I Blew Up My School Counseling Data: What I Learned

In this week’s episode, I’ll take you through my real-life experience of being compelled to overhaul my data systems due to recent legislative changes in Texas—a process that unfortunately did not go very well. 

It’s been quite a journey with some big adjustments I had to make in my data collection methods. However, despite the setbacks, the lessons I learned have been invaluable. 

I’ll share what I learned and was reminded of regarding the secret weapon of straightforward data habits, the importance of selecting effective tools, and the power that comes from purpose in data collection. 

As the school year comes to an end, let’s look back on our achievements and prepare for a future where data supports and enhances our counseling programs. Together, we’ll learn not just to collect data, but to harness its full potential for the betterment of our programs. Let's do this!

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:06

Hey school counselor, welcome back to the School for School Counselors podcast. I'm Steph Johnson, a full-time school counselor just like you, who is here trying to break down the barriers of unsustainable school counseling practices, to make our jobs more rewarding, more effective and definitely more fun, and I'm so glad you're here with me for this episode this week where we're talking about how I blew up my data collection efforts in the worst way possible and what happened after that. I think this is going to be a super fun conversation for you. As we walk through data collection. It exasperates so many school counselors, and understandably so. We work a lot with data in our School for School Counselors Mastermind and it never fails. Our masterminders sort of gnash their teeth over this whole thing. They have a really hard time implementing school counseling data practices, and it's not because they're not super smart, because they are very, very intelligent. It's just something about the data that makes it really hard to implement, and I was reminded of all that this year when I blew up my systems, blew up my collection efforts and learned a ton from it. So if you've known me for any length of time or if you followed School for School Counselors for a little bit, you know that I am all about the school counseling data and not for the reasons that most other people give you. I've learned a lot along the way, but perhaps I've not learned as much as I did this year when again completely blew it up. I started doing all kinds of things I'd never done before, and so I want to give you a glimpse into that this week of my data efforts. What went well there wasn't a whole lot what went really really wrong, and how I'm approaching that in the coming school year to try to correct all of it.

Speaker 1: 2:17

Now, the idea for this conversation came from our data discussions session. We just had it a little bit ago, right before I started recording this episode. We hold it monthly in our School for School Counselors, mastermind, where we workshop our school counseling data. Sometimes I teach masterclasses with tips and tricks, talk about collection. What do you do once you have the data? How do you implement your systems? Where do you go from there? All of the minutiae of working with the numbers. But we also love to troubleshoot data and we talk a lot about our best intentions versus our real-world outcomes in practice, and it gets really, really interesting. So this week we had our final data discussions of the school year. It was kind of bittersweet, but we look back on our year. We talked about what went well, what didn't go so well, and then we planned and prioritized proactively for 2024 into 2025. And as we planned, we talked through all the data pieces. All of these things kind of started flooding back to me in a different way from the past school year and I thought you know this is an important conversation to have on the podcast as we talk about data-driven efforts in our field and what's needed to truly sustain them.

Speaker 1: 3:46

Now a lot of people bark at you about collecting data, right. They bark at you about using it for advocacy efforts. I don't think that's the right reason. Or, you know, they just endlessly give you these systems or forms or all kinds of things for school counseling data, but they never actually get in deep with you about it. I think that's for a couple of reasons. I think number one maybe they themselves aren't quite sure what to do with it. I think that's for a couple of reasons. I think number one maybe they themselves aren't quite sure what to do with it. But number two sustainability is a big part of this conversation and I think it's hard to get your thumb on sustainability, so let's jump into it. Let me tell you all about it. In my work in the School for School Counselors, mastermind and our data discussions initiative inside of that, I've learned one very powerful thing, and that's the majority of the school counselors that I've had the pleasure of speaking with are really invested in the idea of school counseling data. They know it's important, they know they want to do it, they know that it can help their program in so many ways.

Speaker 1: 4:55

But the real speed bump of it all is that it's really difficult to implement. It's kind of like weight loss. Have you ever tried to lose a few pounds or try to eat healthier? We know we can talk all day long about that stuff. We can talk about counting calories, exercising, making healthy choices, but at the end of the day, the change doesn't come from the knowledge of weight loss or healthy eating. What makes you successful is implementing a good plan, having a way of approaching all your triggers that make you want to do the wrong things, how to avoid the temptations and how to keep your goal in mind for the long term. And that is really really hard for us as humans. Our brains seek satisfaction. They are trained to seek comfort. We don't like pattern interrupters and so it's really really difficult to set these priorities and follow through, especially when we're talking about something as dry as school counseling data.

Speaker 1: 6:10

This year, for me in particular, was pretty interesting because within my state of Texas, we had some new initiatives. I say new. They've been in place for a couple of years, but it wasn't until this year that school districts really got intentional about implementing these things. I talked about it in a previous podcast episode, where now we have our 80-20 mandate and our legislature has mandated that school counselors spend no more than 20 percent of their time on non-school counseling duties and as part of that, districts were tasked with selecting their data collection processes. They gave us all a lot of spreadsheets and trackers and things like that, and we were expected to use those to track data uniformly within our districts. Theoretically, that sounds like a great idea.

Speaker 1: 7:06

The problem was with the implementation. For some folks it was great. It got them started collecting the data. It really got them on the bandwagon of making sure they were doing what they needed to do. But for folks like me, who already had systems in place, to completely abandon those systems and start with something new was really, really hard. I was using a pretty well-known piece of software to collect data beforehand. Then my district opted to discontinue that software and I can't say I was completely sad about it. There are some pieces of that business model that I don't feel are in alignment with my school counseling ethos, but nevertheless I thought this would be a great time for a fresh start. But nevertheless, I thought this would be a great time for a fresh start. But that was the first step in blowing up my data collection efforts, because I didn't really feel comfortable tracking not only in a different modality but with different categories than I was used to.

Speaker 1: 8:08

Change is hard right. We don't love change. We avoid it really at all costs. Hard right, we don't love change. We avoid it really at all costs. And so as I had difficulty transitioning to this new spreadsheet, I sort of just chalked it up to. I haven't developed the habits yet, I haven't really gotten it down yet, but I'll get there right. Just give me a little bit of time, give me more of an opportunity to implement and I should be fine.

Speaker 1: 8:30

Unfortunately, that's not what happened. As I worked through the year and I labored over this spreadsheet, I realized that there was so much more to my difficulties. So I suppose my first point and excuse me for speaking a little extemporaneously today, I'm just kind of giving you a brain dump of data collection insights Make sure that you have the right method for you Now. You can find no shortage of people on the internet and in the online world who claim to have the perfect solution for you. Right, they have the perfect setup. All you have to do is this and this, and it'll be rainbows and unicorns from here on out. But data's a little bit trickier than that. It's not always that easy, and I think we need to keep that in mind.

Speaker 1: 9:19

As I told my Mastermind members this afternoon, I was working with this spreadsheet. It just was not jiving for me. For whatever reason, I could not figure it out and, bit by bit, the more I worked through it, the more I began to feel like a failure. I took it really personally and I thought, oh my goodness, I am someone who trains school counselors on using data and I can't even get a handle on this. What is wrong with me? And I felt really bad. The upshot of all that was, though, it wasn't me, it was my system. My system had me feeling out of control. It had me feeling like there were gaps that I couldn't close and it wasn't allowing me to do some of the things with the data that I had been accustomed to being able to do. I think, had I had the right system, I would have felt much more competent and much more confident in my data pursuits. I would have felt like I had a handle on it.

Speaker 1: 10:22

So sometimes you have to experiment with different approaches. You have to decide how do you like to capture and manipulate your data. Is it electronic? If so, what way is the best way? Is it a software platform? Is it a Google Sheet? Is it a spreadsheet? Is it a time tracking app? What do you need to do? Do you need to keep that spreadsheet up on a second monitor all day long at your desktop? Do you do better when you can enter it on the fly on an iPad or something like that? Or do you work better with paper and pencil in hand?

Speaker 1: 11:02

Lots and lots of variables to this, and what makes it interesting is our brains all work differently, and so there's not really one good prescriptive answer. We just kind of have to play and experiment and find out what works best for us, remembering that it takes time and it takes patience. That's one of the things that our data discussions cohort is designed to do is to support school counselors in that journey, to give them ideas and help sustain them as they experiment. But the number one thing I want you to take away from this is that you have to have a method that works for you. If you don't carry your cell phone with you all day, then an app probably isn't the right solution. If a spreadsheet makes your eyes cross and makes you feel like you want to stab yourself in the eye, it's probably not the right choice for you. Maybe you need old school paper and pencil Lots of options here and everything's okay but we really just have to find what we like and what works for us.

Speaker 1: 12:06

The second problem that I had with my data collection and this was pretty powerful, it wasn't something I really even thought about until I was in the middle of it was that my systems for data did not feel cohesive, and what I mean by that is when I was collecting information previously, I felt like the story was being generated for me. As I went, I had lots of night scraps and charts and all kinds of things populating for me. As I entered numbers and I could start to follow my data story graphically, I could see where my time was going and what my days were looking like and where my efforts were mostly directed. But when I started with my district spreadsheet, I wasn't getting that same kind of immediate feedback. The spreadsheet I was given was pretty much designed to log generic categories and that's pretty much where it stopped. It didn't give me any more insight into it, it didn't give me any subcategories, and so I really kind of lost a lot of my excitement for the process because it wasn't painting a vivid enough picture. It was kind of like the difference between looking at a photograph in black and white versus a really crisp color photograph. Right, there's just a marked difference between those two experiences. And for me just tracking the information in the spreadsheet with limited variables and limited output was kind of depressing and I didn't enjoy it at all. It wasn't giving me back what I wanted and I really felt like I just couldn't pick that information up and run with it like I had in the past.

Speaker 1: 13:48

So that's another consideration to make Is your data collection practice sustaining your efforts and is it fulfilling you To go along with that. You really need a reason to be collecting that data, not just collecting it because you heard that you should or you think that you should. You have to have an intention for your data, otherwise you're not going to get very far. Back to the weight loss analogy, right? If you don't have a reason to lose weight, if there's not something purposeful and time limited that's driving your efforts right there's that sense of urgency to it You're probably not going to do it. That's why so many people try to lose weight for vacations and weddings and major events. There is a time constraint to that. There's a goal. There's a defined endpoint for our efforts. That was a big topic of discussion in our data discussions today. You know we can teach you all the things, we can show you all the systems. We can give you all the tools. You all the things. We can show you all the systems. We can give you all the tools.

Speaker 1: 14:56

But at the end of the day, if you don't have a true purpose for your data collection, if you don't feel some sense of urgency, if you haven't created defined goals that you're working toward with your data, it's going to feel like just another thing to do on top of the huge mountain of things that you already have that you have to do right and that feels overwhelming. So often in our days we feel like I cannot get to one more thing right. Bless it. So please don't add any more of that feeling when we start trying these data collection efforts. It's going to feel like too much, like adding the last straw to the camel's back. If we don't have an intention for it, if it does not feel purposeful and useful, we're going to quit, we're going to forget about it.

Speaker 1: 15:46

Third, which goes along with the idea of having a purpose for your data, for having motivation and continuing, is having the right cues in place. This is something that you never hear people talk about, but it is so stinking powerful when we talk about it. In the context of school counseling, data Learning, how to track use of time, data is really building a habit. So we have to have the right triggers in place to compel us to continue building the habit. Whether that is a scheduled alert on your phone calendar reminder, a visual reminder, there's all kinds of things that we talk our masterminders through that they can put in place to jog their memories, to help them develop the data collection habit so that it gets done. In my opinion, probably 90% of the success or failure of our data collection efforts on our school campuses boils down to having the right systems, the right motivation and the right cues in place. That's why our data discussion sessions are so powerful. Our data discussion sessions are so powerful because we come together, we talk about these things in a real-world context, we bounce ideas off each other and then we give ideas to each other so that we're really working collaboratively to create the best outcomes for our members, and that's a really powerful experience.

Speaker 1: 17:23

No, the point of this podcast is not to get you to join the mastermind, although I would love that. The point is you've got to set up a data collection system with the right motivation, the right tools and the right cues that are going to work for you, because y'all this is important. Data can really cover the basis for you. It can be a great catch-all for you to show you what you're doing. You can use it for advocacy, but you have to have the right systems in place. You have to have the motivation and the goals to sustain your intensity and your desire, and you've got to put the signals and cues into your day to remind you to do the dang thing, signals and cues into your day to remind you to do the dang thing. And then, once you have that, you collect your data, you bring it back to our Mastermind Data Discussions cohort and we walk through that data with you, step by step, to show you the next steps, to help you interpret your data and to create a plan of attack for the next phase. We love geeking out on that stuff and we love hanging out with school counselors who love the same thing, and we also love indoctrinating those of you that don't love school counseling data very much. Yet we're going to get you there. We're going to show you the light and we're going to show you how you can learn to love it too. All right, so sustainable systems that work with the way your brain works, maintaining your motivation for what you're doing. Have clear-cut goals for what your data is going to do. That's something that I lost because I was using predetermined categories instead of chasing my program goals that I had always done and make sure you have those good signals and cues in place. I was reminded of that as I revamped my systems, tried to teach myself a new way of doing things and it just hit me like a ton of bricks how super important those cues and signals can be.

Speaker 1: 19:25

All right, as we're wrapping up this podcast episode, the majority of you probably only have a few weeks left of the school year and there are lots of things going on as we wrap up the semester. Before we did our data discussions cohort today, we also had our wrapping up the school year session, where we walked very intentionally through the past year. We looked at what worked and what didn't. We identified goals and initiatives for the next year. We planned them out and we have them on paper. Each of us has our individualized goals ready to go.

Speaker 1: 20:03

When we dismiss for summer, we can go sit by the pool, have some margaritas and not worry about what's going to happen when we get back to campus, and then we can return going full steam ahead without panicking and saying, oh my gosh, what was that thing? I'm trying to remember, what was it that I wanted to do? Or, worse yet, waiting until later in the year and then having it come punch us in the face and we go dang man, another year went by and I forgot to do that. We don't want that to happen to you. We're not gonna worry about it because we've got it all planned out and ready to go for 24-25. And we would love for you to be able to reap the rewards of that as well.

Speaker 1: 20:42

The replay is available and in your Mastermind library right now, in addition to the printables that we use to plan and collaborate, as well as a new assessment that's only available to our School for School Counselors Mastermind members our Smart School Counseling Assessment, which is going to be a huge game changer in the school counseling world. Our masterminders are getting first peek at that. They're already working with it and implementing the suggestions, and it is absolutely astounding the kind of information you can get out of this assessment. It's waiting there for you and all you have to do is join us in the School for School Counselors mastermind schoolforschoolcounselorscom. Slash mastermind. All right, I'll be back soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast. In the meantime, I hope you have the best week and a stellar wrap up to your school year. Be mindful in your approaches at the end of the year. Start planning ahead to 2024-25. Think about those data collection efforts and I'll be back soon. Take care.