The Catalyst Problem in School Counseling

Most school counselors aren’t ineffective.
They’re mis-measured.

In this episode, Steph challenges one of the profession’s most sacred assumptions and names something about her own work that most counselors wouldn’t dare say out loud.

This conversation explores what it means to do catalytic work in a system obsessed with finished products, and why that mismatch is costing counselors their confidence.

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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, CSC, 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.

Chapters

• 0:00 From Lab Bench To School Halls
• 3:05 The Case Against Finished Programs
• 5:21 Science Of Change And Catalysts
• 9:20 Emergency Response As Better Analogy
• 12:33 The ASCA Model And Mismeasurement
• 16:17 Compliance Versus Competence

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:07

Most school counselors aren't ineffective. They're mismeasured. If you could have seen me in college, you wouldn't have guessed that I would end up working in a public school. Lab coat, safety goggles, hair pulled back, very serious scientist energy. Before I ever worked in a school, I was in a chemistry lab. I was a chemistry biology double major, which for the record was harder than pre-med. Beakers, reagents, data that did not behave the way it was supposed to. I even helped one of my professors with research tied to that back to the future idea of turning organic matter into fuel. Very cool, very nerdy. Turns out spending your days managing volatile compounds that don't behave the way you expect is excellent preparation for a career in public education. But it was not a clean, linear process. And that's important. Because one thing labs do not have is a finished endpoint. No one walks into a lab thinking, today we arrive. Hey, school counselor, welcome back. Today I'm putting on my old lab coat, metaphorically, to talk about why school counseling was never meant to be a finished product. We're getting into what it means to do catalytic work in a volatile system, and why comprehensive might be the wrong target altogether. Fair warning, I'm saying things out loud that most people won't, including something about how I think about my own work that most school counselors would never admit. So, if you're ready for some straight talk, my friend, some clarity on your work and maybe a little bit of rebellion, you are in the right place. I'm Steph Johnson, and this is the School for School Counselors Podcast. In school counseling, we've been taught to think a certain way. That if we just do enough or align well enough or document enough, eventually we'll arrive at a comprehensive program, a finished product. And when we don't get there, the internal dialogue kicks in. I'm behind. I'm not doing enough. My program doesn't look right. If you've been listening to the last few episodes of this podcast, you know I do not believe those thoughts come from laziness or lack of commitment. We've talked about autonomy, we've talked about moral injury, and we've talked about the cost of caring inside systems that sometimes don't care about you. So when counselors say those things, I don't hear imposter syndrome or incompetence. I hear someone who is using the wrong measurement tool for the kind of work that they're doing. It's a measurement problem, not a performance problem. Because here's how labs work, and this is where the science matters. I promise I will not go into the graduate level chemistry. But when I was working in the lab, we weren't ever really trying to arrive at a perfect final product. We were isolating variables, observing what happened, adjusting conditions, and learning from reactions that we hadn't expected. We knew we could not control everything. It was impossible. Temperatures changed, materials behaved differently than we predicted, and one small shift could alter the entire outcome. That wasn't failure. That was the work. So as a trained scientist, it has always struck me as strange that school counseling, which operates inside one of the most volatile systems imaginable, is framed as something you're supposed to finish. It's weird. Let me show you what I mean. In basic science terms, a reaction happens when two or more substances are placed together and the conditions are right for them to interact, producing something new. Change happens not because you forced it, but because you created the environment in which it could occur. Then a catalyst is something that you can add that speeds up or enables that reaction without becoming part of the final product. The catalyst doesn't get consumed. It doesn't always even show up in the outcome. And it rarely gets credit. But without it, the reaction either doesn't happen or it happens very differently. And though I realize you're not working in a formal scientific lab, most of the work that you are doing is lab-driven, right? You have problems. You develop hypotheses about where these problems are coming from. You develop a plan for addressing it. You try it, you see what works, doesn't work, you go back to the drawing board again. Much the same process. So why do we measure school counseling like it's supposed to have a finish line? Let me give you a different example. Think about emergency management, fire departments, emergency medical response, those kinds of things. Emergency response teams have established frameworks, they have protocols and preparedness plans, they train, they rehearse, they document. But no one evaluates emergency management by asking whether or not that system has reached a permanently finished state. No one says, Have you developed a protocol for every possible thing that could go wrong for every single person in every corner of the community under every possible set of conditions? No one expects emergency responders to predict every crisis before it happens or to address every concern perfectly with maybe limited tools on the truck, limited time, and incomplete information out in the field. Because we all understand something fundamental about that kind of work. The complexity of that work is not a flaw, it's the nature of the system. And in fact, if an emergency response system ever stopped adapting because it felt like it had arrived, that wouldn't be impressive. That would be dangerous. School counseling operates in similarly dynamic conditions. Students change, staff turnover happens, policies shift, crises appear without warning. And like emergency responders, school counselors function as catalysts, enabling reactions, altering conditions, and rarely recognized in the outcome. And yet we often evaluate this work by how closely it resembles a static ideal. And let's name that ideal directly. It's called the ASCA National Model. The national model is not neutral, it carries an implicit promise inside of its words. That comprehensive is a place that you can reach. That if you align hard enough, document thoroughly enough, advocate persistently enough, you'll arrive. And when you don't arrive, when your caseload is 650 and your admin just added another lunch duty and you're still putting out fires from last week, the model doesn't say the system failed you. It lets you believe you failed the model. And this isn't accidental. Ask and state organizations actively reinforce this framing through awards like RAMP, CREST, and other recognition programs built around alignment and compliance. The message is clear. Comprehensive is a destination. Reach it and you'll get recognized. Fall short, and you're still working towards something everyone else has apparently figured out. I'm not the first person to notice this, I am sure, but I am willing to say it out loud. Structure is not the problem in school counseling. The problem is confusing alignment with arrival. It's about refusing to confuse compliance with competence. Let me see if I can say that a little more clearly. You can check every box on a rubric and still not be serving your students very well. And you can be doing exceptional, nuanced work that doesn't photograph well or document well on a program audit. Because once comprehensive becomes something you're supposed to finish, adapting to your circumstances starts to look like deviation. You made a judgment call based on what was actually in front of you, and now you're left feeling like you have to defend why it doesn't match the template. Your judgment starts to look like noncompliance. And reality starts looking like failure. And I want to be very clear and up front. I am 1000% okay with never having a quote-unquote comprehensive program. Let me let that sit a minute. Because I know some of you just flinched. Like it's the bar, the thing that separates real school counselors from the people who were just winging it. But comprehensive was never meant to be a destination, it was a direction. And somewhere along the way, we let that idea become a measuring stick for our worth. So here's what I've decided. I don't measure my effectiveness by how complete my program looks on paper. I measure it by whether I'm responding well to the system in front of me today with what I actually have. That's not lowering the bar. That's refusing to be judged by a criteria that was never designed for the conditions we work in. When you shift your tone and a student de-escalates, when you remove shame and a parent softens. When you pause instead of pushing, and a teacher stops spiraling. You didn't implement something, you altered the conditions. You catalyzed a reaction. Let me stay on this for a second. Imagine this. You're in a meeting. A parent comes in hot, arms crossed, already defensive. Maybe they felt blamed before, maybe they were blamed. Maybe they're scared and it's coming out sideways. And somewhere in that conversation, you make a choice. You don't correct, you don't explain, you just choose to remove shame from the room. You meet them with empathy, you meet them with solution-focused language and a willingness to truly listen. And something shifts. They uncross their arms, their voice drops, and they start asking questions instead of deflecting. There is no checkbox for that on a ramp application. There's no data point for parent stopped breasing for impact. And in all seriousness, you probably walk out of that meeting, answer an email, and move on with your day. But that was the work. And you don't get to see what happens next. You don't get to follow that parent home and watch how they talk to their kid that night. You don't see them pull up the community resource list you mentioned and actually make the call. You don't get to see the shift in how they show up at the next parent-teacher conference. Maybe with a little less armor on, a little more open. You don't get the feedback loop. That is the cost of catalytic work. You enable the reaction, but then you have to let it go. I've been in these situations myself. I remember a student that I was super concerned about. And I was spending a crazy amount of time with this one kid, referring them to outside supports, talking with parents, troubleshooting classroom behavior. And almost every conversation that I had during that time felt like it was about this student. And it was exhausting. And it felt like none of it was going anywhere. Then came the IEP meeting. So I sat down at the table with the parents, trying to explain the extent of their child's need. Nothing felt like it was getting across. And so I pulled out my use of time data. And I showed them anonymously that in a school of over 800 kids, I was spending roughly 25% of my time responding to theirs. And when I said that, their faces changed. They looked at each other, they looked at me, and then they leaned in and they said, tell us what to do next. That's what catalytic work looks like when you actually get to see the reaction. That data wasn't changing anything for us day to day. But when the conditions were right, it enabled a shift that I could not have walked in that room and forced. Now, most of the time, you don't get that moment. You don't get to watch the reaction happen. But that doesn't mean you don't set them in motion. Most school counselors are not ineffective, they are mismeasured. We have taken a profession that is built on judgment, adaptation, and the nuance of relationship and tried to evaluate it using static models and fixed endpoints. And then we wonder why school counselors feel so tired or behind or defeat it. That's a measurement problem, not a performance problem. You are not failing to reach the apex of the model. You're just working in reality. So next week is National School Counseling Week, and you're going to hear a lot of appreciation rolling around. A lot of school counselors are heroes, graphics and t-shirts and well-meaning posts. Y'all, I'm going to be back next week on the podcast, but I will not be here to do that. I want to come talk about the future of this profession. And I'm going to be very honest about it, including some of the things that are really hard to say out loud. Because right now, we all know school counseling is facing pressure from a lot of different directions, political, structural, financial, and most of the advocacy that I see is still playing defense on ground that's already shifting. If we keep pretending like this work was ever meant to be finished, if we keep measuring ourselves against a model that was built for a system that frankly no longer exists, we're not just going to burn out. We are going to get restructured out of relevance. So next week, I want to talk about what fighting for this profession actually looks like right now. Not the version of advocacy that pawns it off on everybody else or that makes us feel good. I'm talking about the version that might actually matter. We are never going to arrive. That was never the point. But we might just keep the experiment running long enough to make it matter for a whole lot of kids. I'll be back soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast. In the meantime, manage your measurement and stop buying into the rhetoric. You are catalyzing amazing reactions, even the ones you don't know anything about. Take care.