Hey there! Ever thought about how your own thoughts and blind spots might be shaping how you connect with others at work? In this latest episode, we're taking a close look at some tricky stuff that can trip up even the most experienced counselors: confirmation biases.
We're exploring how confirmation biases work as sneaky blind spots in school counseling, subtly guiding decisions and interactions as counselors lean towards information that aligns with their existing beliefs.
We'll explore the ins and outs of how our biases can affect our relationships with students, our colleagues, and our campuses as a whole. I'll share some cool strategies to shake off those biases and make our schools more inclusive and awesome places to learn.
Tune in for a chat that'll get you thinking and arm you with the tools for caring and effective counseling, all while maintaining a positive and empowered perspective. Can't wait for you to join the conversation!
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.
Jump in, ask questions, share your ideas and become a part of the most empowering school counseling group on the planet! (Join us to see if we're right.)
The Mastermind is packed with all the things your grad program never taught you IN ADDITION TO unparalleled support and consultation. No more feeling alone, invisible, unappreciated, or like you just don't know what to do next. We've got you!
Did someone share this podcast with you? Be sure to subscribe for all the new episodes!!
Hey there! Ever thought about how your own thoughts and blind spots might be shaping how you connect with others at work? In this latest episode, we're taking a close look at some tricky stuff that can trip up even the most experienced counselors: confirmation biases.
We're exploring how confirmation biases work as sneaky blind spots in school counseling, subtly guiding decisions and interactions as counselors lean towards information that aligns with their existing beliefs.
We'll explore the ins and outs of how our biases can affect our relationships with students, our colleagues, and our campuses as a whole. I'll share some cool strategies to shake off those biases and make our schools more inclusive and awesome places to learn.
Tune in for a chat that'll get you thinking and arm you with the tools for caring and effective counseling, all while maintaining a positive and empowered perspective. Can't wait for you to join the conversation!
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.
Jump in, ask questions, share your ideas and become a part of the most empowering school counseling group on the planet! (Join us to see if we're right.)
The Mastermind is packed with all the things your grad program never taught you IN ADDITION TO unparalleled support and consultation. No more feeling alone, invisible, unappreciated, or like you just don't know what to do next. We've got you!
Did someone share this podcast with you? Be sure to subscribe for all the new episodes!!
Hello school counselor, Welcome back to the School for School Counselors podcast. I'm so glad that you're back here with me for another episode, and this week we're going to be talking about managing your confirmation bias. Do you know your blind spots in your counseling work, in your work on your campus as a whole, or in your relationships with your students or coworkers? How well can you identify those blind spots? Do you know what to do with them Once you find them? We're going to talk about all that coming up in this episode of the podcast. I'm Steph Johnson. I'm your host, as always, a full-time school counselor, just like you, and I am driven and invested by the idea of supporting my colleagues, empowering you and advocating for the school counseling world as a whole so that we can better and more effectively serve the students on our campuses. And I am just tickled to death that you're here with me this week for this episode.
Steph Johnson:
Now, we all carry some unique beliefs. We carry values. Those things shape who we are and it's natural right. That's what makes us unique and special and different from everyone else around us. But as school counselors, it's important to remember that those personal perspectives can influence the way we see the world and when it influences our world, it often also influences the way we see our students, the way we see our administrators and the way we see our work as a whole, and so we have to be really attuned and on the lookout for confirmation bias. Now, you might remember, confirmation bias is our tendency to lean toward information that aligns with things we already know or believe. So, in other words, we're going to favor information that confirms our preexisting beliefs, we're going to favor information that confirms our own values, and our brains are immediately going to try to discount any opposing evidence. We're going to minimize it, we're going to gloss over it. Sometimes we don't even acknowledge it's there, and this all comes together to create confirmation bias. It's important for us, in particular, to be able to challenge confirmation bias, because it's imperative for us to remain open-minded in our work and that we're able to make good decisions and draw good conclusions in our school counseling. So in this episode, we're going to talk about a few simple ways that we can navigate confirmation bias and make sure that we are growing professionally as compassionate and effective school counselors.
Steph Johnson:
You know, one of the reasons that this topic came to mind was I just wrapped up doing a workshop with my school for school counselors, mastermind members and we were preparing for National School Counseling Week as well as Random Acts of Kindness Week. Both of those weeks are coming up in February and so we wanted to gather our members together. We wanted to crowdsource some ideas for those weeks coming up. We helped them get things planned and going already on their books so they don't get surprised by it at the last minute and to really maintain an open mind about the purpose and the power particularly of National School Counseling Week. You know a lot of our colleagues and friends have already developed biases about this week. They've already developed some predetermined ideas about what National School Counseling Week should be.
Steph Johnson:
Perhaps what others on their campus think of National School Counseling Week. Often it's not very flattering and I see a lot of people draw the conclusion that others on their campus just don't care, they don't respect them because there's not a lot of gratitude initiatives being aimed at them, that kind of thing. And it really got me thinking about the other types of confirmation biases that we carry throughout our day. Side note. I just wanna be very clear on this. You know, National School Counseling Week not ORS, not counselors. There's a difference. National School Counseling Week benefits us best when we view it as an opportunity for outreach, for education about our roles and to really start building bridges, not only with the people that we work with, but with our students and our parents.
Steph Johnson:
You might be one that feels like that shouldn't be necessary, that we shouldn't be called a bomb to do that kind of work, but whether or not you feel we should, it's an imperative. These days, Our roles are so different between states, between districts and even between campuses. It's super important that you uncover some of the mystery of your program on your campus and make sure that people feel they understand what your job is, what you're doing all day. It leaves them less room to develop biases as well. All right, so there are probably four main types of bias that you can experience as a school counselor. Now start researching this and you'll see you start going down the rabbit hole pretty quickly of all the different kinds of biases that are possible. But basically, I think we're probably looking at four main types.
Steph Johnson:
Number one you may develop biases about yourself. It could be something like a self-serving bias, where you solely attribute gains or improvements to your own efforts. That sounds really it does really sound self-serving. I don't think that's the way we intend it when it happens, it's just kind of the way it percolates in our brain. Things like collaborative biases when we're working in groups and we kind of exclude other people's input and tend to embrace our colleagues, our counseling teams, and put more readily those kinds of things.
Steph Johnson:
We can experience bias regarding our administrators. We might stereotype them, we may just make assumptions about their motivations or their goals. On campus we might selectively remember things about our administrators that confirm the biases that we've created about them in our minds. Or we may have a negativity bias about them. They're never going to care, they're never going to understand, they're never going to accept me as part of their team, those kinds of things, instead of really looking at the potential for change.
Steph Johnson:
So we've got biases about ourselves, biases about our administrators, some other confirmation biases that we can develop, our biases about our students, and these to me seem really dangerous. Things like expectation biases, where we kind of think that we've predetermined a student's path. Sometimes we have cultural biases and we make assumptions based on our own cultural background and we don't really take others' backgrounds into account. Sometimes we develop a halo effect with students. So those are really interesting. We let some sort of a positive characteristic about them influence our overall perception and then we start to miss things or we start to feel like we shouldn't have to work on things that maybe need a little bit of help. And then the last big category of confirmation bias I think that can be present is bias just regarding our campus as a whole or sometimes our work as a whole, Things like affinity bias, where we favor colleagues that have backgrounds like ours, who have work styles like ours or interests that align with our interests, and so we kind of preclude perspectives from individuals with other kinds of diverse backgrounds. That's really dangerous. Perhaps we experience some projection bias. There are lots of things that can come into play and, like I said, you can go down a rabbit hole with all these different categories and subcategories of bias.
Steph Johnson:
But we wanna make this simple this week, because the point is we need to be able to recognize these things, we need to be able to confront them head on and be able to handle the aftermath of that, because sometimes it's not super pleasant, but if we can do that, it's going to make us better school counselors, better at our jobs and ultimately better advocates for students. So let's take on first our biases about ourselves. We're gonna have to engage in a little bit of self-reflection here. We're gonna have to take a hard look at our beliefs and our values and determine what kinds of biases have we developed about the world because of them? How might your views influence your interactions with students? How might they limit your understanding and limit your understandings? This is really hard to confront sometimes, but if we can acknowledge these things, we can open this door where we can start to grow and step more fully into our role as a helper on campus.
Steph Johnson:
We too need to continually be mindful of our thoughts in the moment, to check in with ourselves about what thoughts and feelings are dominating our minds when we're working with students, when we're having those heart-to-heart discussions. That way we can recognize bias as it starts to creep in. We can consciously adjust our perspective and make sure that we're making decisions or making suggestions with fairness and with equity and mind. Jumping into professional development opportunities that challenge our perspective or that broaden our exposure to other viewpoints really expands our professional expertise. So seek out opportunities that stretch you Don't just think of it as school counseling professional development. Really become a lifelong learner. That may not be professional texts, it may not be academic research journals, it may be things like reading some good fiction, reading some good self-help books, anything that you can do to really broaden your perspective about the world and your place in it.
Steph Johnson:
And then last and I think this is an important one and it's one that we don't look at often enough but highlighting the opportunities to seek feedback from colleagues and students. This one is a hard one because we don't want to hear what we would think of as the bad things. We don't sometimes want that constructive criticism. We want to hear how awesome we are, what a great impact we've made, how our role on campus is celebrated, and sometimes we're afraid to open ourselves up to any other kinds of feedback. But if you can be receptive to some constructive criticism, if you can encourage those kinds of open conversations, genuinely ask for input and then be receptive to that, it's only going to help you grow as a person.
Steph Johnson:
And as a school counselor, you know, I say often I tell my students I'm specially trained not to get my feelings hurt and while that is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I think it's mostly true and I really have to maintain a particular mindset in order to make that work. But I have to remember that that feedback isn't designed to you know, bring me down. It's not designed to stick a knife in my heart. It's a reflection of another person's experience and if it's a less than stellar reflection on my end, that's my cue. Everything needs to change and in order to be not only a responsible but an ethical school counselor, I really need to consider that. All right, so we've talked about holding a mirror up to ourselves. We've talked about opening up opportunities to receive some constructive criticism and really challenge our own biases about ourselves.
Steph Johnson:
Now let's talk about our biases toward our administrators. Now, I touched on this earlier when I was talking about the National School Counseling Week debates, but I think sometimes we forget that our job isn't just supporting students right, Our job is also building some really great relationships on campus so that we can effectively advocate for students. No one's going to be open or receptive to solutions or suggestions if we can't maintain a happy and healthy professional working relationship. So I think we have a few things we've got to do here so that we don't fall into these holds of bias about our administrators thinking things like well, the school counseling program just isn't important to them. I mean it shows In the level of budget they give me, in the way that I'm scheduled on campus, in the way that they never have time for me, on and on and on, and on and on. And we don't stop to take other factors into consideration. Now, does that mean that all school administrators have the best interests of the school counseling program at heart? Unfortunately no, but we at least want to approach things in a positive frame of mind until we have direct evidence to the contrary.
Steph Johnson:
There's a difference between bias and evidence. Do you have the evidence or do you just have an assumption or a feeling? Very important to tease that out. First, you've got to have open communication between counselors and administrators. Some of you are rolling your eyes right now, going there is absolutely no way on this earth that's ever going to happen. And it's not because I don't want it, it's because they won't. Let me Ever been in a position like that I have. I've been there. I know what you're talking about. We do know that when we have the ability to communicate openly, we create this space where we can acknowledge and address our own biases about our administrators, and perhaps they can do the same on their end.
Steph Johnson:
But if you don't feel like you have this opportunity. That means the first step in your framework is building situations in which you can both learn to know each other, then to like each other, then to trust each other, so that you can communicate. This is a lot like what you do in your school counseling conversations. Be honest, sometimes you get students or parents in your office that you don't particularly like right off the bat. Right, it's just human nature, that's just the way it works. Some personalities just don't mesh well with each other right away. But you have the tools and expertise to usually craft those conversations and direct them in a way where you can have a productive conversation and perhaps even walk away from it feeling like you've gained a better understanding of each other.
Steph Johnson:
Right, and so we have to do the same thing with our administrators, and sometimes this takes time. Sometimes, with some administrators, this takes a lot of time To the tune of years To be able to get them to know you, then to like you, then to trust you. But that's okay. Just remember, all of this is not all about you. There are probably other factors that have contributed to this situation, and if you're gonna stick in it for the long haul. You've just gotta give it your best, most diligent effort to be able to untangle all of that so open communication, but also seek to understand their perceptions and their decision-making processes.
Steph Johnson:
So often to us it seems cut and dried, right, Black and white. You either do this or you do that. Open and shut. It's easy. But oh my goodness, If you've ever had the opportunity to follow a school administrator closely, even for a day, you know it is a tough job. And so by really sitting down and intentionally focusing on trying to understand their side of the coin, trying to understand their challenges, we can begin to develop a bit of empathy for their situation, and then we'll start to really look toward the reasoning behind their decisions. And that's where we wanna be, that's the frame of mind we wanna be in, so we can start avoiding these confirmation biases about our administrators. Well, there, you know. You heard what they just said. It just proves it. They just don't care. We wanna avoid that line of thinking at all costs, because all it does is breed animosity and breeds contempt between the two of you, and it doesn't create a good working relationship for anybody. And that's not how you wanna spend your days. That is not the way you wanna do it.
Steph Johnson:
Third, in our bias about students, we have to be really aware of recognizing diversity. We have to be very willing and ready to acknowledge and appreciate diversity in our students' backgrounds. We should be attending cultural events, we should be engaging in conversations with students that have backgrounds that are different from ours and we should really be making a conscious effort to learn about their experiences. Now, on the surface, this feels like it goes without saying. Right, it's just one of the components of good counseling.
Steph Johnson:
But how often have you felt intimidated to ask a question because you felt it might sound silly or make you look stupid, and so you just kind of avoided it. You just kind of pretend like you understood or pretended like you knew the ins and outs of something, when really you didn't. You were just afraid to ask the question. I'll be honest, I've been there and that's part of my journey as of late is not being afraid to ask more of those questions and really express my genuine curiosity and willingness to learn about students' cultures that are different than mine, and chances are the students are going to love that. They're going to love the chance to teach you about that Staff members perhaps that have different backgrounds than yours, are going to jump at the chance to teach you a little bit about what they believe or how they grew up or what they observe in the routines of their year. So let them. Let them teach you and you will become a better person for it.
Steph Johnson:
Challenge your stereotypes and your preconceptions about students. Sometimes we develop a stereotype about a student. We speak to them once or twice and we think we have them all figured out. But if we talk to them a little more deeply about their interests, their dreams or their challenges, we really gain a deeper understanding of what they're all about and really start to appreciate the diversity of personalities on our campus. So don't sell yourself short. Don't just assume because of the way a student looks, the way they speak, the way they dress, that you have them all figured out, Because I promise you you don't, you just don't, and you know that. You know that, but it's easy to slip into those kinds of biases. So that brings me to sharing experiences, sharing insights about diversity in student populations. Join a space where those experiences, challenges or success stories can all be shared, because once you are able to engage in these kinds of learning conversations, we're going to strengthen our understandings and our abilities to support every student, regardless of their background. These kinds of professional communities can also hold a mirror up to us, to force us to challenge some of our assumptions in the best, most productive ways. So seek a quality consultative community that can help you grow in that way.
Steph Johnson:
Lastly, we need to confront our biases about our work or about our campus as a whole. Those could be things like developing a more comprehensive understanding of what's going on at your school. Sometimes we think we have it all figured out. We know exactly what everybody's fears are, what their stressors are, what their hopes and dreams for the campus are, and we find out later those weren't entirely accurate. So make sure that you're attending school events, you're showing up at extracurricular activities and that you're just present in the day-to-day rhythm of the school. You're accessible, you're visible, you're engaging in things going on on your campus. That way, you're going to start breaking down those walls of bias. It's a lot harder to hold bias about other people when you're face-to-face with them on a regular basis.
Steph Johnson:
Right, and being out and about this way helps you develop a more nuanced understanding of the challenges that are facing your campus, as well as the successes that that campus is experiencing and you want to know all of that, to be able to be very well-rounded, to be a go-to resource and an ultimate helper. Remember, on committees, Become an integral part of the decision-making process on your campus. Get in positions where you can really hear other people's concerns, or you can really hear other people's insights, so you can truly understand where they're coming from. That's going to break down a lot of walls of bias and then again, promote that open dialogue. This doesn't have to be a formal process, doesn't need to be. Let's just make an appointment and sit down and have a dialogue together. It doesn't no, it doesn't need to be like that. In fact, I would recommend that it not be like that. But if your staff truly knows you and believes that you do have an open door policy and that they can come to you and talk to you, and that you're not going to get your feelings hurt, that you're not going to feel resentful when they reflect your actions or your words back at you, you can make a lot of headway here. So encourage others to bring you their questions. Encourage them to bring you their concerns or their frustrations and be ready to hear those with an open mind and with a sense of curiosity that's going to help break apart your blind spots so that you can really have a full view of what's going on on your campus.
Steph Johnson:
It is so important, like I said, to remember that our personal perspectives influence the way that we see the world. So if we get stuck in a negative mindset or if we start to see ourselves as these victims right as objects of manipulation, or sometimes in an opposite way is something more than what we are. To be honest with you, sometimes we can see ourselves as being better than we really are. Things start to go sideways. So use bias as an opportunity for reflection and as an opportunity for growth. Bus through the limitations of your thinking. Take a hard look at your thought processes regularly and make sure you're keeping them in check so that you can always be working to grow past them. You're right. I hope this helps shape your perspective of your work as you are serving students, families and staff members on campus.
Steph Johnson:
This week, I'm truly humbled by the number of folks who are tuning into the podcast regularly, each and every week. You have no idea how much that means both to me and to my team. Before I let you go. I do want to remind you about two things going on in our School for School Counselors world right now. Number one is our new year restart. This is a free series designed to help you with the ins and outs of all the pesky little nagging to dos that sometimes we forget about when the school semester gets underway and then they jump up and bite us later and we go oh man, I wish I would have thought about that. This series will be your guide in getting all of those taken care of and off your plate. It's completely free to join. You can go find out more information at schoolforschoolcounselorscom slash restart.
Steph Johnson:
And the other big exciting news is that our Get the Job program is going to be opening very, very soon. This is a program that is often imitated but never successfully duplicated. We are the original interview strategy program for school counselors and we have the testimonials and the feedback to prove that it works. This is not cookie cutter advice. This is not a bunch of baloney that we gathered off Google and put together to sell you a strategy. Those crawl all over me and there's lots of them around, especially for school counselors. This is research based. It has an evidence base behind it and it has hundreds and hundreds of hours of testing and collaboration behind it. It is designed to help you be the most successful school counseling candidate that you can possibly be.
Steph Johnson:
If you want more details on the Get the Job program, you can go to our website schoolforschoolcounselorscom. Slash get the job. We'll also have the link here in the episode description if you wanna go. Click on that and you can go check it out. We just wanna see you put your best foot forward this interview season. If you're gonna be looking for a new position, we wanna be cheering for you and rooting for you and supporting you every step of the way. All right, well, thanks again from the bottom of my heart for joining me for this episode, and keep listening because there are more coming your way. Until then, I hope you have the best week. Take care.