Are Your School Counseling Approaches Really Best Practice?

Ever been swayed by a viewpoint on the Internet only to discover it's not... quite right? You're not alone! In this episode, we take a critical look at how social media algorithms can channel us into echo chambers, potentially leading us astray- especially in specialized fields like school counseling. We'll share strategies on distinguishing the good from the bad, and how to make informed decisions that truly benefit your students.

We'll also get real about the idea of collaboration and safe spaces in school counseling. We'll unpack the difference between mere venting and productive collaboration. And we'll also share some tips on how to critically analyze information for its reliability. Remember, a school counselor is as strong as their network: we invite you to build strong relationships with colleagues, join a consultative group or even become a part of our very own School For School Counselors Mastermind. Together, we can navigate (mis)information overload and make a true difference in our students' lives.

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Mentioned in this episode:
School for School Counselors Mastermind 

School for School Counselors Podcast Episode: "What You're Doing Wrong With Separation Anxiety (And Why It's Not Your Fault!)"


Resources:
Bessi, A. (2017). On the statistical properties of viral misinformation in online social media. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 469, 459-470. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2016.11.012

Chen, X., Sin, S.J., Theng, Y. & Lee, C.S. (2015). Why do social media users share misinformation? In Proceedings of the 15th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL '15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY: 111–114. https://doi.org/10.1145/2756406.2756941

Muhammed T, S., Mathew, S.K. The disaster of misinformation: a review of research in social media. Int J Data Sci Anal 13, 271–285 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41060-022-00311-6

Paulson, L. R., Casile, W. J., & Jones, D. (2015). Tech it out: Implementing an online peer consultation network for rural mental health professionals. Journal of Rural Mental Health, 39(3-4), 125–136. https://doi.org/10.1037/rmh0000034

Wu, L., Morstatter, F., Carley, K.M. & Liu, H. (2019). Misinformation in social media: Definition, manipulation, and detection. SIGKDD Explor. Newsl., 21(2), 80–90. https://doi.org/10.1145/3373464.3373475

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Our goal at School for School Counselors is to help school counselors stay on fire, make huge impacts for students, and catalyze change for our roles through grassroots advocacy and collaboration. Listen to get to know more about us and our mission, feel empowered and inspired, and set yourself up for success in the wonderful world of school counseling.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

Hey there, my friend, quick question for you Do you have a school counseling writer die? Do you have one? Do you know what a school counseling writer die would actually be? That's what we're gonna be talking about in this week's episode of the School for School Counselors podcast, and I'm so glad that you've joined me here again this week. You've heard me talk a lot in the past, if you've been a listener, about the value of professional consultation, about the value of cultivating your expertise in the school counseling world, but today I'm gonna turn all that on its head a little bit, and I wanna talk about the reason that you need a school counseling ride or die and spoiler alert, it's not what you think. Before we get started, though, I would love to share with you the newest review that we've received on the School for School Counselors podcast. You guys are so precious to be bringing these reviews and posting them at Apple podcasts. That makes such a difference for not only us, but for folks who need to find us, who need to hear the information that's coming out.

Speaker 1: 1:22

This week's review comes from Kay Summers. Kay Summers said I'm a student in the process of getting my school counseling certification, as well as a middle school teacher and I came across your podcast. I love all the information you talk about on your podcast. Whenever I'm grading papers or getting my classroom ready in the morning, I'm listening. Thank you for the podcast. It has been very insightful and helpful. Well, thank you, kay Summers. We appreciate such kind words. We're glad that we've been of help to you and looking forward to having more conversations with you in the future as you get that school counseling gig underway. We know it's gonna be just a matter of time until you're sitting in a counselor's office somewhere. So good luck with that. Keep in touch with us and thanks again for the review.

Speaker 1: 2:17

Hey, my friends, if you haven't submitted your review yet, my goodness, we sure could use those. They're the fuel that keeps this engine running. Just hop over into Apple podcasts or any of your podcast platforms of choice. Give us a rating, give us a review. If it gives you the option to do that, it would so mean the world to us, right? So this week we're gonna be talking about school counselor ride or dies. Now, those are not usually two ideas that go into the same phrase, and I'll bet you've never heard anybody talk about a school counselor ride or die.

Speaker 1: 2:56

But here's how it came up. So I just got back into town from attending the Lone Star State School Counseling Association Conference in Texas and I'll tell you there were a lot of really amazing things happening there. But probably the best part for me was being able to host a meetup of our school for school counselors folks to just be able to get together informally to meet each other in person instead of those tiny little circles on our Zoom screens or those tiny little profile pictures on social media and just be able to visit, just be able to see each other, talk to each other, get to know each other and maybe, just maybe, geek out on school counseling just a little bit. And that, my friends, is exactly what happened. It was so fun, it was amazing. We had several folks who showed up that said you know I don't have a lot of time, but I did want to show up and meet you, and ended up staying well past their plans. We had an amazing, amazing time. And as the conversation continued outside into the parking lot, as everybody prepared to leave, one of our very smart school for school counselors members made a very astute observation. So, jennifer, if you're listening and I was picking up what you were laying down. I thought this was such a smart observation and I really wanted to share it.

Speaker 1: 4:30

On the podcast, jennifer was talking about how, when you graduate grad school, you're ready to tackle the world of school counseling. You're on fire. You're ready to build programs, you know all the things that you need to know to get a program underway, until you don't, because you're given all these other tasks to do. You're given all these maybe 504 responsibilities IEP counseling, behavior intervention, all these wild and crazy things that get thrown our way. We're not educated about them in grad school because they're not considered proper for a school counselor, right? So nobody teaches us. And then, when we get in the field, it's like we've been thrown in the lion's den and we're scrambling, trying to find a way to make sense of all the things that are going on. You been there. Yeah, I know I was. I can remember those days still so vividly, just trying to get my feet underneath me, trying to learn the ins and outs of all the things that happen, and that's a large part of how school for school counselors was even born.

Speaker 1: 5:41

So, anyhow, jennifer was talking about how social media can be a great outlet for crowdsourcing information when you've been tasked to do all of these things that you weren't trained in doing. But the problem is, sometimes it's really difficult to separate the bad information from the good, and that challenge really isn't even very evident until you've been in the field for a while, you've learned, you've grown as a professional, you've educated yourself, and you look back and you say, oh, my goodness, now I see what the problems have been. People have been giving really bad advice around here, oh no, and now others are hearing it and thinking, oh yeah, well, that's what I should do. There's just not a good way to vet the enormous volumes of information that we come across each day, and Jennifer said that one of the most valuable things that she's gotten out of being part of the school for school counselors world is the ability to vet the information, to discern the good from the bad and get a better grasp on which direction she wants to head. I thought that was really really smart, and so I started of course, you know me diving into the literature about this to see what I could find.

Speaker 1: 7:15

As I studied, as I read and as I learned, it became more and more apparent to me that what we've been talking about around in this podcast, in our free School for School Counselors Facebook group, in our School for School Counselors Mastermind all the things we consistently come back to the idea of consultation, but it sort of solidified itself in my mind as a ride or die situation. Now, do you know what a ride or die is? We toss that phrase around a lot, but really what is a ride or die? Essentially, what a ride or die is is someone who has extreme loyalty. They're loyal, they're authentic, they're honest with you and they have your back, no matter what, they truly want the best for you and everything that you come up against.

Speaker 1: 8:17

As I was investigating this idea, it was really interesting to see what popped up in the peer reviewed literature and there was a lot of information that came out about the missed information available on social media. So you always see those hot button topics pop up. A hundred people show up. Everybody wants to give their two cents. One person says I do it this way. Another person says no, no, no, you should do it that way, and it's just kind of this mosh pit of ideas and thoughts and opinions and they're all competing against each other and it just sometimes devolves into craziness, I think, and it can get confusing, for sure, and so it's easy for misinformation to take hold and it's hard to tell. It's hard to gain clarity for yourself, it's hard to know if you're truly doing what's best for your students and your campus, and it's tricky. It's tricky. The C and team found that misinformation can actually encourage behaviors that are strongly divergent from recommended practices. What that means is people can convince each other that they need to be doing things that actually aren't considered best practice. I will tell you, I have seen this firsthand in the school counselor. Social media world.

Speaker 1: 9:48

Just as I'm sitting here talking, the topic of separation anxiety immediately springs to mind. People have very strong opinions on how separation anxieties should be approached in students, particularly very young students, and I'm here to tell you that I think a lot of that information is flat wrong. I think it's been handed around like folklore for years and years and years folks saying this is what I would do, this is how I handle it nine times out of 10. They haven't collected the data to really know whether or not the intervention was effective or whether the student just aged out of that separation anxiety. It's an interesting conversation, for sure. We even have a podcast episode about it. It's called something like what you're doing wrong with separation anxiety and why it's not your fault. There's just so much information in the literature that directly conflicts with the popular remedies that are being handed out. So in situations like that we do need to have some good filters, we do need to have something in place to at least help us make a more informed decision, to sort of broaden our perspective a little bit, where we can lean on someone else's expertise to help guide us in making the best decisions.

Speaker 1: 11:15

There was also an interesting study done by Chen and team that found that perceived characteristics of information, such as the ability to spark conversation or how catchy it seems you know how cool it is to talk about can actually lead to misinformation. Because everybody's talking about it, everybody wants to be cool, everybody wants to seem like they're in the know, and what happens is that information gets kind of twisted, it gets misinterpreted. People then repeat that and all of a sudden it's rampant with misinformation. They noted too that an individual's need to express themselves sometimes leans to them perpetuating this misinformation. Essentially, they're not following up on it. It's one of those things like I heard it somewhere and it sounds pretty good, so I'm going to repeat it because it makes me look really smart, but actually I haven't even looked into it to see if it's true.

Speaker 1: 12:20

There's a lot of that y'all, and it's not just the school counseling world, this is everywhere we are going to have to learn how to become better consumers of information, because we are being absolutely flooded with it right now. Basi goes on to confirm this thought and said something that I think is really interesting. They said that the way that we form our beliefs or our ideas about what we want or what we want to see happen, are very strongly influenced by our communities, because, as we're sharing this information, we have sort of these shared systems of meaning within our communities. They become little echo chambers, right, and everyone is affirming one another, telling each other how smart they are, how right they are oh my goodness, yes, I do this too. I believe this. Oh, yes, I believe that too. And we create these virtual echo chambers for ourselves where we're constantly hearing echoed back to us the same thoughts and ideas that we've put out into the world. And when we're doing that, we begin to bias the way we read those responses, the way we hear those words, the way we interpret those ideas, we begin to develop a bias towards self confirmation. So we read it and our mind tells us oh yes, that's what I meant, that's exactly right. We may read into something a little bit further to convince ourselves that we were correct or that the people that we're hanging out with are right. They're really smart people. They must be, because they're who we're hanging out with. You see the problem.

Speaker 1: 14:14

There are entire fields of study dedicated to the phenomenons of misinformation, wrong information, intentionally misleading people, all those kinds of things, all the way through to like conspiracy theorists and lots of interesting topics in the world of social media. For sure, think back to the TikTok challenges of what a year or two ago, where kids were committing theft on campus. They were damaging or destroying property stealing urinals comes to mind, ripping soap dishes off the walls. Do you guys remember that? That was a big deal for a while, and a lot of what fueled that so-called trend were the algorithms of social media. Someone had an idea. It was a really bad idea, but to them, for some reason, it seemed like a good one. They repeated it to someone else. It started picking up steam. It was bounced around in these little teenage echo chambers, right where they're constantly being validated for believing that these were cool ideas. And then a lot of students managed to execute on those. The algorithms of social media fed into that, where, when students showed an inclination to read more, watch more, hear more about that topic, the algorithm, in its bid to keep them on the platform as long as possible, kept showing them those same types of information when, eventually, they were only being presented with one viewpoint, and it happened to be the one that they were initially most interested in. So not only did they have an echo chamber created with the folks they were interacting with online, but the algorithm created an even more powerful one for them right there in their own portals. Crazy, crazy, crazy how that works.

Speaker 1: 16:21

But again, I'll say, I've seen evidence of this in our school counseling world. It's why you so often hear me refer to peer-reviewed literature. Right, empirical evidence. I want you to know I'm not just grabbing these things out of thin air and presenting them because I've developed some sort of ignorant opinion on them. And not saying ignorant to call people names or say that they're ignorant people, but you are ignorant of topics, you're ignorant of best practices until you seek to better educate yourselves. That's what we aim to do on this podcast. That's why you hear me talk so much about peer-reviewed research, about empirical evidence.

Speaker 1: 17:06

I'm doing everything I can do to be on the up and up with the information that I'm presenting to you, because when we're repeatedly exposed to these ideas that we think could be true I don't know, I don't know enough about it to know whether it's right or wrong, but it, I mean it seems right, then we're going to start believing it. We're possibly going to start sharing that content around. That's when it starts bouncing around right. That's when it starts creating these ripples, these echo ripples, and then, when we see it bounce back to ourselves, it confirms it for us. Yep, I was right all along. I knew it, I always knew it.

Speaker 1: 17:43

So how do we combat this? How do we combat all of this echo chamber nonsense? Because I'm here to tell you we have a lot of folks in our school counseling world, but by comparison to a lot of other industries, we're still pretty small and it's easy to see, especially with the types and numbers of social media outlets that we have for school counselors, how easy it is to create these echo chambers. I gave you the example of separation anxiety earlier. That's a big one.

Speaker 1: 18:19

There are some other topics that I think, too, can be some of these hot button issues. People want results, they want to understand it immediately, and folks pop in, they give their ideas, they give their approaches, and sometimes they're not 100% accurate, sometimes they're not appropriate for any other audience, but that postures specific audience too. There's some nuance to that, there's some discernment that needs to happen, but you don't often see that side of it being discussed, if that makes sense. So how do we combat this? Well, we've got to get vigilant. Like Jennifer said, we have to be able to find a way to be able to filter the great ideas from the not so great ideas. We've got to have a sounding board of people who aren't just like us. That's really important. We have to have folks with varied levels of experience, varied life experiences. We have to have people who have worked in different settings, different kinds of locations, different kinds of student populations, in order to be able to give us a variety of feedback on the situations that we're facing.

Speaker 1: 19:43

So how do we vet this information? How do we decide what we want to follow, what we want to listen to and what we need to give a little bit more careful consideration, for before we jump in with both feet. There are a few ways to do this. Number one is just relying on yourself, maybe a colleague, and just really working to be super discerning, really working on sitting down and researching an idea before you implement it. Diving into the peer-reviewed literature, looking at opposing viewpoints in that literature, because oftentimes you have to weigh different ideas and opinions or conflicting studies. So you've got to be able to do that and you're going to have to be able to go back to your research methods courses about which resources are reliable, which ones are esteemed. You've got to determine which are peer-reviewed so you know you're getting good information and not just some sort of random journal of baloney somebody decided to throw up in the internet, because those are out there. They are out there. That blog post that you read was it researched? Does it have resources listed or are they just giving their opinion? These are all important things to watch for so you can do this yourself. I find doing it yourself to be one of the most difficult ways to do it, but it's certainly something that you can do. The second way would be collaborating with your local peer group or your immediate group of colleagues. A lot of folks rely on their local school districts for that or on their state associations, where they feel like they can collaborate and really work with others to get a varied spectrum of perspectives.

Speaker 1: 21:37

It touches on an idea that we've talked about a lot in our School for School Counselors mastermind. It's actually the reason that we don't record our consultation chats. It's something that we've deemed professional safety. Professional safety is this idea that when you consult about students, when you're looking for best practice or even when you're looking to learn and you just need a place to ask questions, you need a place with enormous professional safety in order to be able to do that well. Professional safety means that you don't risk being outed about your question or outed about your situation or the way that you've handled it so far. It means that you are removed enough from your immediate work environment that you're not worried about a colleague judging you. You're not worried about that information getting back to your principal or someone posting it online or something like that, or someone questioning you that you work with thinking oh man, I thought they were good, but maybe not. Those are very real examples of a need for professional safety. So we hold consultation chats. You are free to identify yourself however you'd like. You're free to be on video, off video, whatever happens.

Speaker 1: 23:05

We want to create a really safe space that's distanced from your immediate work environment, where you can be real about the things going on, where you can be honest about the situations and what you've tried and what hasn't worked and why you think maybe it didn't work and how you want to handle it. Maybe you are trying to get some feedback. Maybe you're trying to get some advice on which direction to go next. Whatever it is, you need to have that bubble of professional safety around you in order to really get down in there and figure out what needs to come next. You also need to have a circle wide enough that there are folks that can challenge us on our own constructed echo chambers, meaning, if we strongly believe in something we strongly adhere to, some sort of specific approach, idea, intervention, whatever it is that we have people far enough to remove from us that they can challenge us about that.

Speaker 1: 24:12

One thing that I find in school districts in particular, and sometimes even at the state level associations, is we get these ideas about what we want to do when everybody starts repeating each other right, and no one has been beyond the borders of those echo chambers to experience that there are other ways of handling the same things. And so we get surrounded by people in person, just like we do online, that are constantly revalidating these ideas for us. So what if you could create a little bit bigger circle? What if you could create a circle of people who have maybe heard or seen or tried things that you've never thought of before and who have enough professional and emotional distance from you to be able to challenge you on it, to be able to call you out if you need calling out, or be able to say hey, you know what like that could work, but have you thought about this? Or have you thought about the ways this could go wrong? Or what's the basis for that approach? What's your theoretical underpinning here? What's your foundation? Why do you think this is going to work? Those kinds of things Super, super important to be surrounded by people that can ask those tough questions and hold you accountable to them.

Speaker 1: 25:39

Last, I will say true collaboration with whatever circle you develop needs to be differentiated from venting. A lot of people sort of think those two ideas are equivalent and they're not. Venting constructively can be very therapeutic. It can actually be very helpful for our sense of well-being in our work, for being able to kind of process what we're saying as we're saying it and to be able to really gain meaning from the situations we find ourselves in. But beyond that, we still need something backing it up.

Speaker 1: 26:18

And I'll go a step further and say professional development is not consultation. It's valuable, it is empowering, it is not consultation. So really make sure that, as you're thinking about who your school counseling right or dies are going to be, who are the folks that are going to have your back, who are going to believe in you but are also going to question you and challenge you for your own good? Are they just professional development buddies? Are they just your venting buddies at your district meetings? Where does it go beyond that? If you've been listening to me for any amount of time, you know where I'm headed with this conversation because I come here often. It's about our School for School Counselors mastermind. It's why we built this thing. I'm not going to give you the big pitch about why the mastermind is valuable for consultation. You can go listen to any of my podcast episodes virtually and find out all about it.

Speaker 1: 27:25

But I do want to say this. It's so funny when I was at the conference this last week. It was crazy to me and I think, just because I strive to remain very humble about my work, I want to maintain my sense of humility in my work and recognize I y'all, I'm not an expert. I don't see myself as an expert. I see myself as a curator of information, I see myself as a cheerleader and I see myself as almost a coach in assertion. That sounds terrible and really cheesy, but we do talk a lot about that in our mastermind, about how can we get assertive about our roles without being aggressive, how can we get our points across in the most constructive way possible. So I see myself in those ways. I don't see myself as an influencer. I don't see myself as an expert or any of those things.

Speaker 1: 28:22

But when I was at the conference I got stopped quite a bit by folks saying, hey, I think I know you, or aren't you that lady with the podcast or whatever had some folks take pictures with me this past week. It was incredible, y'all it was amazing, just absolutely amazing. And I thought, man, what an impact what we're doing in school for school counselors is having for my colleagues and I got super excited about that, but also very humbled and grateful for the audience that was willing to walk up and say something. But what really made me feel like hey, maybe we're making some bigger ripples than I thought, was in a session by a very well-known school counseling personality, pretty prominent in our world, who I felt kind of took a shot at us a little bit. I'm just gonna be honest, and I could have just inferred that it certainly wasn't directed specifically at us. But just reading into the conversation I thought, man, how many people are there actually out there doing this kind of work with professional school counselor consultation? Not many. But the comment was made that, yeah, I mean, if you go on my website, we have meetings every week where we can talk these things through and share ideas and I don't even charge you for them like some other people do. Boom alright. Well, we know how they felt about that and it made me giggle a little bit, because folks who say that and we have been fired upon before for that really don't have a great grasp on the context of the situation. Here's what I mean by that.

Speaker 1: 30:07

It is inordinately difficult to construct a community for professional collaboration based on free events. We know it because we've tried it. Everything that we've done in school for school counselors has been developed and implemented with an idea for making information, making, support, making empowerment as accessible and as economical as humanly possible. It's been paramount to everything we've done. So why do we charge for the School for School Counselors Mastermind? Well, there are a few reasons. Number one it takes about 11-D bajillion platforms to run that thing. On your side it probably looks pretty simplistic and that's by design, but on the back end of that thing, oh my goodness, the kinds of things we have running in the background and, unfortunately, all of those things online cost money. So in order to deliver a quality consultative and educational experience to you, we've got to utilize the best tools in the business, and those cost money. Secondly, research shows and this is not only our own numbers, although we do have the numbers to back this up that when folks invest in an experience, they are more likely to follow through, they are more committed to the process and they're more likely to stick around.

Speaker 1: 31:40

Well, in a consultative relationship, that's a big deal, right, because you do need people to understand where you're coming from. You need to be talking with folks who have an idea about where you work, what your student population is like, maybe some historical context about some things that have happened on your campus previously. We're developing these little histories about each other and the only way that that happens is by having a consistent core of people who show up week after week, which is what happens when you invest in an experience. A study from Paulson related to rural mental health practitioners noted that an online collaboration group a collaborative online group provided a varied source of resources and information and promoted the professional and personal development of the group members. They go on to talk about how these varied perspectives, about this personal and professional development through this online consultation, created a generalist framework for their people. It made them be able to more effectively discern the good from the bad when they needed to collaborate, why they needed to collaborate, what sorts of approaches they need to be looking at all of these kinds of things. There's research to back this stuff up.

Speaker 1: 33:17

So, no matter your tech on this, no matter your approach on this, I want you to know it's time to find your school counseling right or die. It's time to find that person or that group that's going to hold your feet to the fire. That's going to make you answer for some of the choices you're making in your school counseling practice. That's going to challenge your beliefs, that's going to question you about some of the misinformation that you've seen online and perhaps have considered acting on. Because they truly want the best for you, they truly want the best for your students and they want to see you become the most equipped, ethical and capable school counselor that you can possibly be.

Speaker 1: 34:09

That's exciting, isn't it? When you think about it in that way. That's exciting. So let's avoid the misinformation that we're seeing in social media. Let's develop the skills to help us discern which information is the misinformation and which is the good information just like Jennifer was reminding me about in the parking lot last week and let's develop those relationships, those ride or die school counseling relationships that can really help us elevate ourselves to be the best school counselors that we could possibly ever dream of being. It's a big goal, it's a lofty goal, but I know you can get there. And, just as a reminder, if you don't have a ride or die consultative group, I know where you can find one Go to schoolforschoolcounselorscom. Slash mastermind, read all about it and I'll see you inside the mastermind. Until then I hope you have the best week this week. I hope you feel challenged, I hope you grow as a professional and I hope you have a little time to develop your consultative ride or die relationships and have the best week ever. Take care.