Are You a Reactive or Responsive School Counselor?

Do you feel like a first responder, constantly reacting issues as they arise, or do you feel like you have the time and space to proactively plan for student wellness? This episode is a deep dive into the realities of reactive versus responsive school counseling. You'll be able to reflect on your daily tasks and learn why your situation, whether it's putting out fires or strategically planning, is more about your school environment than your personal capabilities, and how you can begin modifying your approaches bit by bit to regain a sense of purpose and clarity in your work.

No matter your circumstances, it's possible to identify small but powerful changes that can be made in your counseling program to help you transition from reactive to responsive approaches without neglecting your moment-to-moment responsibilities. It's time to reduce stress and begin building a future-thinking school counseling program: this episode will tell you how.

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Transcript

Steph Johnson: 0:07

Hey there, school counselor, good to have you back for another week of the School for School Counselors podcast. You can see we're trying things a little bit differently this time. You might be watching the podcast instead of listening, which is super cool, something we never, ever thought we would do. Yet here we are, and just one more iteration in the steps of things that we never, ever thought we were going to be doing when we started School for School Counselors, but we're so glad that we are. Hey, I've got some questions for you this week. I want to start with right off the bat and I want to talk about reactive versus responsive school counseling. So let me ask you a few questions and you see if you can identify with any of these scenarios. Alright, number one when you're working with students, do you find yourself a addressing immediate issues and crises, or b planning and implementing preventative strategies for long-term success? Which one is more you? Are you just putting out the fires and addressing those immediate issues, or are you planning and implementing things for longer-term success? Alright, question number two Don't worry, there's only going to be three of these. Question number two how would you describe your focus in your daily tasks? Is it a putting out fires again and managing those urgent matters just back-to-back non-stop, it never quit. Or b, are you proactively planning to prevent potential issues? Alright, and then last question when you're collaborating with teachers, do you tend to a deal with disciplinary issues as they arise or, b, identify early signs of issues and work collaboratively on preventative measures? Now, really, all three of those questions sound like they're asking the same thing, don't they? Essentially, what we're asking is are you just working in the moment, moment to moment, trying to get things done and taken care of throughout the day, or do you have a little space and room to breathe, to kind of plan, think out into the future and really get intentional about the things you want to do in your school counseling program?

Steph Johnson: 2:38

Now, let me make a qualification here and say this is not a judgment on you. So if this feels like a judgment on you that you feel like man, you know I should be doing a better job of planning. You know long range, I should do a better job of being proactive in measures. That may not necessarily be your fault and I would wager it's probably not. You are a product in your school counseling program is usually a product of the environment in which it functions, and so it may not be that you're making the grade. It may be that you haven't been given the time, the personnel, the scheduling flexibility to be able to make those things happen.

Steph Johnson: 3:25

So I know that you know the difference between reactive and responsive school counseling. I know that you do, but in this episode I want to talk about the differences. I want to talk about some really realistic ways that we can address these things, and I just want to get you thinking along these lines because, I'll be honest, as I was kind of turning this over in my brain getting ready to record this episode, it really kind of hit me that I'm way more one kind of school counseling than I am the other, and so I'm thinking about my own program too, about how I can really modify and adjust. So we're going to do this together, all right, but before we get into that, as always, I want to share one of our recent reviews for the school for school counselors podcast. We love it when you submit reviews Y'all. This is the gravy on top of the biscuit. We love it. We love to see what you're thinking about the podcast, and it really encourages us to keep going. You know nothing for nothing.

Steph Johnson: 4:28

I'm a full time school counselor, just like you, as are my team members. We're all full time school counselors and we have done that by design. We don't ever want to be out of touch or feel like we don't have our fingers completely in that school counseling pie, and so things get busy, they get crazy and sometimes it gets really tempting to kind of step off the gas a little bit and take a break. But we don't want to do that and your reviews are the fuel that really helps keep us going. This most recent review is from local customer family and they titled their podcast review Old Dogs, new Tricks. I really, really like that. The review goes on to say, as a school counselor of 17 years in Texas, I had continued to learn, grow and feel supported by your podcast. We are an island, sometimes on our campuses, and it's nice to feel that connection with others. It's a great encouragement at a time when our jobs are so needed, yet at times doubted and under supported. Please keep up the great work. Thank you so much. Local customer family. You're amazing. Thank you for such kind words, very, very humbled by those, and I do completely agree with you. This is a time in our history where the need for school counseling, I think, is unprecedented and so important to keep those of us going in the field that are invested, that do wanna be doing this work and who are willing to plow through the difficult stuff to make it happen. So I appreciate your thoughts very, very much. Thanks again.

Steph Johnson: 6:09

All right, so reactive versus responsive school counseling. I'm gonna give you a quick rundown again, not that I think that you don't know what these are, but sometimes it's easy to have a very firm context on what we're talking about as we dive into some deeper discussion. So reactive school counseling is probably what you're doing now. Unless you have a really supremely awesome school counseling program on an amazing campus, most of your time is probably spent in reactive mode. This is when we're addressing urgent matters like self-harm, violence, substance abuse on our campus and we're looking at those short-term interventions to really just try to stabilize the situation Right. We're not looking much further past the here and now. We really just kind of have to get everything stable and under control in the moment and we have a tendency when we work in these kinds of environments to really prioritize immediate needs over longer-term planning, and that's understandable. It's called survival mode. You've been there. I've been there tons of times. I know exactly what that's like.

Steph Johnson: 7:27

In reactive school counseling, we're addressing symptoms rather than problems, or rather than those root causes of the problems. We're going into problem-solving mode all the time, and so sometimes when we do that, we can kind of go past the underlying issue. Right. We can either not identify it or misidentify it. We're more apt to jump to conclusions when we're working this way, and that can make things kind of dicey Because we don't have time to really get into student stories or situations. We have probably 600, 700, 900 kids on our campus all needing our time and attention, and it doesn't allow us the leeway to really get invested in our students. So we're going in and we're providing these stop-gap measures, we're giving this temporary support and we're not really coming up with some long-term sustainable solutions for students. So what happens? They end up coming right Because we're not addressing the real issue. We're kind of slapping a bandaid on it, right, we're putting the bandage on as best we can and we're moving on to the next crisis In this reactive mode.

Steph Johnson: 8:47

Again, it's emergent issues, it's putting out fires, it is constantly reacting moment to moment to moment, and this crisis management is just keeping us from looking any further ahead than maybe the next day, right? So think about that for a minute. Is that kind of what your day looks like now? For the majority of school counselors, I would say it probably is, and that's unfortunate. We're gonna talk about some things we can do to address that and know I'm not gonna tell you to advocate for your program Promise. I think that is a tired approach to some of these situations. I do think it's needed, but I also think it shifts a lot of blame onto people who have no control in the situation. We'll get to that one in a minute.

Steph Johnson: 9:37

So reactive school counseling, dealing with the discipline issues right, and it may not be asserting disciplinary measures, but we're looking at consequences or supporting consequences for students rather than preventing the behaviors in the first place. Again, because we're not really able to be super proactive about what we're doing. We're gonna have limited collaboration with our teachers because we're running moment to moment, thing to thing, like a ping pong ball all day long and so we cannot get super proactive about behavior management. And on campuses where reactive school counseling is happening, we see a super high demand for immediate conflict resolution. How many times have you been called in to really get in the middle of conflicts, to really try to solve conflicts, either between students or between students and teachers? Right, because everybody just wants you to fix it. That's where that feeling of having to fix things all the time comes. We're also looking at things like behavior incidents, bullying reports. We're allotting a lot of time to those kinds of things and it's taking away time when we could be doing bullying prevention efforts on our campus or where we could be teaching conflict resolution proactively before the conflicts come to a head.

Steph Johnson: 11:09

We also lose the ability to track what we're doing, to have those initiatives in place, to deliver them and to be able to do a really good job of tracking what's working and what's not working for our student population. And, as I said before, this is all very short term right. Slap a bandaid on it, get them out the door and hope for the best. Long term support is almost non-existent. It just can't be. You're one person in this reactive mode. It's just not possible. And then when we start to see underlying issues for students, whether those are social issues, whether they're emotional or mental health issues or whether they're academic issues, it's harder for us to identify them and really get good at supporting. Because we're running 100 miles an hour.

Steph Johnson: 12:05

When you're working in this reactive style, you're feeling stressed right, that might be the understatement of the year. Lots of stress, lots of potential burnout. Yes, because you're constantly exposed to these crises. You have all of this emotional fatigue right. You're making decisions second to second, moment to moment. That's tiring, it's hard on your brain, it's hard on your body and that constant pressure to always be reacting to the new situation at hand and to be able to react quickly is just increasing those cortisol levels. It's just increasing your levels of stress and you feel like you can't get it. It also limits your time and your commitment to taking care of yourself, to being able to leave work at work when you go, to be able to do things, to care for yourself once you leave and even to pursue professional development to help you handle some of these things more effectively. It just makes it difficult all the way around.

Steph Johnson: 13:17

Reactive school discipline also takes time away from planning preventative measures. It's almost like you have so little time to get out of crisis mode that you're just doomed to keep repeating it over and over and over again. You need just an extra three weeks in the school year to really be able to dive in and learn and grow and be able to determine what to do in some of your most common issues on campus. But you don't have that time. Or, quite frankly, if you find the time, you really don't care about it right, you're tired of thinking about it. You don't wanna think about school counseling anymore. It's not that you don't care about your students or your campus, but you're just over well, and this is too where we get into not being able to implement this idea of a comprehensive school counseling program. We are nine times out of 10. We're trained in the idea of a comprehensive program. We really want to implement those. When we start our work, we are led to believe that we're gonna be able to do that, that folks are gonna be excited and supportive of these programs, and so often that's not the case.

Steph Johnson: 14:32

As we try to develop these program models, if we're on a reactive campus, it's really difficult to plan those initiatives out. It's difficult to build sounding boards of stakeholders. It's difficult to develop programming that goes throughout the year and is conducive to student growth, that's sequential, that builds on itself. That all takes time, it takes intention and it takes room to think and as we kind of fail to do that, we start to feel really bad about ourselves, right, and we feel like we're not able to prove ourselves to our school administrators, and sometimes our administrators wonder what we're doing. So it's really a bad place to be, but, again, not uncommon, and I don't think that for the majority of school counselors, this is the situation you would choose. If you had the ability to make the call right, you would choose to be a more responsive school counselor. So responsive school counselors are just the opposite of what we talked about. I don't wanna belabor the point, but let me go over just a couple of the main ones to get your mind turning, because I want you to be able to imagine and really visualize what this would be Okay.

Steph Johnson: 15:49

If you are a responsive school counselor, you're able to be proactive. You're able to really anticipate student needs and intervene before they become big problems. You're able to emphasize things like building positive and supportive school climate. You're able to look at early identification of concerns. You're able to look at crisis prevention. You have the time to get to know your students so that when something's a little off, you're one of the first ones to notice. You are able to implement a program that not only addresses social and emotional needs, but can also address all the academic, all the career needs, right Personal development. You can help students develop resilience and coping skills. Now we can do that as a reactive counselor too, but not to the extent that we do it when we are responsive. We have more time to collaborate with teachers, we can look at issues with a more holistic lens, we can find the underlying concerns and issues that may be driving some of the things that we're seeing on campus and we're, just in a nutshell, able to do a much better job as a school counselor.

Steph Johnson: 17:17

When we're able to be a responsive school counselor, we have less stress and less burnout. That doesn't mean it goes away. The birds don't sing over the rainbow where the unicorn's prancing every day. Schools don't work that way, but you do have less stress. You have less chance of burnout because you're able to be more proactive. You're able to be on top of things a little bit more and feel like you have a little bit more control over what's happening. You have opportunities to grow as a professional, to learn to collaborate with others on your campus or in your district, and you're able to begin aligning with some of those components that you know you should be implementing, you're able to look toward that comprehensive school counseling program with a sense of eagerness and anticipation, instead of feeling like you're just a major loser, when you've been there I've been there. I know what that feels like. It is the most demoralizing feeling ever. We don't want you to be there. We want you to feel like you are more responsive and able to really handle what's coming. So how do you move from reactive to responsive?

Steph Johnson: 18:33

Normally, when you hear conversations like this, it's usually something along the lines of you know, make sure you're tracking your data and keeping track of what you do in a day, take that data to your administrator and advocate for change. Right, you heard that we all have, and that seems to be the only solution that people can give us. But the problem is and you've heard me talk about this before, as you've listened to these podcast episodes good inside out advocacy, which is what we're being coached toward, takes time. I have yet to see anybody instruct a school counselor in effective advocacy and realistically address the timeline needed to make meaningful change happen. And it's a shame, because when we have these advocacy conversations. We're convincing school counselors that they can go, have these meetings, they can have these talks with their administrators with this semester's worth of data, or maybe a year's worth of data, and have enough buy-in to really catalyze change in their programs. And sometimes it works.

Steph Johnson: 19:48

Sometimes, if you're on a really involved campus that's really invested in school counseling, they might be super willing to listen and to make some changes. But for the majority of school counselors, this advocacy game takes time, and as I say time, I don't mean a semester or two or three, I'm talking about a years-long approach Three years, four years, maybe even five, and I'm not telling you that to dishearten you, but I do want you to have a realistic viewpoint on what it takes to really compel meaningful advocacy that really makes a difference. So if I'm not going to give you that blanket statement about advocacy, what is there to do To switch from reactive to responsive? Now let me say number one this is not an all or nothing proposition. It can't be. That's not realistic, it's not healthy for you, and so really be careful, as we're having this discussion, of not viewing this as you're either all reactive or all responsive. It's not realistic for anybody. You're going to have shades of both in any school counseling program.

Steph Johnson: 21:08

The trick is we want to move the needle over to the responsive side as much as we possibly can without neglecting all of the moment to moment beads on our campus. Does that make sense? So this is not a hundred percent, one or other. Be very, very careful with that, because once we get into that all or nothing thinking, just like we tell our students, that's what really starts to drive a lot of unhappiness, a lot of rest, a lot of anger in our work, and we do not want to get it.

Steph Johnson: 21:43

So number one is identifying small, impactful changes that you can make in your school counseling program, something that is very manageable, some sort of an initiative or approach on your campus that you can get pretty immediate results from and feel like you can still handle everything. Some of you may be thinking that's not even possible, it can't even work. But I'm gonna challenge you a little bit on that and say where there's a will, there's a way. Find one small, teeny something. It could be the smallest grain of sand feeling initiative that you could come up with, it doesn't matter. All right, go for it anyway, because we just want to look at those small changes that can still be impactful and as we grow and develop those and we can show how effective they are, we can begin to build credibility on campus. That credibility is what's needed for effective advocacy Again, something that nobody talks about.

Steph Johnson: 22:54

You can't go marching in an administrator's office on your own merit when they hardly know you and expect them to make a change. It takes people a while to get to know, like and trust each other on a school campus. So keep that in mind. You are awesome, but it may take them a little bit to recognize the full extent of your awesome Two. I think, as you're looking at these small initiatives, these quick wins, you need to really celebrate them for yourself and for your campus. How often do we try a little something. It works pretty good and we're like okay, let's move on to the next thing. Take a moment and really savor them and be proud of yourself. Toot your own horn a little bit. You deserve it. You've been working really, really hard for your students on your campus. You deserve a little bit of celebration. So take that moment and do as you identify these wins and you celebrate them. They're going to begin constructing a narrative for you on your campus. You are going to be able to, when you get to the point when you're ready to actively advocate, you can almost tell a story about how your role has evolved and then provide the data to show what it can become. But again, this is a long process. This is not a one semester, one month, three month thing. This is going to be a while, so keep that long-term vision in mind as you're working toward this.

Steph Johnson: 24:30

Three, I think we need to really look toward some good collaboration. You've got to have some good collaborative partnerships going on on your campus, especially because if you're heavily in reactive mode, you may not have a lot of time for these initiatives, to find these successes in these small wins. So how can you bring other programs in your community on board to help catalyze some of that change for your students? How can you bring some outside counseling supports in? How can you bring assistance for families onto campus? Or how can you compare parents and students to those sources? How can you facilitate those relationships? How can you make them feel safe? Reaching out to other people? It's really important. Invest in the supports you have outside your campus and, if you don't think you have any either, collaborate with other folks in your district to find them, or just start calling agencies in your area. Introduce yourself, explain what you wanna do and see where they'll leave you, because agencies are often very, very hungry to serve and they would be divided to tell you how they can help your students.

Steph Johnson: 25:49

Or it might be a good idea to connect a counseling initiative to an academic goal. So what I mean by that is identifying one specific, maybe tier one or tier two goal on your campus. It's pretty widespread and showcase how your counseling program can contribute to that academic success. So it might be something like college and career readiness, it might be improving high school graduation rates, it might even be improving attendance percentages Anything that supports academic success Number one. That's what you're there to do, right, to serve your students and help them do the best that they can when they're at school. But secondly this is an administrator's love language If you are making their campus stats look better, if you're making a direct contribution to those and you're making sure they know about it, you don't have to be obnoxious about it, right, you don't have to be in their face about it, but making sure they understand your side of the initiatives and what you're implementing to help catalyze that change. That's gonna be huge for conversations on down the line, I would say too.

Steph Johnson: 27:08

A nice compliment to that, if you don't feel comfortable with the academic intervention quite yet, is looking at emphasizing school climate improvement. Try to see if you can build a more supportive and inclusive school climate in what we call high visibility school counseling, where you are very visible, you're very available and it's very obvious that you're working to promote these positive and inclusive school environments for all students, and I don't know what school administrator wouldn't love that If they wouldn't, there's something wrong there, for sure. But looking at those academic or climate concerns is really, really gonna help. So let's recap really quickly. You've probably realized if I were a betting woman, I would bet you're a more reactive school counselor than perhaps responsive. That's gonna be part for the course for most of our podcast audience.

Steph Johnson: 28:07

When you're reactive, it's moment to moment, crisis to crisis, issue to issue, not a lot of time to look down deeper into the concerns, not a lot of time to get proactive, to plan ahead and to really implement what we identify as a comprehensive school counseling. So in order to get there, we're gonna have to identify micro initiatives, these small little stepping stones to where we want to go. Quick wins, impactful changes, preferably with some academic goals or school climate. We wanna take time to celebrate those, not only for ourselves, but to make sure that our administrators are aware of what we've been doing. And we wanna be collaborating. We wanna be bringing services and resources onto our campuses or effective schools. We wanna actively building bridges for our students from school to those outside resources in the community. Either way, those are gonna have a tremendous impact on your school counseling program and alleviate some of the burden that's on your shoulders. And then, as you're able to do that, you're gonna begin to free up that mental space, that bandwidth that you need to then be able to really reinvest into your career, to be able to look beyond your campus, to grow, to learn, to collaborate with other school counselors, to engage in some quality consultation, and it's just gonna make you a better school camp.

Steph Johnson: 29:42

So I hope this is helpful. I do realize a lot of this is out of your control, but it is nice knowing that you do have a little bit you can do in these situations. Right, it's like those circles that we all draw for our students what's in my control and what's beyond my control. If we can start with these little micro initiatives within our circles of control, if we can build on those, we might be able to really start to advocate into that outer circle. If that, my friend, is the big goal, we're gonna be talking a lot more about advocacy in the coming months, and even probably the coming years, here in school for school counselors, because there's so much more to talk about in the advocacy realm that you're just not hearing right now. We wanna support you every single step of the way.

Steph Johnson: 30:33

All right, that's all I have for you for this episode. I hope that it at least kind of helped get your gears turning a little bit, thinking about your program and maybe some of those small, tiny micro changes that you can make to really find quick wins for your students. If you need some support in this area, if you need to talk things out, smash it out with somebody who has been there or who can provide some insight. I know exactly where you can go head over to our School for School Counselors Mastermind. We would love to welcome you over there. You can find out more about it at schoolforschoolcounselorscom.

Steph Johnson: 31:08

Slash mastermind. It's an amazing group of some of the most phenomenal school counselors I have ever and they would love to welcome you. They would love to talk this through with you and help you find some areas that you can really implement, some micro initiatives on your campus and begin to consult and take some of the load of the crisis to crisis issue, to issue rhythm that you've had in your day. Just take it off your shoulders and be able to take a breath. I'll be back soon with another episode. In the meantime, I hope you have the best week. Take care.