School for School Counselors Podcast

"Burns" vs. Bullying: What School Counselors Need to Know

• School for School Counselors • Episode 178

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Everyone was laughing... until suddenly someone wasn’t.

Learn how "burns" work, why it’s usually mutual until it isn’t, and how to know when it’s time to shift from counseling to consequences.

Burn culture shows up in those fast, sarcastic exchanges where students trade “jokes” for laughs, status, and social footing... until someone becomes the cost of the humor. 

In this episode, we unpack why these moments feel so hard to respond to in real time, how adolescent peer dynamics fuel them, and how school counselors can step in with confidence when the line has clearly been crossed.

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Want support with real-world strategies that actually work on your campus? We’re doing that every day in the School for School Counselors Mastermind. Come join us! 

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All names, stories, and case studies in this episode are fictionalized composites drawn from real-world circumstances. Any resemblance to actual students, families, or school personnel is coincidental. Details have been altered to protect privacy.


This work is part of the School for School Counselors body of work developed by Steph Johnson, LPC, which centers role authority over role drift, consultative practice over fix-it culture, adult-designed systems and environments as primary drivers of student behavior, clinical judgment over compliance, and school counselor identity as leadership within complex systems.


SPEAKER_00:

Lunch table. Seven eighth graders. Maya's showing pictures from her weekend camping trip. And someone says, Did you even shower? Your hair looks like you just walked out of the woods. And the whole table laughs. And Maya fires back. At least I have plans that don't involve my phone. Even more laughs. She's holding her own. And then someone else jumps in. Girl, with that face, nature's probably your only option. The laugh gets bigger this time, but Maya goes quiet. Phone goes down. Her eyes don't move from her lunch tray. The group keeps going because they haven't noticed all this yet. And you're watching from a ways away and you're thinking, Do I step in? Because they were all participating in this. And then all of a sudden, for some reason, it stopped being mutual. These are the kinds of situations where you get cold in, where everybody's laughing, but then suddenly somebody's not. When both students are giving as good as they get, it looks mutual. Then all of a sudden the room changes and no one can quite explain why. And you're left to decide on the spot is this joking? Is this bullying? Is this a teachable moment? Or did this just cross into something that needs consequences? That gray space is burn culture. And research on peer dynamics tells us that this exact moment, the shift from shared humor to social harm, is where adults actually hesitate the most. Because it looks like everybody's still just joking until they're not. And I know you're seeing and living in this every single day. Because when situations live in that gray space where everyone was laughing until suddenly somebody wasn't, you know something needs to happen, but you have no idea what it should be. If you've ever walked away thinking, I know something just crossed the line, but I can't quite put my finger on it, you're in the right place. So if you're ready for some straight talk, my friend, some clarity in your role and maybe a little bit of rebellion, you're in the right place. I'm Steph Johnson, and this is the School for School Counselors podcast. So before we dive in too deep, we need to name what burn culture usually is and what it isn't. Because most of the time, burn culture is not one student relentlessly targeting another. When behavior is one-sided, persistent, and power-based, the research is very clear. That's bullying. You know it, and I know it. But that's not what we see a lot of the time. Nine times out of ten, burn sessions are intense teasing that gets out of hand. Relational aggression research has been pointing this out for years, that a lot of adolescent peer harm doesn't start with a clear aggressor and a clear target. It starts as reciprocal interaction that's reinforced by the group. And this is where schools often trip themselves up. Because the knee-jerk reaction to these situations is to launch into bully investigation mode. You've probably been pulled into some of this in your school counseling career, right? Where we want to start looking for power imbalances. We start asking who's the aggressor? Who's the target? But when the behavior is mutual and the roles inside of it are pretty fluid, those questions don't fit. And trying to force them actually makes it harder to respond with a clear solution. So here's what we usually see students are trading insults, they're laughing, and they're performing for their peer group. Peer group research consistently shows that audience reinforcement, especially laughter, is one of the strongest drivers of repeated behavior in adolescence. So, in a lot of ways, burn culture is mutual until it isn't. And our job when this happens is not to pretend that it was never mutual. This is something that we have to educate administrators about, and parents even, by saying something like, when behavior is one-sided and persistent, we treat it as bullying. When it's mutual and students are in and out of the insults, we treat it as burn culture. But we will intervene the moment that consent or safety goes offline. That distinction matters more than any label that we want to slap on the situation. So back to that lunch table. Maya was participating, and that matters. But the moment that she stopped and they didn't, her consent disappeared. And that's how you know you're at the point where intervention is needed. So now that we've kind of stopped trying to force this behavior into the bullying or not bullying box, let's talk about what these behaviors are doing socially. A burn is a public insult that's framed as humor. It's delivered with an audience in mind, and it's reinforced by laughter. It's protected by minimization. Researchers studying relational aggression and peer dominance describe harmful behavior that continues because it is socially rewarded. So we're not talking here about accidental rudeness. And believe it or not, it's usually not a social skills deficit. Burns are insults with applause. Students are tracking reactions, they're watching to see who laughs, and they're calibrating their own status in real time. That's why this behavior often suddenly disappears when they realize the adults are nearby. Because when we are the audience, it doesn't matter. But it explodes when their peers are watching. Developmentally, this makes a lot of sense. Neuroscience research on adolescents, especially work by researchers like Evelyn Crohn and Ron Dahl, show that this is a time of intense social effective engagement. In real words, what that means is peer approval is carrying way more weight than adult approval. Social reward systems are very highly sensitive. Status is negotiated publicly. And real-time perspective taking, especially knowing the point when they need to stop, is still developing. Remember Maya's table? Every student there was tracking reactions in real time. And that's this neuroscience playing out. It isn't about kids lacking empathy. Developmental research shows they can understand impact, but applying that understanding in the heat of peer interaction is still emerging. It's selective empathy in service of peer payoff. So when you see a student that makes a really cutting comment and then they immediately look around to see who's laughing, it's social calculation. They're not asking, did I hurt their feelings? They're asking, did it land? They know it hurts, but they just decide that the laugh is worth it. And the part that adults often miss is that the social game has already shifted, but the group hasn't recalibrated yet. And that's when adults need to step in. Burn culture thrives in adult hesitation. And if you hesitated stepping in at Maya's table, you would be 100% normal. Because everybody is worried about getting it wrong in the moment. School counselors don't want to overreact. Teachers don't want to be the joke police. And parents want answers faster than we can investigate. Research on peer aggression is very consistent here. It's not the severity of the adult response that predicts whether or not this behavior persists. It's inconsistency, not intensity, not severity, but inconsistency. Burn culture thrives in adult hesitation. Now, not every burn is the same. Some are really clumsy. I bet you've seen them. They're one-to-one burns with no audience payoff. Maybe they're delivered kind of awkwardly. And when you talk about the impact that that jab might have had, there's some genuine confusion there because they just haven't really mastered the art of the burn. And I hate to say that, but that's how it works. Others are more calculated. They make sure there's a peer audience present. There's laughter or reinforcement for the comment. Immediate minimization. Oh man, I was just kidding. You know, I'm just messing with you, right? So here's how knowing this changes the way you can respond. Because if it's a clumsy burn, right? Awkward, no payoff, kind of confused about how it all works, that's a private conversation, right? We name the impact of the behavior and we move on. Calculated burns require more immediate intervention. So the whole game here becomes a game of function. If the humor only works when someone else loses, it's not humor, right? And that's our line of distinction to know what our next steps might need to be. Now, before we go any further, let me ask you something. How many situations do you navigate in a week that don't necessarily feel like they fit clumsy or calculated, but you still need to make a quick decision? If the answer is too many to count, I want you to know that's exactly why I created the School for School Counselors mastermind with real-time consultation, real counselors, and real situations that do not fit the textbooks. You bring the case and we work through it together. So if you're tired of figuring this stuff out alone, you need to go check out schoolforschool counselors.com slash mastermind. All right, so let's talk about then the mistake that most schools are making. Bird culture often gets mislabeled as a social skills problem. But most students that are involved already demonstrate some pretty strong social awareness, right? Gauging reactions and status on the basis of how we can launch jabs at others. That is social awareness. And you don't remediate a skill that someone is using strategically. Groups for social skills make sense when there is a genuine, like pragmatic language delay or consistent misreading across settings. But they don't make sense when behavior disappears under adult supervision and reappears when it's time for peer applause. So we keep that in mind because how many times have you had students refer to you because they're engaging in this burn culture and everyone looks to you like you're just supposed to fix it, right? Here's your validation. Social skills groups do not make sense in this context. And so if you start maneuvering your way out of that, you are 1,000% correct. You can have conversations with students, you can guide them, you can work to help bring around their awareness and the capacity of their empathy. But there is a point at which there is no more that can be done on the school counseling side of things. So what happens when we've tried to correct the behavior and it keeps happening? That's where school counseling support reaches its limit and the manner of your involvement shifts. This is where you need to know. Burns are not accidents. And when they continue after correction, they're not a counseling issue anymore. They're a conduct issue. And you are well within your role to bring that to everyone's awareness. Behavior research is very clear here. Once expectations are understood and the behavior persists, the response needs to shift from teaching to accountability. Referring a student for discipline is not a failure of school counseling. And we need to be okay with that. We need to be okay with understanding that if we have attempted to reinforce expectations, to develop a student's capacity for empathy, and they persist in this burn culture, that is not your fault. That is their choice. Let's go back to Maya. You pull the student aside who made the face comment. You explain impact, and they apologize. But two days later it happens again. A different student target, but the same performance. That's when this situation stops being a counseling conversation and becomes a conduct issue. And here's what that looks like you don't pull them for another heart to heart. You loop in your administration, you document the pattern, and you shift from intervention to accountability. Because at that point, the student has demonstrated that they understand the expectation, they're just choosing not to follow it. Now, sometimes there can be a fear that if we deploy consequences, that's going to escalate things. But the literature says the opposite. Accountability does not escalate burn culture, inconsistency does. Burn culture thrives on payoff, but clear, predictable responses from adults remove that payoff. When we intervened at Maya's table with clear expectations, the behavior stopped because the payoff, the shock value, the attempt at social dominance disappeared. But inconsistent responses would have strengthened that. So then let's talk about what actually works. As school counselors, what do we want to do to intervene specifically in these situations? Give me like a step one, step two, step three stuff, because I'm not seeing it, right? Here are three questions that work. Because when you walk up with these three questions, students cannot deflect by saying, Oh, it's just a joke. All right, these questions are gonna shift the focus from the audience to the impact. So here are three questions that stop burns cold. Question one, what reaction were you hoping for? Because it names the performance without shaming it. And once they tell you what they were hoping for, you're there to say, yeah, and you got that reaction, but now here's what else happened. Question two, did you notice their response after everybody laughed? That's an important question because it trains real-time awareness. You follow that up with, hey, let me tell you what I saw. And then question three, is this the version of funny that you think might work outside of the school building? So this is an important question too, because it connects that behavior to future reality without giving the kid a lecture, right? So then we come around and we follow up with, you know, so what would the other version of humor sound like? And then we have to pause and wait and let them answer. That's what moves the needle in these situations. Let's imagine what that full conversation would have sounded like with the student from Maya's table. So you pull the student aside and you say, What reaction were you hoping for with that comment about her face? And they say, I was just joking. Everybody was laughing. And you say, Well, you got the laugh, but did you notice Maya's response after that? Then pause. Let them think. Then maybe you follow with, here's what I saw. She got quiet. Her phone went down and she checked out. Everybody thought your joke was funny, but something else was happening there too. So here's my question. Is this the version of funny that's gonna work outside of this cafeteria? Because I'm thinking about where are you gonna work in the future? What kind of friendships are you gonna have? Is this the kind of humor that's gonna help you with those things? Now they were gonna know that it's not. So then you talk about, well, what would another kind of humor sound like? Like, how do you get a laugh without somebody having to be the loser? And you talk about it. Those are the kinds of conversations that stick with kids. So instead of defaulting to lectures, we focus on norm setting, right? That that got laughs, but it changed a lot of other stuff. We are focusing on audience awareness and we're focusing on in-context replacement. How can you be humorous without humiliating someone? Right? If we can be honest in private with students and not deliver this as a public commentary, we have a greater likelihood of success. And then if we're not successful and the behavior continues, that's when we start looking at discipline. Now, in all of this, in watching these burns, listening to the insults, kids getting their feelings hurt, trying to intervene. All of these things going on, in addition to all the people on your campus going, you need to make them stop. This kid is constantly doing this. I don't know what else to do. We also have an extra element of yaw involved. And that is parents who show up convinced that this is bullying. And I don't mean to laugh, but I chuckle because I know that you have been in this situation. A lot of times, parents are getting either part of the story, they're not understanding that it was mutual for a little bit, or they just cannot bear the thought of someone insulting their precious perfect child, right? And so they show up and say, My child is being bullied at school. What are you going to do about it? When that happens, we always need to start with impact, right? I hear this sounds really upsetting for your student. But then we have to add some clarity to the situation. We got to just call it out and say, so when we talk about bullying, we're talking about patterns of behavior and we're talking about imbalances of power. This situation started as mutual jokes. And then school staff intervened when it crossed the line. Right? So we have to lay that out for parents because often they don't have all that information. And what usually happens next is the parent says something like, but it hurt my kids' feelings. They didn't want to be part of this by the time it got to the end and nobody was stopping. And you say, Man, I know you're absolutely right. And that's exactly when we stepped in. When the insults stopped being mutual and started being more cutting, that's when we take action. And then if the parent is still pushing for bullying consequences, then we talk about, hey, here's what we're watching for. Is this one-sided and persistent aggression? Or was it mutual burns that cross the line? Right now, this situation is in the second category. But if it switches to the first, we're going to escalate our response and we'll do it fast. So be concrete, right? Avoid overpromising. Well, I can assure you they're never going to do that to your child again. Good luck with that. That is a recipe for disaster. But escalate the situation with students based on the evidence, not on fear, right? Not on fear of the parent reporting bullying concerns, not on the fear of what everybody thinks about how you're handling the situation. Lean into the evidence. Is it one-sided and persistent, or was it mutual jabs that just eventually crossed a line? I'll leave you with this. Burn culture is actually preparation. Now, not for adulthood, right? Because adults who burn get fired, right? Not promoted. Not for healthy relationships because friends who burn lose friends. But it's preparation for these kids for right now. It is preparation for navigating a social system that rewards a quick wit and punishes vulnerability. Your students are not confused about the impact of their burns. They're choosing short-term social gain over long-term relational cost. Most of them just haven't been taught that that math stops working after graduation. So here's the way I want you to shift your thinking about all of this. Believe it or not, your job is not to eliminate burn culture on your canvas. Your job is to teach students when wit is becoming weaponized and why that version doesn't survive very long in life. That's reality training. Because the students who can learn to be funny without making somebody else lose are the ones that other people actually want to be around. And that's not just in their school years, right? That's going on forever. You'll know when you're getting this message right because students will start self-correcting mid-burn. They'll be in the middle of the delivery and they'll stop themselves. And when you pull somebody aside to talk to them about a situation like this, they'll say, I know, I know, before you even start. So it's not just an appearance of compliance. Often that is signaling internalization. And that is important because that is what lasts. Hey, if you want some support navigating these situations in a way that feels clear, that feels doable, and like you know the next best steps, then you need some real-time consultation and you need to be in the middle of a community that gets what you're talking about. So don't forget to go look up the mastermind. Schoolforschoolcounselors.com slash mastermind. I promise you it is a game changer for school counselors. That's where I'm gonna be, that's where I hang out each and every week. And so if you'd like to run your own campus situations by me, that's where you can find me. I'm Steph Johnson. I'll be back soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast. In the meantime, I hope you have the best week. Take care.

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Steph Johnson

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