept in Eunice’s own voice.

What Does a Counselor Actually Do

Q. Isn’t a counselor ultimately there to get families to enroll?

Since this is the question I get most, let me answer it honestly. My job is not to produce enrollments. It is to understand the learner. Enrollment is just one of several outcomes that can follow once that understanding is complete. Just recently, I advised two families to take a different direction instead of our classes. That was the conclusion of those consultations, and I consider them successes too.

Q. What do parents actually ask most often?

The first sentence is almost always a level question. Something like “Which class can my child get into?” But around the thirty-minute mark, the real question comes out. “Is my child behind?” “What did I miss?” To me, the consultation only begins with that second question. Everything before it is a cautious mutual feeling-out.

Q. Do you have any habits of your own when you counsel?

I have a habit of adding one more question before I give an answer. When a parent says “My child doesn’t read,” I ask, “Do you remember the last book they read all the way through?” Parents discover a great deal on their own while answering that question.

Things I Never Say in a First Consultation

Q. Is there anything you absolutely never say in a first consultation?

“If you don’t start now, it will be too late.” Anxiety speeds up decisions, but it stops understanding. I also never make definitive pronouncements about a child I have just met. How could I possibly know everything about a child I have watched for forty minutes? So when I share assessment results, I always attach the qualifier “based on what I saw today.”

Q. There must have been consultations that didn’t go well.

Plenty. For my first few weeks of counseling, I filled the entire forty minutes explaining the curriculum. Then one day a mother quietly said, “I already read all of that on the website.” When I went back over my notes from that day, I found I had not asked a single question about her child. Of the families I counseled during those weeks, fewer than half ever contacted us again. Since then I have kept a rule of not explaining anything for the first fifteen minutes, and the first line of my counseling notes is always one sentence I heard that day.

Q. What is your most memorable consultation?

One day last fall, a mother came in carrying a file where she had organized three years’ worth of academy schedules. The child sitting next to her stayed silent the whole time. Then I asked the child, “Of the books you started and put down, which one do you regret closing the most?” and for the first time that child looked up and talked about books for more than ten minutes. As the mother was leaving, she said, “That’s the first time I’ve seen my child talk about books for that long,” and those words have stayed with me. Even now, that child stops by the desk every Wednesday to tell me how far along they are in whatever book they’re reading.

Thinking of the People We Will Work With

Q. What is the most essential ability for a counselor?

The strength to stay curious for a long time. Before every consultation, I make a point of reading the records accumulated in Rubric, our class record system, and to me those records are raw material for building questions. The person who keeps wondering why a child stopped at this particular point is the one who ends up giving good consultations.

Q. What kind of colleague do you hope will join you?

Someone who can say they don’t know when they don’t know. At the desk, the temptation to give an instant answer is very real. But I’ve found that trust is built by the person who says “Let me check and call you tomorrow” and then actually calls the next day. If you’re someone whose first instinct when hearing a question is the next question rather than the answer, I would love to learn alongside you.

In the next episode of Praxis People, we will visit another colleague’s desk.