School for School Counselors Podcast

Dysregulated Adults ≠ Regulated Students

August 26, 2024 • School for School Counselors • Episode 111

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In this episode of the School for School Counselors Podcast, Steph Johnson addresses the evolving role of school counselors in behavior intervention on campuses. Steph highlights the growing need for counselors to assist not only students but also staff members, who may unintentionally exacerbate student behaviors. She discusses common challenges, such as teacher dysregulation and its impact on students, and provides actionable strategies for counselors to model emotional regulation, train staff, and offer support without seeming condescending. Steph also touches on the importance of mindfulness and solution-focused conversations for promoting a healthier school environment. 

00:00 Introduction and Welcome

00:25 Behavior Intervention in Schools

01:41 Supporting Your Staff

03:57 Understanding Staff Challenges

05:03 Teacher Interaction Styles

13:35 Promoting Emotional Regulation

23:57 The Importance of Support Systems

26:07 Conclusion and Upcoming Events

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References/Resources:

Gregoire, Simon & Lachance, Lise & Taylor, Geneviève. (2015). Mindfulness, mental health and emotion regulation among workers. International Journal of Wellbeing. 5. 96-119. 10.5502/ijw.v5i4.444. 

Vollmann M, Schwieren C, Mattern M, Schnell K (2021) Let the team fix it?—Performance and mood of depressed workers and coworkers in different work contexts. PLoS ONE 16(10): e0256553. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256553

Zerillo, C., & Osterman, K. F. (2011). Teacher perceptions of teacher bullying. Improving schools, 14(3), 239-257.

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Speaker 1:

Well, hey there, school counselor, welcome back. I'm so glad that you've joined me for another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast. I'm Steph Johnson, a full-time school counselor, just like you, on a mission to make school counseling feel sustainable and more enjoyable, and I am so glad that you've joined me for this wild ride we've been having the past few weeks, as we've been talking about behavior intervention on campuses. Now, normally, this isn't an area that we talk a lot about in school counseling, but every day, more and more, it seems like it becomes more of our purview, and so, even if we're not officially involved in behavior intervention, there is a high likelihood that we're going to be pulled into these things at some time, and so I want you to not only be prepared, but also feel confident and competent about not only jumping into the fray sometimes, but offering your expertise and advisement in situations. Now, a couple weeks ago, we talked about some of the behavior intervention mistakes we see people making across campuses, and last week, we talked about some different ways to really conceptualize behavior intervention in our field, and if you missed either of those episodes, I urge you go back and give them a listen. They're really going to expand the way you see behavior intervention on your campus.

Speaker 1:

But this week I want to take a little bit of a different route. We've been talking about students a lot. We've been talking about ourselves a lot. This week I also want to talk about your staff. This week I also want to talk about your staff because how many times have you walked into a classroom, someone has called you down on the walkie or someone's called for assistance, and you walk in the classroom and the teacher immediately confronts you. I want to tell you what happened. This is this and that is that, and their voice is high and it's moving fast and you can tell that this poor soul is just in a dither over whatever has just happened. We've talked about that in the past, about how we really need to coach our teachers to disengage if they're calling for assistance, because once we get there, we get to take control and there are some nice ways to remind them in the moment to do that.

Speaker 1:

But we also need to look at how our staff perhaps sometimes sets off our students. They trigger them with different things they say or the way they do things, and we know that dysregulated adults do not generate regulated students. But what can we do about that. These are our coworkers. These are often our peers on campus. How can we help adults regulate without seeming condescending or without coming across as a know-it-all or holier-than-thou? Because we have to work with these people all year long, every day, without fail. We don't want to ruin that relationship, but at the same time, we want to be able to provide some insight and some assistance, not only so they can intervene with students' needs a little more effectively, but also so that they can enjoy their time on campus a little bit more.

Speaker 1:

Most of the research that I've looked at in preparing for this podcast episode is actually re-familiarizing myself with parenting styles, because we are in loco parentis on our campuses. Every day we are in lieu of the parent. We take on that role, and often we have many students who spend more time with us in school than they do with their parents, just due to lots of different situations. So this frame of reference seems appropriate to me. So that's the road we're going to head down, but the other thing that we need to keep in mind, in addition to staff interaction styles, is that sometimes our staff members are affected by their own personal challenges. Perhaps they're battling depression, anxiety, ptsd, adhd. The list goes on and on. They're people just like you and me, just like everybody we come in contact with in the world every day, but somehow we forget that. Somehow we forget that they are people with deadlines and meetings and lots of expectations, and they're struggling to maintain order in their classroom. They have anxiety about that, they have fears about that. What if my class is observed by an administrator? Was my evaluation good enough? Did I get my lesson plans on time? On and on and on and on and on. So we need to remember throughout this conversation that our teachers and our staff members are people too. We need to handle them with care. We need to treat them with compassion and dignity, just like we would do with our students.

Speaker 1:

Now, I'm sure you've run across a few folks in your career I know I have in mine who tend to have very negative interaction styles with students. Perhaps they're coercive, perhaps they're demanding. Sometimes unpredictable interaction can really stir the pot and create what can be a harmful emotional climate for some students. I think a lot of these people don't even realize they're doing it. It's just their default and they've never really seen a problem with it before. They've never seen a reason to change, or sometimes they're so focused on their own needs in the classroom, their own need for control, their own need for order, that they're unable to look past that to see how some of their interactions are affecting people around them. You might hear things like I need you to do whatever I need. It's their demand.

Speaker 1:

We often talk about if-then statements or first-then statements in classrooms, something like if you get your work completed, then you can draw on your notebook. But these folks will take a different bend on that and they'll turn it into a demand or coercion, not a choice. That can change the whole vibe of the classroom as well. And sometimes we have classrooms that are just completely random. It just feels like chaos.

Speaker 1:

The moment you walk in the door you can't really discern a structure to how things are happening, and we have a lot of students again due to their own concerns, who need more structure. They need to know what's happening. They need to know what's happening. They need to understand what's happening next, how that's going to go down, and so when we provide procedures and routines, it helps calm their nervous system. It helps give them a sense of peace and control when they're a member of that classroom. We know that. We hope that our teachers know that, but those things often do not come to pass. In contrast, we know that responsive, supportive and consistent teachers and staff members win the day. The ones who have consistent expectations, the ones who are trauma-informed I personally don't like that nomenclature. I think it's more than being informed about trauma. I think you have to know how to interact with trauma, but that's a whole different conversation. We need people who are invested and knowledgeable about collaborative problem-solving with students All these kinds of things so that we can provide that responsive, supportive environment that students need you have on campus, without having to go on Teachers, pay Teachers and buy another group curriculum and gather another group of kids together. These are designed to be very high impact, low prep, but also low material initiatives, and one of the things that we have is a behavior playbook that really focuses largely on supporting classrooms in these kinds of approaches, because we can come running to the rescue as the hero each and every day, but if we're not investing in our staff, if we're not guiding them and encouraging them on this path, we're going to continue running to those classrooms each and every day and we don't have the time and we don't have the bandwidth to be able to do that over and over and over again.

Speaker 1:

Norman and Team 2012, and again I'm going to give you all the resources used in this podcast episode talk about something called psychological maltreatment and says that this kind of maltreatment can cause adverse mental health outcomes in adulthood. And while I don't think we're talking on a large scale about psychological maltreatment on school campuses I certainly hope not I do think this kind of gives us a tinge of what can happen if it continues right, if it just keeps running rampant of what can happen if it continues right, if it just keeps running rampant. Many people have something in their brain that just lives there forever that an adult said to them when they were young that they never forgot, and it could have been something said in passing. The person who said it really didn't mean it to be as impactful as it was, but it hit you just the right way and it stayed with you forever. I know I've had a few people in my life that have made comments that I just caught on the fly and thought, man, that totally changes my perspective, and it was either how I saw them or how I saw myself, and those comments lived in my mind for a long time. So I think we're all prone to that, even as adults. That can happen, and so we've got to be really careful.

Speaker 1:

There can be something, too, that happens in classrooms, where students begin to become scapegoated, where they become pariahs in the classroom, which ends up really being a form of teacher bullying. I told you at one of our recent episodes that I was gonna be talking about teacher bullying with students and before you say that's ridiculous, steph, this is getting a little dramatic. There's no way that that's really happening on schools and mass. It's just not a thing. This is some sort of sensationalism right out on the internet about teachers bullying students. I want you to know. There's actually a study out about this and again, we're linking to this. Zerillo and Osterman 2011, gathered data from both student and teacher surveys, and they found that not only did students report teacher bullying with high incidence, but that 45% of teachers reported themselves as bullies at one time or another. So this is not to blame teachers, but I think it brings us awareness of these types of dynamics that are going on in classrooms, because it can cause confusion, it can cause anger, fear or self-doubt in students, as well as affecting their academic success and their social success.

Speaker 1:

Zarrillo and Osterman also found that the major types of teacher scapegoating tend to be in these categories. First is denial of access. So we're talking about things like denial of bathroom privileges, excluding students from events like assemblies, or just flat out ignoring their requests for help. That's almost 16% of teacher bullying concerns. The second concern of teacher scapegoating is belittling 12.8% in front of the class, calling students' names, sometimes in a joking way, just trying to play it off.

Speaker 1:

Oh, we're just kidding around here, calling them out directly in front of their peers. We're waiting on so-and-so so we can get going. Such-and-such is a hot mess today. No one's going to want to play with you if you act like that. No one wants to be around you because you're so loud. Everybody's staying away from you because you're acting so crazy. Y'all those things happen. Or giving threats of exclusion. If you don't get your act together, you're not going out with us at recess, you're going to sit here by yourself or delivering some related comments through sarcasm. Older students might be nuanced enough to recognize it, but I promise you our elementary and often our middle school students do not possess the capability to recognize sarcasm. They think you're being real and literal, and that can take a toll. So we've got to be careful and I'm saying you, we're talking about any teacher or staff member on campus.

Speaker 1:

Hopefully, with your counseling background and training, these things aren't coming out of your mouth, but we know we do hear these things from time to time, and so we want to be aware of them. We want to just be listening for them, because our job is to serve our students on campus above and beyond any other responsibility that we have, and so we got to talk about what do we do. What do we do to promote adult emotional regulation that we know serves as a protective factor for kids. Also, according to Sisler Olatunji Feldner in Forsyth 2010, this is super important for better overall well-being for students, less psychological concerns later in life, fewer behavioral problems and giving kids a chance to experience examples of emotional regulation if they don't see it at home dysregulation if they don't see it at home. How do we promote that? If we're not the principal, how do we do anything about it when we're not an administrator on our campus? We don't want to come across like, hey, I know how to do your job better than you do, or perhaps we're working in the middle of a very toxic campus environment. How in the world do we combat this stuff? How do we combat teacher dysregulation on the whole, how do we handle scapegoating and student bullying, and how do we promote those healthy emotion regulation skills across our campuses when we're not in positions of authority?

Speaker 1:

I have a couple of ideas for you. Certainly not saying all of these are going to be home runs, but there's something to think about, and the funny thing about podcasts is that as we listen to ideas, as we really absorb them in our brains and turn them around in there, we often come out with newer ideas that are different than the ones that are being presented to us, but it sparks something in our minds and gives us a great idea, and so I hope this conversation is going to serve to do the same thing for you. I think one thing we can do certainly is to model emotion regulation. It is amazing how many people will follow our lead if we lead by example, but our example has to be visible, it has to be consistent, and we have to have established the know, like and trust factor on our campuses. People won't follow you and they won't want to be like you unless they like you.

Speaker 1:

And this is a key piece I see a lot of school counselors miss, especially some of our new school counselors who hop on a campus and instantly want to be a voice of authority. And while I do agree they deserve that, that's often not the way campus politics works. You have to invest in your people, you have to show them what you're all about and you have to grow their ability to know you, to like you and to trust you, and then they start following your lead. So we can model these kinds of reactions and expectations through really mundane interactions, just in our daily going about our business things, as well as in the times when we're called to intervene in behavior intervention. We can start working the side of polyvagal response and mirror neurons and getting down right, going low and slow with students, meaning getting down on their level, talking in a low voice, going slower, trying to get them to match our affect. Super, super powerful and something that a lot of people are never taught, and it would be so beneficial to our teachers to understand the power of just that kind of intervention and the more they see you do it, the more they may be compelled to try it themselves, and that would be an amazing thing To our words that we use the way we interact with students.

Speaker 1:

We just need to be careful. We need to remember that we're being watched all the time, even if we think we're behind closed doors in a counseling session with the student and nobody's listening, nobody knows what's going on in there. I promise you there are things that escape that counseling room through that student, and when they do, you want to be above reproach. You don't want anything to be taken the wrong way. You don't want anything to be interpreted sideways and call into question the way that you're talking to students or interacting with them. And so we just we need to keep that in mind. It doesn't mean we need to be paranoid or scared or worried, but it does mean that we need to conduct ourselves with a high level of professionalism, and as we do that and as we do that out and about on our campuses, people will notice and often will try to emulate. So modeling is our first solution.

Speaker 1:

Secondly, training our staff. If you have the opportunity to train them would be great. Now I don't recommend a PowerPoint and standing up just talking on and on about interaction styles, blah, blah, blah. No one's going to be interested in that friend, they're not going to want to sit and hear it. I remember my days in the classroom and just about every professional development I attended I was either sitting and making a list of the things I needed to do or I was creating to-do lists in my head. I was solving problems in my head for when I got back to my classroom and so I was only half listening to any kind of presentation that was going on. So make sure, if you endeavor in the training aspect of this, that, yes, you're trauma-informed, yes, maybe you're talking about collaborative problem-solving or you're talking about stress management, which goes so far to help adults regulate, but we need to not do it in a lecture style and it does not need to be a one-and-done training. This is another huge sore spot that I have about a lot of things on our campuses, where we tend to do a one and done training, we walk away and then we expect everybody to implement and we know that's just not how human beings work, especially in schools where we're all flying a million miles an hour.

Speaker 1:

So if you have the privilege of training your staff somehow, if you have the privilege of training your staff somehow, perhaps consider adding in some weekly reminders. You can send them in emails. You can send calendar invites with reminders, or you can hand out physical papers in the teacher's mailboxes you could be handing out or providing. I noticed accolades to staff members. I noticed the way you were speaking with that student in the hallway. You were so empathetic and real with them. Thank you for that. That's what our students deserve. Those kinds of things, those kinds of notes, take just a couple minutes to write but can be so super impactful when they're received.

Speaker 1:

And then, beyond modeling and training, I think providing support is also very important and we get into some sticky situations here because we often have school counselors that say that's not an ASCA responsibility. I can't fathom why people feel that way, because our teachers need support and they need support in a big way. But if you're not providing direct support to teachers, be a safe somebody for those people that need it on your campus. You can use solution-focused approaches with your staff, just in conversations in the hallway, to give them a better sense of their own positive attributes, the positive attributes of the students they're working with, and some possible solutions that they can find. Those kinds of conversations, when done well, are so super empowering, and if there was any skill set that I could really impress upon you to develop and get really really good at, beyond data collection and manipulation, it would be solution-focused conversations. If you're not well-versed in that, please go find some resources. It will serve you, I promise, the rest of your life in just about every setting you ever encounter. But for purposes of this conversation, talking with teachers in that solution-focused manner is going to be so restorative and hopeful for them. When they're experiencing perhaps some distress in dealing with the student or feeling like they don't know what to do, we can help guide them in a really conscious way or teaching them collaborative problem-solving approaches. Again, I'm a huge fan of Ross Green. I love the collaborative problem-solving approach and while it takes teachers a little bit to learn and really get fluent in, the results are game-changing and it is a huge gift that we can provide to people on our campus once we know it and understand it ourselves.

Speaker 1:

Encouragement to pursue and sustain mindfulness practices can also be helpful. This one's become a little cliche over the years. Everybody talks about it and then at this point we're all just kind of rolling our eyes going, yeah, well, whatever, like anybody has time to be mindful in a school right, and I totally get that. Been there, done that as well. But an interesting study. I totally get that. Been there, done that as well, but an interesting study Gregoire 2015,.

Speaker 1:

Looked at mindfulness training for call center workers, which is also a high stress occupation, and wanted to see the effects of mindfulness on their psychiatric well-being and no surprise, in reducing psychological distress, stress, burnout, those things. Those are consistent effects we see throughout studies about mindfulness, but their intervention also helped workers avoid impulsive behaviors or reactive behaviors when they were in a negative emotional state. In a negative emotional state and I think a lot of the adult regulation that we see on campuses happens precisely in the same way we have staff members or teachers who get in these negative emotional states. They're done, they've had enough, they're tired of looking at that kid's face, whatever it is, and so they become very reactive and they become very impulsive. They lose the ability to think through the words coming out of their mouth before they come out, or their actions or their threats or whatever it is. And so the more we can encourage our staff to engage in mindfulness.

Speaker 1:

As cliche and as cringeworthy as it sometimes feels, I promise you the studies say it's going to pay off in spades, I think. Last, it's important to remember that our adults on campus sometimes are dysregulated because they don't feel valued, they don't feel heard, they don't feel seen, and if you've ever worked on a campus that's like that, you know the emotional toll it can take. I've been on a campus like that. I remember dreading walking in the doors every day because the goal on that campus was to remain as invisible as possible. The moment you called attention to yourself, the moment you spoke up or stuck your neck out, really bad things happened and so no one felt valued or appreciated. We didn't feel like we were part of a team working toward a common goal. It was very much survival of the fittest and it was a horrible, horrible situation.

Speaker 1:

So be sure that you are engaging as an active listener in conversations, even if they seem like they're not really anything intense or super important. Do it anyway, because it's going to build the habit with your staff. They're going to know you're someone that listens no matter what, because you have genuinely demonstrated that and when the big things come up, they'll be able to come to you to be seen and heard, which is going to help them better regulate. Just like with students, that one relationship with one caring, competent adult can make a huge difference between whether they succeed or fail, so too can it be with our teachers. I'm not saying you have to be that person for everyone, but make yourself available, help your people out. Everyone in your building is likely overwhelmed, stressed and sometimes feeling like they're out of control, and you have a unique opportunity to step in and help the adults around you regulate themselves so that they can better help students regulate, and that's going to go a long way toward behavior intervention on your campus. All right, so that was a sideways view of looking at behavior intervention, but I think it's valid and, again, I think it's something that we don't talk about a lot.

Speaker 1:

Now, as the words were coming out of my mouth, I was imagining what you might be thinking as we wrap up this conversation and I thought there's going to be a lot of people saying that's all great and well and good, and I can be that active, empathetic listener for people on my staff and I can be that safe place for them to land if they need it. But who's my safe place? Who's going to listen to me when I'm feeling overwhelmed, when I'm not feeling valued or heard on my campus. What about me? What do I do? And why am I expected to support all of these people when nobody's supporting me? Have you ever felt like that? And I think that's pretty common in our field and it breaks my heart Absolutely, just breaks it into a million pieces, because you do such hard work on your campus every day and you hear and see the worst that your students have to offer sometimes and you're expected just to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and keep on marching, keep on executing, keep on dealing with all of the inquisitions about your time and where have you been and what are you doing?

Speaker 1:

And what about that kid and what about this? And I need you to do that. What are you doing? And what about that kid? And what about this? And I need you to do that. Who's in your corner? And I want you to know if you're feeling like you don't have anybody in your corner, if you're feeling like you need that safe place, that soft spot to land, I've got it for you and it's called our School for School Counselors, mastermind Y'all.

Speaker 1:

This is the whole reason we built this thing. It wasn't so that we could build some sort of side hustle. It wasn't because we wanted to be online entrepreneurs. Nothing could be farther from the truth and if you were with us back in the early days of School for School Counselors, back in the COVID times, back in 2021, you know we were having lots of live conversations in our Facebook group about how do we better serve school counselors, how do we successfully serve our colleagues not just try to sell them a bunch of stuff they may or may not need and through time and consistency and lots and lots of feedback from our members, because I never do anything without running it past them.

Speaker 1:

First, we developed the School for School Counselors Mastermind, and the only reason that the School for School Counselors Mastermind is a paid opportunity is because we have to have some way to run the platforms that we're using to do all the things that are happening behind the scenes over there and I promise once you get in there, it's going to blow your mind. The level of resources, the level of discourse, the level of support I will say with 1000% confidence, is surpassed by none. But also to protect your professional safety, because sometimes there are things you don't want to be spouting out on the internet. Sometimes there are questions you want to ask or situations you want advisement on that you're not comfortable putting out into public, and so, through a paid group and through allowing us to gatekeep who is there, knowing who's involved, knowing their backgrounds and their intentions as they're in the group, provides you a huge level of professional safety, and that's what allows us to get super real. When we get invested in your consultation and your support, we're able to go all in and give you what you deserve, because you're right, it often feels like there isn't anyone in your corner. So if you need that, we want to be that for you. You can check out all the details schoolforschoolcounselorscom. Slash mastermind. I'd be happy to chat with you if you have any questions or concerns. I'm just an email away, hello, at schoolforschoolcounselorscom, and it will be me reaching out to you directly. So don't hesitate to reach out if you need that kind of support, because your teachers need you, your staff needs you, your students need you and your entire school needs you to be on your A game and feel clear, confident and capable, and I want that for you too.

Speaker 1:

All right, this episode went a little long this week, but I hope it was worthwhile for you. I hope it helped challenge some perspectives and the ways that things are maybe done on your campus now. Remember, change happens in small increments. In education. You can't expect things to change overnight, but you can start laying the breadcrumbs for some positive change with your students, and that's going to start with modeling, moving to training and being sure that you're a great support for teachers and for staff.

Speaker 1:

All right, I'll be back soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast. We have our pod party coming up here very soon and my next episode is actually going to be a collection of three. We're calling it our Podcast Power Pack. You're not going to want to miss it. Three of the episodes I've been most excited to bring to you all in one big shebang, and we're going to be having a huge podcast celebration in our Facebook at the same time. So make sure you're in our Facebook group. You won't want to miss that. We're giving away over $1, dollars in prizes and materials and supplies for school counselors and I know you're going to want to be in on that. Make sure you're in our Facebook group. Go check out the mastermind and I will be back with you in a flash for that power pack. Until then, I hope you have the best week. Take care.