Research-Based School Counseling Spaces: Does Yours Make the Grade?

Can the design of your school counseling office really impact student well-being and performance? Join me, Steph Johnson, on the School for School Counselors Podcast as we unpack the essentials of creating a functional and calming counseling space. Drawing from both personal experiences and cutting-edge research, I guide you through the journey of setting up an environment that will not only support your students but also help you stay focused and calm. Whether you are a new counselor setting up your first office or a seasoned professional looking to refresh your space, you'll find practical advice that can make a significant difference in student engagement.

Throughout this episode, we emphasize the importance of intentionality in designing your space, highlighting how clutter can negatively impact focus and anxiety levels. Discover the unique role of school counselors in fostering a regulated environment, distinct from regular classrooms, and learn how to advocate for your true role amidst the challenges of being assigned non-counseling duties. We share inspiring stories and actionable steps to make your counseling office a sanctuary for student support. Plus, don't miss the chance to hear more about our Best Year Ever event coming soon!


Mentioned in This Episode:
BEST YEAR EVER!!!
School Counselor Must-Haves Guide


Resources:

Barrett, P., Zhang, Y., Davies, F., & Barrett, L. (2015). The impact of classroom design on pupils' learning: Final results of a holistic, multi-level analysis. Building and Environment, 89, 118-133. doi:10.1016/j.buildenv.2015.02.013

Cheryan, S., Ziegler, S. A., Plaut, V. C., & Meltzoff, A. N. (2014). Designing classrooms to maximize student achievement. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1(1), 4-12. doi:10.1177/2372732214548677

Evertson, C. M., & Weinstein, C. S. (2006). Classroom management as a field of inquiry. In C. M. Evertson & C. S. Weinstein (Eds.), Handbook of Classroom Management: Research, Practice, and Contemporary Issues (pp. 3-15). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Fisher, A. V., Godwin, K. E., & Seltman, H. (2014). Visual environment, attention allocation, and learning in young children: When too much of a good thing may be bad. Psychological Science, 25(7), 1362-1370. doi:10.1177/0956797614533801

Hamre, B. K., & Pianta, R. C. (2005). Can instructional and emotional support in the first-grade classroom make a difference for children at risk of school failure? Child Development, 76(5), 949-967. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2005.00889.x

Martin, S. H. (2002). The classroom environment and its effects on the practice of teachers. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 22(1-2), 139-156. doi:10.1006/jevp.2001.0239

Tanner, C. K. (2009). Effects of school design on student outcomes. Journal of Educational Administration, 47(3), 381-399. doi:10.1108/09578230910955809


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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

Whether some of us want to admit it or not, the beginning of the school year will soon be upon us, and I know many of you are spending at least a little bit of your summer thinking about how to set up, or maybe how to revamp, your counseling space. But be careful A lot of the things you see are not best practice and could actually work against you, sometimes in a very big way. In this episode, we're going to look at what research says is best practice for school counseling spaces. If you're just getting yours set up, this will be a great checklist for you, and if you already have a space, you'll be able to listen to see if your office makes the grade. I'm so glad you're here.

Speaker 1: 1:02

This is the School for School Counselors podcast, and I'm Steph Johnson, a full-time school counselor, just like like you, on a mission to help school counselors create programs that are impactful but also feel sustainable. I want you to love going to work every day and I want to help you in any way I can. So let's talk about these school counseling spaces, these school counseling spaces. This reminds me back when I was a beginning school counselor, scheming and dreaming all summer long, thinking about all of the things that I wanted to do with my upcoming school counseling space and as the beginning of the year got closer, I meticulously planned and scoured Amazon and garage sale sites, all the things I could get my hands on to try to create the perfect space for my students. And I was so excited, I just wanted it to be awesome, and I remember even going so far as to get some graph paper out and graphing the room Y'all. I was intense. I was motivated about my school counseling space. My first school counseling office did end up pretty amazing, but I will say I also had an eye toward clinical spaces. At the time I was working on my clinical licensure as well. I had seen many therapists' office and the office of my supervisor, and so I kind of had an idea of the direction I might need to be headed. And even as a teacher, it never made a lot of sense to me to take a student over to a bulletin board or a corner in the classroom where there was just this huge jumble of posters about calming strategies and coping strategies and breathing techniques and it was almost as if they were like look at all these posters and now breathe Never made any sense to me how anyone on the planet would find that calming. So it's been a unique interest of mine over the years, especially as I have now trained many school counselors and have had many conversations about counseling spaces and what might need to be included or what they should look like.

Speaker 1: 3:24

And I do think we need to be intentional about the way that we set up our spaces. Intentional about the way that we set up our spaces. Part of that is because we may be working with limited space, so the things that we choose need to have a distinct purpose. I think, too, when we create soothing and calming environments, it soothes our own nerves and even helps us to regulate as we're trying to help our students, and I also think that it differentiates us on campus. I'm going to get to that in just a minute, but before we head that direction, I'm going to give you just a little audio tour of my minimalist school counseling office. This is not something you typically find, I think, at my level.

Speaker 1: 4:12

I'm an elementary school counselor and I have been very purposeful and thoughtful about not introducing a lot of extra stuff into my office. Over the years, I've gotten tired of having to dissuade students from grabbing this or that, getting distracted by Legos or games or stuffed animals or whatever it was in the counseling office and trying to really bring them into the purpose that they were there. Now, formerly, when I was working with some play therapy, those kinds of approaches were great to let the student come and explore the counseling room, select what they wanted to play with and just allow me to follow along for the ride. But you know that in school counseling we don't have the luxury of time and sometimes we don't even have the luxury of space. We've got to be very intentional and purposeful. Again, those two words about what we're doing and how we're getting from A to B.

Speaker 1: 5:16

So today, as I prepared to record this episode, I sat down and made a list of the most often used items in my school counseling office, and I don't want to turn this into a must-haves list, although if you need one of those, we have one available. We'll put the link in the show notes. But the point is, what's the bare minimum that I can have in my school counseling office and still feel like I could be effective with the majority of students that walk through my door? And so here's my list. Are you ready? You probably won't need a pen and paper because it's not that long. There are only six things on my list. Number one is my Likert scale. So I have a Likert scale with emoji faces. I actually have two, so I don't know if that counts as two items. One goes one to ten and one goes one to five, but I'll be honest with you, my one to five is pretty much the only one that gets used. I try to ask students rating questions every time they come in my office. It helps give me a good gauge on what's going on and gives us a great jumping off point.

Speaker 1: 6:25

My second item would be my dollhouse. It is just amazing what you can learn through dollhouse play and you typically get there pretty quickly. You learn a lot about potential family dynamics, relationships, maybe get a window into what's going on in their home, but most importantly, you get a view on how that student sees the world. What are they worried about, what are they afraid of? It seems to all come out in dollhouse play and I realize if you're working in a middle school or high school that may not be appropriate to you, but as you listen to this list, I think you're automatically going to think of something that would work in the place of some of these things that I'm listing that you may not want to use.

Speaker 1: 7:12

Third, a deck of Uno cards. Almost everything it feels like can be solved with a quick game of Uno. We may not jump right into it, but often we can get through a lot of things by playing a game of Uno. It helps break the ice. It sets the stage for conversations about particular topics. We can assign colors to different levels of questioning or all kinds of things that you can do with Uno.

Speaker 1: 7:39

Fourth are my magnet tiles. I think there are some alternatives for older students Stacking rocks, balancing games, things like that, just something to keep their hands busy that's not too difficult to work with. We use magnet tiles all the time in our front office complex. As a matter of fact, we've just purchased another huge set of them because they really help us get where we need to go with students.

Speaker 1: 8:07

Fifth are my art supplies. I typically have markers, glue paper, perhaps some quick sticks. Those are little paint sticks. If you haven't had the pleasure of having those in your office, go to your Amazon cart right now and add some, because they're amazing. And last is my hole punch. That's a weird one, right? Just a one single hole punch old school hole punch. It's amazing how much aggression can get worked out by punching holes in paper with an old school hole punch. So those are my six items my Likert scale, dollhouse, uno, game, magnet, tiles, art supplies and a hole punch.

Speaker 1: 8:55

And the great thing about all of these is they can serve multiple purposes. It's not just a one and done resource. It's not the thing you know, that I flip through my filing cabinet and say, oh well, you know we're dealing with a grief issue. Better pull out the grief folder. Now we're dealing with anger. Better pull out the anger resources. No, these have multi-purposes and it's beautiful, because I don't have the kind of space where I can have a lot of things cluttering stuff up, and I could work for years with just these six things.

Speaker 1: 9:29

Now your list may be different. You may approach counseling in a completely different way than I do, and that is 1000% amazing. The point is, what could you pare down to? What is your bare minimum of your absolute essentials? Determine that first before you start adding all the little extras, all the frou-frou stuff, all the fun stuff. Determine your core essentials and then build out from there so that you don't overwhelm your space.

Speaker 1: 10:04

Sherian and Team 2014, and again we will link to these resources in the show notes found that cluttered environments increased stress and hindered self-regulation ability in students. So we really want to be mindful about the number of items that we have in our offices. This is in contrast to a lot of pictures that you see on social media, where you see these school counseling offices that are sort of over the top, very colorful, they may be well organized, but when you look at them, they just have a lot of stuff. We also know that a calm, serene environment can soothe our nerves and help us regulate, and that goes for our students as well as ourselves. Fisher, godwin and Seatman 2014, as well as Barrett and team 2015, have done a lot of work looking into visual complexity in classrooms and when people approach this topic again, I'm mostly speaking to what I've seen online.

Speaker 1: 11:16

There tend to be two very distinct camps of school counselors. We have one camp of school counselors that is very much into the aesthetic minimalist vibe very calming, very soothing environment and then we have the second camp of school counselors that say, well, I don't like that, that's not me. What I like is to do this. I like excitement. I want kids to feel like they're in a sensory wonderland. I want them to want to come to my office. Have you seen that? Perhaps you've thought that yourself, and there's nothing wrong with that, but I think we need to take a step back and really regain some perspective.

Speaker 1: 12:05

My home is very different from my school counseling office, because my school counseling office isn't set up for me. It's set up for the betterment of my students. It's calm, there are cool tones, there's not a lot of clutter. When you come to my home, it's very vibrant. It's very colorful, there are lots of things around. It feels very cozy and homey, but also a little bit busy. That's my vibe at home. I can make that the way I want it because it's for me and for my family, but at school, I have to give consideration to a greater number of people with different needs than mine.

Speaker 1: 12:53

Fisher and team found that highly decorated classrooms distracted students and reduced task performance. Almost like kids just weren't able to concentrate. They were overstimulated by all the things on the walls, all the colors, all the words to read, all the things that were going on. That were going on. Sherryman, ziegler, plout and Metzoff 2014, did a lot of work into color and lighting in learning spaces and reinforced what you probably already knew, which is that soft, neutral colors create a calming environment. Bright and vibrant colors resulted in overstimulation and disruption.

Speaker 1: 13:39

There was even one study done and I did not grab the reference to this, so if you see it somewhere, alert me because I want to credit it to the right person. But there was a study done, I believe, in a kindergarten classroom, where they went in and measured the heart rates and blood pressures of kindergartners in a very brightly colored classroom, then went in and repainted the classroom, reinstalled carpet even to provide more gray and blue, soothing tones, then went back in and measured the heart rates and blood pressure of the students again and found them all to be significantly lower and I believe, if memory serves, it even involved a few students who were visually impaired. The effect on the environment was so great that even though they could not see the difference in color, it still affected them physiologically. It was fascinating to read. I wish I could find it again. I will continue searching and if I find that, I'm going to credit it in the show notes.

Speaker 1: 14:45

But I think on some level we all realize that right, we all understand there is a reason why most hotel rooms and spas follow similar color palettes. There's a reason that we look at things and just think, oh, because color does affect us, and I think it's something that we really kind of need to keep an eye toward as we're preparing our school counseling spaces. Watson and Weinstein 2006, found that classrooms operate better when they're well and intentionally organized and, again, that stands to reason. Right, clutter is going to maybe make some folks nervous, maybe give some opportunities to go off task. Now, the majority of this research has been done in classrooms, but I pulled it because I felt it was most appropriate to our environment. It because I felt it was most appropriate to our environment. We could pull color theory and research into clinical counseling offices if we wanted to, but I think they're going to show us much the same thing and, since we operate on school campuses, to me that felt the most true to our mission today, which is to determine how to best design and set up our school counseling spaces. So so far, we've talked about being intentional with our materials, not bringing in a bunch of extra malarkey if we don't need it, and making sure we're bringing in items and materials that have multiple purposes, that aren't just one-trick ponies, and then being very mindful about the environment in which we are counseling students, reducing that visual complexity, paying attention to color and lighting and making sure things are very well organized.

Speaker 1: 16:34

But I think there's another piece to this conversation that most folks don't talk about a lot. You know we often hear other little tips. Like you know, don't have a desk between you and the student when they walk in the door. You want it to be open, you want it to be inviting. You don't want furniture placed between you and the student when you're talking with each other. Those may or may not be possible in your environment and, honestly, in all of the school counseling offices that I've worked in, I've never really found any of those to be a factor, although we know that those things are best practice. But I think what's really interesting as we seek to set up our school counseling spaces and really create something amazing, is that we tend to go with the flow. As far as school decor, we tend to really go with the same kinds of things that you often see in classrooms Lots of posters, lots of instructional materials, kind of like those breathing posters I mentioned earlier, lots of busyness, visual stimulation, borders, things hanging from the ceiling, things hanging off chairs, all these things in our offices, and I'm not sure that that differentiates us.

Speaker 1: 17:59

Well, I think one of the problems in school counseling and this may feel off topic for just a minute, but I promise I'm trying to make a good point here so often school counselors' expertise is dismissed on their campuses. They're sort of relegated to these roles of backup teachers, break givers, lunchroom monitors, bus monitors, things like that. Right, and I know there are so many of you that get frustrated with fulfilling those roles and every time you're asked to do one you think this is not what I signed up for, this is not my job. And there are even still more school counselors that are being asked to fill spots in the master schedule permanently. They have really been turned into social-emotional teachers. They don't get out of those classrooms often enough to really even get to counsel students too much or really engage in MTSS or PBIS processes on their campuses, and that's unfortunate.

Speaker 1: 19:06

That's something that I think we really need to be pushing against in our school counseling world at large. I don't know that it's necessarily a call to advocacy for those particular folks. I think we need some greater entities working toward that end. For us, that's a whole other conversation, but at the end of the day, what we want to be careful about is setting up our spaces to appear as though we may be a good substitute for a teaching role. You see where I'm going with this, because the more we decorate our counseling offices as though we could be an SEL teacher and we would be perfectly happy with that, the more we give that impression, whether intentionally or unintentionally intentionally the more risk we run of being placed in those kinds of roles. And so I think, because of the unique aspects of the work that we do and really to play on the mystery of our roles, because so many people have no idea what we do all day let's differentiate ourselves within our spaces. Let's really define them and make them look like the outcomes we want for students Calm, cool, collected and regulated.

Speaker 1: 20:32

And so I urge you to give some thought to your space this summer. It doesn't mean you have to completely revamp everything you've had going on. It doesn't mean that if you have color or lots of things in your office, you're doing it wrong, but it does mean if you find yourself coming upon situations, pretty often, where students are having difficulty either regulating themselves or they don't want to leave your office when it's time to go back to class, you may have a problem with your school counseling space, so keep that in mind. There are going to be so many cute things coming out this summer. I know it's going to be hard not to want to grab all of them. It's going to be hard not to want to buy all the office supplies and all the things I know, because I am just as susceptible to that as you are. But be mindful about what you're putting in your school counseling office. If you feel like you need more materials than your bare minimums, rotate the extras out. Bring them out as needed. Be mindful about the way you're setting up your space so that you can promote the best interests of your students.

Speaker 1: 21:49

All right, I'm going to get you that checklist here in just a minute, so keep listening. But I do want to give you a heads up. As an esteemed podcast listener and I'm so grateful that you are here I want to give you a sneak peek into something that's coming up in our School for School Counselors world. Very, very soon, next week, we're going to be opening registration for our annual Best Year Ever extravaganza and y'all, this year is going to be amazing. I'm going to have all the ideas, cheat sheets, checklists and things there to help you set your year up for success, but we're also going to have some mind-blowing new materials for you as well, so you are not going to want to miss this. If you want to get all the details, you can go to schoolforschoolcounselorscom. Click on Best Year Ever at the top of the website and you'll have the opportunity to either sign up for Best Year Ever or join the wait list, and we'll let you know when it's open. This is our most favorite event of the year and, did I mention, it is absolutely free. So I want you to go now. Get on that list, because you are not going to want to miss this.

Speaker 1: 23:12

All right, so before I go, let's recap. Your ideal school counseling space will hopefully include the following Intentionality, where everything has a purpose. Even if it's cute, it doesn't need to be included unless it's useful, hopefully, for more than one thing. A soothing environment with minimal visual complexity, neutral colors, reduced distractions and soft lighting, and a space that looks different from a classroom. Just three things, that's it. Bada, boom, bada bing. Write it on a sticky note and put it in your school counseling notebook so you can refer to it year after year as you set up your school counseling space.

Speaker 1: 24:04

All right, I hope this helped you reconceptualize the way you are setting up your school counseling office or counseling space, and I hope that it inspired you and encouraged you to go with your gut about what might be the most appropriate in serving your students. Don't forget to go sign up for Best Year Ever. And hey, if you enjoyed this podcast episode, I would so appreciate a rating or review. It's what helps other school counselors find out about the podcast, and I would be indebted to you and I would also love to read your review. A rating or review it's what helps other school counselors find out about the podcast, and I would be indebted to you and I would also love to read your review on a future episode. I always think that's super fun. All right, enough talk about school starting. I'm going to let you go enjoy your summertime. Have a restful and rejuvenating week and I'll be back soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast. Take care, my friend.