School for School Counselors Podcast

Stop Using AI Like This: What Every Counselor Should Know

• School for School Counselors • Episode 132

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In this episode, Steph Johnson continues exploring how artificial intelligence is influencing school counseling. She unpacks the risks of depending too much on AI-generated tools and stresses the need for strong professional judgment to evaluate the quality and relevance of resources. Steph also dives into the ethical challenges posed by AI- including protecting student privacy- and underscores the irreplaceable value of authentic, human connection in counseling. This conversation is a call to action for school counselors to reflect on their practices, rekindle their passion for their craft, and deepen their impact on students.

Episode Highlights:

  • 00:00 Feeling Undervalued on Campus
  • 00:25 Recap of AI in School Counseling (Previous Episode)
  • 01:10 Professional Fluency: The Key to Credibility
  • 04:23 Perceptions of School Counseling Work
  • 07:05 The SEL Lesson Debate
  • 13:00 Risks of AI-Generated Resources
  • 24:28 Ethical Concerns: AI and Student Privacy
  • 30:06 A Call to Reignite Your Passion


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Speaker 1:

Have you ever felt like you're not being taken seriously on your school campus, that you're just kind of seen like this extra set of hands that could do pretty much anything and your expertise, your knowledge base isn't really being valued and sometimes isn't even asked for? Do you ever feel like that? This week on the podcast we're going to talk about that, but in a little bit different way than you're used to, and we're going to be looking at a continuation of a conversation we started in the previous podcast episode where I was talking about artificial intelligence, or AI and using it in school counseling and kind of some of my thoughts on that approach. So if you haven't heard that conversation, you might want to jump back to the previous episode really quickly and catch the gist of what we were talking about. We covered a lot of ground there. We talked about the power of connection, the importance of human interaction and the importance of really developing a concrete professional fluency where, if AI generates something for you, you would be able to look at it and discern if it was a quality resource or a quality recommendation upon just looking at it, and although that sounds like it should be a pretty easy task to do after all. You have a master's degree in school counseling. The truth is, it's really good at tricking you and making you believe its ideas are great when they're actually not founded in anything that we know in reality. Ai has a way to go, my friends. We also talked a little bit about online content, about a lot of folks just blindly downloading things and utilizing them and wondering why they're not working and how introducing AI into our school counseling world like that is going to bring even more headaches for people who are trying to build some clout on campus, who want to be looked at as an essential part of the administrative team on their campus.

Speaker 1:

If we're just blindly throwing resources at the wall and hoping something sticks, we're not going to achieve that kind of reputation, and so this week we're going to continue that conversation. I am going to kill a lot of sacred cows and I hope it isn't too painful for anybody, but I do want to be real about this and I do want to be honest about some of these implications. All right, but before we jump in that, let me introduce myself. If you have not listened to the podcast before, it is great to meet you, and if you have listened before, thanks for coming back. My name is Steph Johnson. I am a full-time school counselor, just like you, and I am on a mission to make school counseling more sustainable and more enjoyable, because you deserve real supports, not lip service, not the same old tired suggestions you see and hear everywhere else, but real support. And so, through the School for School Counselors podcast, through our community and through our School for School Counselors mastermind, I'm looking to bridge the gap between what grad school taught you and what's actually going on on your campus, so that you can feel competent, connected and inspired to make a difference, even if you're working in a really difficult school.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so let's jump back into it, and I'm talking off of some notes that I made over the Christmas holiday. I had my AirPods in and I was just kind of talking in stream of consciousness style, all of my thoughts about AI school counseling, what I've learned from true experts in the field and where I think this is going for us in not only the school counseling industry but in education as a whole. So I want to start by talking about the perception of our work, and I've hit on this in a previous podcast episode when I was talking about the perception of teachers' pay teachers' materials and I really feel like I'm harping on this in this AI podcast series and I guess I am but there are just so many unintended consequences from those things and at face value they look great, right? Hey, we're all helping each other, we're creating these resources, we're sharing them. This is great. We're all going to help each other out when, in actuality, the research tells us otherwise.

Speaker 1:

The truth here tells us otherwise. The truth here, the empirically validated research, says that most Teachers Pay Teachers materials are absolute garbage. And I'm not calling out any one creator, I'm not calling out any one person. There are a few good ones out there. I have about three Teachers Pay Teachers resources in my office that I do use, but for the most part I don't even look at that website. It's not worth my time. And, going back to what we talked about in the previous episode, a lot of that is because I've worked hard to develop the fluency to be able to conduct school counseling business without having to rely on printables.

Speaker 1:

But, more to the point, that I started to make and kind of got sidetracked, there are already misunderstandings on campus about what our role should actually be and with all of the bargaining in the school counseling industry about what are school counseling duties? What are non-school counselor duties? What should we be doing? Dang it. I just want to do what I was hired to do Conversations about advocacy. Prove it with your data. Blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1:

One piece that everybody's missing and maybe this should be a whole other podcast episode is that we don't even really know what we want to be doing as a whole. In our industry, we have a lot of people who are perfectly content to download resources off the internet and use them and call it a day, and they don't want to give any more thought to it. And then we have people who are more like me on the other side of the spectrum, that are very into evidence-based, very into empirically validated resources. And then we have people all along that spectrum in between. So we've got to start agreeing what we need to be focusing on, because I've had a lot of run-ins online with people when I've suggested that perhaps social emotional learning lessons should not be provided by the school counselor.

Speaker 1:

You would have thought that I had suggested we all go out and commit a crime because so many people are so invested in these SEL lessons and they've been led to believe that that is the holy grail of school counseling. But I'm going to be honest with you I have never seen and I have never heard about, in the thousands of school counselors that I've worked with over the years, about any tier three kid that came around because of a teacher's pay teacher's lesson. Correct me if I'm wrong and I am open to feedback, give me the evidence and show me how I'm wrong, but I can tell you that again, through thousands of school counselors that I worked with over the past four years, never, ever, has anyone ever shown up to a support and consultation chat and said I found the magic key. In fact, there have been maybe only I'm trying to remember two or three downloadable resources that have ever even been suggested in that forum, and even those were created by licensed therapists. So just to give you some perspective on the kinds of conversations going on in our mastermind when we rely on these print and pray resources, when we rely on the easy button, when people see us doing that, when people see us doing that, and even as people in our schools watch us deliver those lessons which I do thousand percent believe should be a part of every school campus everywhere. Not debating that at all.

Speaker 1:

Who should be providing it? That's a different story. But if our jobs only needed to boil down to printing these curriculums and delivering them, maybe doing a pre and post-assessment and calling it a day, we wouldn't have needed a master's degree to do this job. And so a lot of folks who take this track in their careers are selling themselves seriously short. They are seriously underestimating their potentials for impact, and it makes me sad, because one of the core beliefs in School for School Counselors is that students deserve access to capable, competent and healthy school counselors. And if we are capable and competent, we should be beyond providing these lessons, especially when they're printables.

Speaker 1:

Think about it this way when our staff sees us show up with these materials because they're unmistakable right, because of the graphics and the fonts that are used and the way they're presented on the page, because they're almost always worksheets or printable games, right, sometimes slides, but they're unmistakable Anybody on a school campus can look at that material and say that's a TPT resource. There's no question about them. What does that do? What does that do to elevate the perception of your role on campus? Think about that for a minute. Are you showcasing your expertise and the depth and breadth of your mental health knowledge when you're printing things off the internet and presenting it to students all day long. Now, for some of you, you don't have a choice, and I get that. Some of you are in situations at schools where you have been told you are an SEL teacher, essentially, and you've been provided a set schedule with set amounts of time and you're just grinding it out with no provided curriculum, so you have no choice but to rely on that stuff. And I get it. I so get it.

Speaker 1:

That's a whole other conversation that we need to have another day about advocacy and about how your national organization right now was failing you, getting pretty opinionated in this one. But bear with me Back to the point. When you show up with these printable materials, how does that elevate you in the eyes of your school staff? How does that elevate you in the eyes of your school staff? Because, like it or not, if you want to advocate for your role, if you want to be able to do the school counseling job that you expected when you got hired, you're going to have to be able to make a case for that, and part of making your case lies in your staff knowing you and liking you and trusting your professional expertise. But if you're showing up with that stuff that looks just like the stuff they're downloading in social studies and math and English, it's not elevating you, it's not building trust in a higher level of expertise, and so that's where I think a lot of things have gone wrong in the school counseling world. We haven't agreed on what our role should be and we are using a lot of subpar materials and undermining our own efforts to elevate our field. It's kind of profound when you think about it, isn't it? It's a lot to think about.

Speaker 1:

But then let's turn back to the AI conversation. A lot of people online are talking about this stuff right, either directly, as in they're sharing resources or they're trying to tell you how to prompt AI, or they're indirectly showing up in school counseling groups, and that's a nice way of saying disingenuously Can anyone recommend XYZ? Y'all know a lot of times those people are planted in those groups. You know this right In social media if you see a really open-ended question. Or could somebody tell me a little bit more about Platform X? I'm considering using it in my program. A lot of the times they're asking that because they're a plant. They've been encouraged to post that question so that they can get the conversation going about that resource, so that maybe other people will get interested in it, maybe they'll go Google it, maybe they'll check it out and use it, and sometimes it gives the creator a chance to show up and say, hey, so glad you asked. Let me tell you all about it. It's all a farce, and so if you think all of those are innocent questions, think again.

Speaker 1:

If you ever see a question in a group marked anonymous post, approach it with caution, because that's the veil under which a lot of these things are going through. That's why we don't allow anonymous posts in our School for School Counselors Facebook group. The only way that we allow anything even close to that is that if someone submits an anonymous request to me or to a member of my team, we know who they are, we review it, we determine if it's legit and then we post it on their behalf. Does it take a lot more work? Yes, is it easy? No, but is it effective? Yes, because you don't see half of that baloney going on in our group as you do in other groups, and there's a reason for that.

Speaker 1:

A lot of the people who are talking about AI right now are actually affiliates of programs. If you see them talking about one thing over and over and over again, there's one called Magic School right now. That seems to be a big push. You know why? They just introduced an affiliate program. That means, if these people can get permission to private message other people, they'll send you their link to join it or to get a free trial. And then you know what they get. They get paid. They get paid for recommending the platform. It's not always on the up and up and they won't always tell you they're an affiliate, even though they're supposed to. They present themselves as an expert, someone who knows all about the field, and give the impression of you know. Based on my rigorous research, this is the best option for you and in actuality, the only thing they know about it is what the company has told them. They're just going after the Benjamins and they're going to recommend whoever's paying them. So just be vigilant out there.

Speaker 1:

I'm not telling you not to use any of this stuff. I'm not telling you that if you and I were friends, I would be disappointed in you if we were having coffee and you told me you were using something with AI. But I do think we need to pump the brakes a little bit. To me, this situation is a little bit like buying a car. You never want to buy the first new model of a car when it comes out, because there are always problems. There are always blips and burps, things that don't work right, lots of recalibrations needed. You want to wait to get yours until it's established. Then you buy the car. Talk to some of the people who own Teslas right now. My apologies if you're a Tesla owner, but those things are having a ton of safety concerns, electronics concerns, all kinds of things, and the people who were early adopters a lot of them are regretting their decisions. Wait until it's been validated in the market. Wait until it's been proven to be able to do what it's supposed to do, and AI is no different. If you want to brag, if you're interested in the power play, if you want the online swag of being one of the first people, you do you.

Speaker 1:

But in school counseling, my primary obligation is to my students on my campus and then personally, my listeners and members, and that's you, and so I'm going to be a straight shooter on this. I'm not going to pretend like it's automatically the most amazing thing that's ever happened in our field? It's not yet. It could perhaps be Again. I think it's going to be a poor substitution for connection, for empathy, face-to-face conversation.

Speaker 1:

Those characteristics are going to become even more important in this new AI world because a lot of people are going to let those skills go. They're going to forget what it's like to sit across from a student and have to be able to come up with something on the fly. Think about this how many times has a kid walked in your office and you thought you knew exactly what you were going to be dealing with and then, as you talked with them for five, 10 minutes, you realized the real issue was completely different, and then you had to adjust course quickly. You had to figure out how to handle this new reality. Y'all that's professional fluency, it's empathy, it's expertise, and that's what we're going to need now more than ever. We're going to need now more than ever.

Speaker 1:

We are going to be absolutely flooded with these AI prompts, ai suggestions, ai generated resources, use, quotation marks around that. That's going to start flooding the school counseling marketplaces, and a lot of the people who are going to be at the forefront of this are the people who are already creating those kinds of content. They see the writing on the wall. They know what's about to happen. They're working to adjust track. Maybe I'm not creating these materials anymore. Maybe now I'm going to show up and teach quote, unquote people how to generate their own through AI. That sounds like a great idea. No, it's not, and if you want to know about the limitations of AI and why that's not a good idea, go back to the previous episode and listen to it. Because AI lies, it hallucinates, it has biases. It's not ready for prime time in school counseling.

Speaker 1:

Actually, that brings to mind a related topic with AI in school counseling, and that would be using AI for more routine tasks, not necessarily counseling plans or advice on interventions, but things that are kind of more mundane. I'll give an example. Let's look at it through the lens of recommendation letters for high school juniors and seniors, because that seems to be one topic that comes up a lot online where high school counselors are saying this is great, I can use AI to generate these letters about my students. It's going to save me a ton of time. It's going to be so fantastic. I hate to burst your bubble, but I don't think it's going to be as awesome as it first seems, and here's why you may know, over the past few years we've run a program through School for School Counselors called Get the Job, and in Get the Job, we helped school counselors really hone in on their areas of expertise, the best way to present that expertise in an interview and how to create a phenomenal resume.

Speaker 1:

As part of that journey, I was working with national organizations on things like resume writing, interview skills and things like that, because I wanted to make sure that the information that I was providing was current and relevant and valid. So, as we were working with school counselors on their resumes, a lot of them were having trouble even getting a call for an interview. They would come to us then and they would say hey, I don't understand why I'm not getting calls for interviews. I've put out 35 resumes, I haven't gotten a single call. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. And so we would have them send us a copy of their resume. We would look it over and there were usually some very specific problems that we could identify.

Speaker 1:

But one of the issues was that the resume was not created to be successful with what are called ATSs Applicant Tracking Systems. That is really some older school AI that school systems have been using for a long time to weed out resumes online. Did you know this? And so when you go to a website and you upload your resume to a school district, a lot of times especially if it's a bigger district they're using an ATS, and so if your resume isn't formatted correctly, if it doesn't have the right wording with it those kinds of things your resume gets kicked out and you don't even get the opportunity to get a call for an interview, and so that's kind of the beginning of the AI that we're using now. So think about this If we've been using ATSs to weed out resumes for this long ATSs to weed out resumes for this long because this is not a new phenomenon it's only a matter of time until universities, which have multi-million dollar budgets, begin using this technology to weed out recommendation letters that have been AI generated. That's just the long and short of it, and maybe, as the technology becomes more nuanced and more sophisticated, that threat will be eliminated. But for now, I don't think that AI generated recommendation letters are your best option. So keep that in mind, and if you decide to go down that road and your students are not being successful with those letters. That may be a large part of why.

Speaker 1:

Last thing I'll bring up is a lot of people in online school counseling groups asking for prompts. I need help working with this student on this issue that has these kinds of concerns. Blah, blah, blah. We need to consider, as we are consulting with technology, that students still have a right to privacy. Consider how AI learns and grows. It learns and grows through the information that's provided to it, what it does with it and the kind of feedback it receives because of its actions. And even if it's telling you that it's not storing information, at least overtly, it's still storing aspects of that conversation. In my opinion, in my opinion, kind of unethical to enter student information into AI. I don't think a lot of people are talking about this or even thinking about it, but it's worth bringing up.

Speaker 1:

You might remember back in 2020, the good old COVID times. Whole world shut down. A little bit before that and a little bit after was really when the big Google push was happening in schools and everybody was heading over to Google. Google at that time was getting slapped with all kinds of lawsuits from school districts over student privacy. Did you know that they were not protecting student information in the way that they were saying they were protecting student information in the way that they were saying they were, and they got sued and they lost a lot of money over that and eventually, hopefully, they refine their practices. But it just goes to show that an assurance isn't a guarantee, and even big companies like Google know that information is the new currency. That's just currency in our modern world, and so, on our end, when we value things like student privacy and confidentiality so greatly, we should never, ever, be putting anything remotely close to student information in an AI system.

Speaker 1:

Now, you know I get pretty passionate about my opinions. I'm very direct about my thoughts on these things, and so, again, I don't necessarily expect you just to grab onto them and believe those at face value either, but I do want to provide you with some different viewpoints so that, hopefully, you'll do one of two things You'll either go do your own research and become informed on your own, or you will pick the route that feels like it has the most integrity. You are smart, you have expertise. You do have the ability to discern a good resource from a bad resource once you have developed a certain level of professional fluency, but when you're working in an industry that's as high stress as ours, that demands so much of us, literally minute by minute, it just becomes the default mode of the majority of the people that do the work we do to just grab on to what's ever easiest because it feels the most sustainable. And that's an industry issue. Right, that's an advocacy issue Again. That's a whole other topic of conversation for another day. But within this world I feel like I have to present these opposing viewpoints. I want to broaden your perspective and hopefully invite you to challenge some of the beliefs that you have about your work currently and then make up your own mind.

Speaker 1:

Decide what's best for you and your students and your campus. Utilize the professional expertise that you have and if you've been relying on the easy button too long and you feel like you've lost some of your expertise, be diligent about building it back. You can do that. Get reinvested in all those journal articles you had to look at when you were in grad school. Just look at five or six every month. Log into your ASCA account. Go to the Professional School Counseling Journal, see what's come out this month. You could pick out a topic that you would really like to build expertise in Something like solution-focused approaches, dialectical behavior therapies, motivational interviewing, something like that, even play-based counseling techniques, and immerse yourself in that world, read books on it, refamiliarize yourself with what you already know and then learn some more. Or, if you have the gumption, invest in our School for School Counselors Mastermind, where we meet every week without fail to build that professional fluency.

Speaker 1:

I don't think that anybody spends years and tens of thousands of dollars pursuing a career with an intention of half-assing it right. But I also know that the circumstances that we work within, day after day, wear down your resolve. And then you're working hard at school, and then you still need your personal time. You have family obligations and other things going on in your life. You don't want to have to invest 100% of your time thinking about your work, so you enter default mode because it feels easier. There's a happy compromise between those two, and so what I'm really urging you to do is kind of look in that direction. Reignite your passion that you have for your work.

Speaker 1:

Whether you agree with me or you disagree with me, think critically about these conversations, think about how you feel about it, what feels right and what feels wrong, and y'all. I'm always open to healthy debate. That's why we meet in our mastermind every week, because when we have elevated professional discourse, when we can disagree but we can do it in a productive way, we are all going to learn and grow and at the end of the day, that's what I am here for. All right, so that was a mouthful.

Speaker 1:

We started with AI, we went into some different topics, but I hope that, even through being sort of a stream of consciousness conversation, that it was interesting and relevant and useful to you and, most of all, I hope it invited you to think about your work in a little bit of a different way, because ultimately, when we do that, that's when we grow, that's when we get better and when we get better we can better serve kids. If you're interested in the mastermind and the conversations we're having over there, if you're interested in developing your professional fluency in all the ways that I described and how to use that professional fluency to advocate from the inside out, you can find out more at schoolforschoolcounselorscom. Slash mastermind. I'll be back next week with another episode, but in the meantime I hope you have the best week, be careful out there and take care.