School for School Counselors Podcast

When Less is More in Your School Counseling Program

• School for School Counselors • Episode 125

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In this episode of the School for School Counselors podcast, host Steph Johnson addresses an issue many school counselors face: the overwhelming number of "urgent" student requests.

She argues that constantly "saving the day" might actually hurt student development and introduces a framework for triaging student concerns. 

Drawing on research by Ryan and Deci on self-determination theory, she emphasizes the importance of fostering student autonomy for psychological well-being. 

Steph outlines key questions counselors can use to decide when to intervene or step back, aiming to balance immediate support needs with opportunities for student growth. 

The episode also touches on strategies for explaining this approach to school staff, keeping professional fluency, and joining the School for School Counselors Mastermind group to discuss and refine these practices.

00:00 Introduction: The Overwhelmed School Counselor

00:49 Welcome to the Podcast

01:48 The Problem with Being a Superhero Counselor

07:13 The Importance of Student Autonomy

13:03 A Framework for Triage in School Counseling

20:15 Implementing Autonomy Supportive Strategies

28:45 Building Professional Fluency

30:37 Conclusion and Resources


Link to Decision-Making Question List


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Resources:

Eagle, J. W., Dowd-Eagle, S. E., Snyder, A., & Holtzman, E. G. (2015). Implementing a multi-tiered system of support (MTSS): Collaboration between school psychologists and administrators to promote systems-level change. Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation, 25(2-3), 160-177.

Epstein, J. L. (2018). School, family, and community partnerships: Preparing educators and improving schools (2nd ed.). Routledge.

Friend, M., & Cook, L. (2017). Interactions: Collaboration skills for school professionals (8th ed.). Pearson.

Reeve, J. (2009). Why teachers adopt a controlling motivating style toward students and how they can become more autonomy supportive. Educational Psychologist, 44(3), 159-175.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2017). Self-determination theory: Basic psychological needs in motivation, development, and wellness. Guilford Press.

Su, Y. L., & Reeve, J. (2011). A meta-analysis of the effectiveness of intervention programs designed to support autonomy. Educational Psychology Review, 23(1), 159-188.

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Speaker 1:

Imagine this, and I promise you it won't be a stretch. There's a line of students standing outside your office, your email is overflowing with who knows what, your to-do list keeps growing and you're doing what most of us do. You are solving problems as fast as they come up, trying to meet all the needs like a school counseling superhero. But what if I told you that our helping instinct to go swoop in and save the day might be the one thing that's holding a lot of our students back? That's what we're going to talk about in this podcast episode.

Speaker 1:

Welcome back to 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 more sustainable and more enjoyable. Sustainable and more enjoyable I believe that each and every one of you deserves support, validation and empowerment, and that's why I founded School for School Counselors, where we take practical tools and make them work in the real-world situations that you face on the daily. I want to bridge the gap between what they taught you in grad school and what's really going on, so you can feel competent, connected and inspired to make a difference, even if you're working in crazy, difficult circumstances. I want to be a resource for you and I want to be a source of inspiration and of strength throughout your professional journey. So I sent an email out recently to all of the subscribers on our School for School Counselors email list and it talked about how you're charging through the year, doing all the things that need to be done and all of a sudden it seems like staff and administration start referring everything to you Bad behavior, having a sad day, friend problems, whatever it is. They start lining up at your door and stacking up in your email inbox with urgent requests for students to be seen. The problem is, if you're running a ratio greater than 250 to 1, you're getting buried under all of those requests and it becomes a minute-by-minute game of what's most urgent right now. And then how can I squeeze in all the other things? And you start feeling overwhelmed. You're running like your hair is on fire and trying to get to all the things you can to try to address as many needs as possible, because it's expected of you. And then you spend the rest of the semester battling out of this perfect storm and kind of wondering all throughout it, what should have really been sent my direction. Was this all really necessary, or were some of these situations better handled elsewhere or by someone else. What if there was a better way?

Speaker 1:

I want to talk with you today about how to triage requests so that you can really discern which issues are more pressing, to help you prioritize your activities. But I also want to talk about how you can politely decline some of the non-urgent requests that you receive, without ticking people off, without making teachers angry, without making parents or administrators upset with you. How can you do that? And at the end of that email, I asked readers to email me back and tell me if they felt like they were being bombarded in this way, and I have to tell you this is one of the biggest responses I've ever received from one of my emails. Just email after email with yes, yes, yes, just kept pouring into my inbox, and so I knew we were on the right track with this podcast episode. I think this is something that we all need, and no one really clarifies it for us. No one really gives us a benchmark or a framework for how to discern what to tackle first, how to triage all the needs Because, let's face it, sometimes you just can't get to everything. You just, physically and emotionally, cannot meet every single need on your campus. So how do you prioritize? And, even better, how do you prioritize without feeling like you're going to be viewed as just oh well, I guess she doesn't want to do her job today Because, right or wrong, that's the way schools often operate, right? So we're going to tackle all of these things head on.

Speaker 1:

When I was a new school counselor brand new on my first campus, I had the same instincts. I wanted to jump in and solve all the problems, and teachers were calling me to talk with kids about all sorts of things, and a lot of times it was minor situations, or they were having a sad day or they were frustrated about an isolated incident within one day. But I went running to all of the concerns because, number one, I genuinely wanted to help. Number two, I was worried about what my staff would think if I wasn't running to all the needs. And, number three, I was really worried about you know, what if I miss something? What if I let somebody down? It was a huge concern on my end and I found myself just running myself ragged trying to take care of all of these things, to the point that anytime I went into an elementary classroom to teach a guidance lesson. It was a no-brainer that I was going to be called out of that lesson. I don't think I completed a single lesson within an entire semester on that campus because I was constantly being called and I continued to run my school counseling program like that because everywhere I went, everything I read celebrated these school counselors that were working their fingers to the bone, who were so overwhelmed and approaching burnout as a badge of honor.

Speaker 1:

It's really backwards in education how we celebrate success and what we see as successful, and I bought in to that narrative. I thought you know, they must all know what they're talking about and everybody seems to be doing this. So why would I think that I was any different? And then, years later, I learned about Ryan and DC's research on self determination theory and when I started learning about that I went wait, maybe I'm not on the right track. After all, ryan and DC's research spans decades and involves thousands of students and tells us that autonomy is essential to psychological well-being.

Speaker 1:

Think about that for a minute. When we foster autonomy in young people, it builds their sense of resilience and their self-efficacy. When they solve problems on their own, they're building confidence and they're developing coping skills on their own no-transcript. That's pretty powerful when we think about it right. How often are we running to the rescue without giving them a moment to take a breath, to assess and to think through what they want to do as their next steps? Reeve 2009 says that when students are in autonomy-supportive environments meaning we're giving them a little bit of time and space to develop their own autonomy over situations that their motivation increases and their positive psychological development. Y'all this is grounded in research. Sue and Reeve 2011, did a meta-analysis of 43 intervention studies and when they looked at autonomy-supportive approaches, they found significantly increased student engagement in school, improved academic performance, stronger persistence when facing challenges and enhanced psychological well-being. And the really cool part about this is that brief, focused autonomy support training so just helping kids develop the agency to have autonomy over their problems proved more effective than longer interventions. So this tells us that in school counseling, it's not about us trying to do less, it's about us trying to do business differently. So how do we know when to step back and when to jump in?

Speaker 1:

If we think about multi-tiered systems of support MTSS we hear about that all the time in our education world. We know that supports are typically broken down into three tiers. Tier one usually about 80 to 90% of your students on campus are universal supports. Tier two 10 to 15% are targeted supports. And tier three one to 5% of students are typically receiving intensive supports. Universal supports in school counseling typically looks like guidance lessons, school-wide initiatives, assemblies, those kinds of things, things where everybody is learning about the same thing, regardless of their personal circumstances. Tier two that targeted support for that 10 to 15 percent are cases where students need a little bit of guided autonomy, things like some mild anxiety, mild stress, response, academic performance dips, social challenges, minor behavior issues. Those are typically the things we see within the realm of tier two. And then tier three, your intensive supports, are things like safety concerns, significant mental health issues, severe academic struggles, crisis situations, the things that you cannot leave. You must jump in immediately and we know that right. We know tier three is a non-negotiable, especially when things suddenly spark off. But when we look at tiers one and two, we have to get really critical about where is our expertise most warranted. So great, steph, I know my tiers of intervention. I know my tier one, my tier two, my tier three kids.

Speaker 1:

Now this new thing comes up and I'm not even really sure in the moment where it fits within this framework. I don't know if it's a tier one or a tier two. I have no clue because I haven't yet started working with the student. So how do I know when to hold back and when to jump in if I don't know the full extent of the problem? Because you know, and I know, that typically what's first reported to us as the issue is never the real issue, right? So how do we make that determination Okay? So we know, then, from this research that student autonomy is crucial for their development, but then that creates a practical challenge for us. A practical challenge for us.

Speaker 1:

How do we balance a student's need to develop autonomy with our responsibility to provide support? Because not every situation allows us to step back. It's not always appropriate for us to wait and see, or you stand back at arm's length to see what a student is able to accomplish. Sometimes we need to provide immediate intervention. So my thought is we need a more systematic way to evaluate situations and to determine whether these situations are ones that we need to jump into with both feet or whether they're ones that we can kind of step back and see if students can develop autonomy. That's why I developed a framework for myself to help determine what needs need to go first.

Speaker 1:

If there are too many needs being presented on campus, how do I know where to jump in first? How do I know which situations need to simmer a little bit and which are the ones that I need to jump and cover before they explode right? So just like a doctor would use triage to determine which patients need to be seen immediately and which can wait, we can use a similar approach to help us decide when student autonomy can be approached or when we need to immediately provide that direct intervention. So these questions that I use helps balance three key factors of student situations One, the immediacy and the severity of what's going on. Two, the student's capacity for autonomy. And three, the potential learning opportunities that are presented as a result of the situation. So let's talk through these decision-making questions that you might want to use to determine how to triage situations on your campus.

Speaker 1:

Question one is it an immediate safety or legal issue? Question one is it an immediate safety or legal issue? Does it involve harm to self, harm to others, abuse, legal obligations or anything like that? Obviously, if the answer is yes, you're going to jump in. If no, we go to the next question Is the issue significantly impacting student functioning? Is it a true concern regarding the student's academic, social or emotional functioning? If it is, we need to look at the severity. Does it look mild, moderate or severe? Let's make a plan and let's jump in. If it's not significantly impacting the student's functioning, let's go on to step three.

Speaker 1:

Step three is looking for evidence of a sudden or immediate decline. Has the student's academic performance, emotional stability or attendance suddenly taken a nosedive? If it has, escalate the situation. Give immediate support or intervention. If we don't see that kind of evidence, we move on to step four. Step four asks is the student capable of solving the problem? Are they cognitively capable of addressing the issue independently, even for a short time? Are they emotionally capable of addressing the issue independently? And we have to be careful here that we don't start projecting onto our students, careful here that we don't start projecting onto our students. But if it looks like they're capable of a little bit of autonomy in their situation, let them take the lead. And if you don't believe that they have that capacity, that's when you step in to provide that capacity-building support, building support.

Speaker 1:

Then we need to consider can a staff member assist. Does this concern fall within the expertise of another staff member or within the scope of a relationship that the student has with someone else on campus? If it is, and a referral is appropriate. If it is and a referral is appropriate, see if you can get a staff member to help with the situation. If there's no staff member available or the student has not developed strong relationships with others on campus, consider a brief, solution-focused check. Would that kind of brief intervention clarify the issue for the student or provide them that next best step? If it would, that's when you go forward with a brief, solution-focused approach.

Speaker 1:

If not, we consider would our stepping in prevent valuable learning for the student? Have we seen the student successfully navigate similar challenges in the past? Does this situation provide a safe environment for them to learn without immediate and dire consequences? And dire consequences? Will intervening in this situation teach the student to rely on adults for problems that really they can solve? And what is the student likely to learn if I don't step in? If you feel comfortable with those questions and feel like stepping in might remove that learning opportunity for the student, coach them, watch them from a distance, but don't get hyper-invested in counseling. And if you don't feel that they would benefit from trying to solve it on their own, then you know you need to step in.

Speaker 1:

Now, that is not a formal framework. There's nothing published about that anywhere to my knowledge. But as I kind of sat down and thought through the things that I think about when situations present themselves on campus, those are kind of the broad general categories that came to mind. Now, don't feel like you have to go back and listen to this and write them all down, unless that's how you learn best, which is how I learn. So you will often catch me doing that in podcasts. But if that's not your jam and you need a list of these questions, I want you to know I'm going to hook you up at the end of the podcast episode where you can access these questions in flowchart style and be able to directly apply them to your school counseling program.

Speaker 1:

All right, so we've talked about the benefits of sometimes providing some autonomy to students to let them grow into themselves, to let them understand what they're capable of and really to support better psychological well-being. We've talked about the different tiers of intervention and some questions that we can ask as we're approaching situations on campus to determine whether or not. Our immediate response is the best option and, as we've talked through that, I can imagine you're probably thinking, um, yeah, this sounds great in theory. You're probably thinking, yeah, this sounds great in theory, but what about the people on my campus who expect results now? What about the parents that are constantly emailing me wanting me to sort out all of the problems? What about the teachers who are expecting me to essentially show up with a magic wand and fix all the behaviors? Or what about the administrators who are expecting results now? I can't tell them that I'm trying to help students build autonomy. They are going to interpret that as I am being lazy, I'm falling down on the job or I'm not committed to our students.

Speaker 1:

Did you have that thought? If you did, I would say that's pretty typical in our school counseling world. Working on school campuses in general can feel pretty punitive, almost like you're back in school yourself. Right, if you don't make the grade, there will be consequences, kind of a thing, and that looks different on different campuses. But we also tend to be rule followers and we wanna be helpers, and so it's hard to separate ourselves from that idea of the instantaneous helper to the one that steps back. So how can we explain this to others around us? How do we make them understand that this is actually a research-based mechanism for supporting students? Well, certainly we can talk through Ryan and DC's work on self-determination theory. I think that would be a powerful conversation to have, and I'm not sure that a lot of educators are aware of it.

Speaker 1:

Sue and Reeve 2011, shows us that these autonomy-supportive approaches significantly improve academic engagement, problem-solving capabilities, long-term resilience and emotional regulation, just like I talked about at the beginning of this episode. But the really cool thing, the next step beyond that information, is that student improvements were not temporary. The research showed that student behavior and student capabilities sustained lasting changes. So we have to be ready to explain our rationale to those around us. We have to develop the confidence and the belief in the way that we're working to be able to explain it well, so that people understand what we're talking about and that we can truly communicate that we do have the best interest of students at heart. The slack that we get on our workload that's just an added bonus, right, that just allows us to get to more students.

Speaker 1:

And if we provide this autonomy for students at the outset of an issue and we see that they're not making progress. Certainly we're going to step in and provide the needed supports. Right? It's not like we're just standing back watching them from around the corner wondering if they're going to fall on their face. That's not this at all. But we can briefly check in, find out what the problem is, assess where we think it falls in the hierarchy and then provide suggestions for ways that they can take control over the situation or engage in more intensive counseling services. It's going to be up to our expertise, but when we talk about Ryan and DC's work, sue and Reeve's work, it reminds us that we don't have to be the superhero all the time, we don't have to be the lawnmower counselor going and trying to clear all the obstacles from students as they work through situations, and that actually, if they have to chop down some of the weeds themselves, they may actually emerge stronger, smarter and happier because of it. So, based on this research and based on the plan that I outlined for you, here are some ways that you can get started slowly with this idea in your school counseling program.

Speaker 1:

First, choose one type of student issue where you typically just jump in immediately. Think about something maybe that's happened fairly recently or something that tends to happen over and over again On my campus. I can give you a perfect example. I wish I had a dollar for every teacher that emails me that a student needs to be seen immediately because they're having a sad day, and it often takes some conversation with teachers to help them understand that. I'm worried about sad days when they last a long time, when there are many, many of those sad days in a row and the student's demeanor changes. That's when I wanna get involved. But everybody has sad days, right. Everybody has days where they feel angry. Everybody has those crappy days that just don't go right. It doesn't necessarily mean we need to be calling the school counselor to the forefront.

Speaker 1:

So think about some of those situations on your campus, which are ones that you typically encounter. Really, think critically about your current approach in those situations. What do you tend to do? Do you tend to drop everything and run to find the student? Do you tend to worry and stress yourself about how you're going to fit them in in between all of the other things you've already had going on? Do you end up staying late because you're seeing students when you'd planned on doing paperwork or documentation? How does that work for you and then, once you've identified those recurring situations and your typical responses, see if you can implement some autonomy supportive strategies. See if you can check in with the kid briefly five, 10 minutes to identify the problem and help them come up with their next best step.

Speaker 1:

This is where solution focused approaches work fabulously. If you're not well-versed in solution focused approaches, I would really urge you to study up and learn on it as quickly as you can. Those are going to be as close as you're going to get to a magic wand in school counseling. But think of some autonomy-supportive strategies you can implement Solution-focused conversations, providing a menu of options, scheduling, brief check-ins after the fact, things like that where you're not necessarily sitting down face-to-face with the student for even 10 or 15 minutes. This might be a brief five-minute walk and talk up and down the hallway. How can you implement some of those autonomy supportive strategies in your school counseling program and then track the outcomes in your school counseling program and then track the outcomes, watch and see what happens. See if your students don't report feeling stronger, feeling proud of themselves, feeling accomplished because they worked their way through the situation.

Speaker 1:

If you love the idea of stepping back and giving students a little bit more autonomy. But you're nervous. You're worried about what your principal might say, you're worried about the chatter in the teacher's lounge. I'm going to tell you that your number one best ally in those situations is knowledge and empowerment. When you can talk the talk, when you can effectively explain what you're doing and why, the naysayers quickly get quiet because you're not leaving them a leg to stand on. And that's part of what we call developing professional fluency.

Speaker 1:

Just like we urge our readers in school to develop fluency right so that they can become prolific readers, we want to develop professional fluency within our craft. We want to be able to have these just-in-time conversations at the drop of a hat. If someone walks up to us and asks us a question, we want to be able to answer with authority, without feeling like we have to BS around the situation or having to say you know what? Let me get back to you on them. We want to come across as cool, calm, collected and competent. And the way that you develop that school counseling fluency is by engaging in regular professional consultation and support. That's why we built our School for School Counselors Mastermind. That's why we meet each and every week and we have people who have been meeting us every week for years, who are masters at their craft, who know that the more they immerse themselves in these conversations, the better they're going to be. The more clout and influence they're going to develop on campus, the better they're going to be able to support their students. It all comes from professional fluency, and so I would love to welcome you to the School for School Counselors, mastermind. It's an amazing group of phenomenal school counselors, and the best part is you can join in and just listen until you get ready to offer your expertise in the circle as well. You can find out more about it at schoolforschoolcounselorscom. Slash mastermind.

Speaker 1:

And if you've been patiently waiting for the list of questions that I walked through in this podcast episode, check the episode description in your podcast player. You'll see a link right there for my list of questions and how I conceptualize triaging student concerns. I am not guaranteeing that it is the right answer. I am not guaranteeing that it is the best answer, but it's the way I approach my work, which I try to do with integrity and due diligence, and you can take this list of questions and adjust it as needed for your campus. The important thing isn't necessarily the flow chart itself. The important thing is you're thinking about how you're doing business and how to best support students' development and outcomes.

Speaker 1:

Hey, do me a favor this week, if you haven't already and you know of a colleague who would love to tune into our podcast, why don't you share it with them? It would mean so much to us that the word is getting out about the podcast and hopefully it's going to become a phenomenal tool in their toolbox, just like it's become an awesome tool for you. Reach out to a colleague, copy the share link in your podcast player and just send a quick email. Hey, I thought you might be interested in this. Just help us spread the word. All right, I'll be back soon with another episode. In the meantime, I hope you have the best week and the best Thanksgiving break coming up. I'll see you again soon. Keep being awesome and take care.