School for School Counselors Podcast

GRADED Recap: The Best & Worst of School Counseling

• School for School Counselors • Episode 165

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What if the tools you’ve been told to use as a school counselor are actually working against you?

In this highlights reel, I’m recapping eight of the field’s most popular practices and giving you the real verdict on each.

You’ll hear the truths nobody disputes, the traps that keep counselors spinning their wheels, and the takeaways you can actually use on a real campus. 

I’ll even hand you the one-liners and micro-actions you can take straight into your next meeting.

But this isn’t just a recap. It’s a truth bomb episode. 

By the end, you’ll know what to keep, what to ditch, and how to defend those choices when the pressure to “do more” shows up.

Hit play and let’s level up.

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

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


Speaker 1:

Here in the South, one of the ultimate love languages is knowing how to make good gravy, biscuits and gravy for a Sunday breakfast, chicken fried steak smothered in good gravy or mashed potatoes. My mother makes the most incredible gravy. I mean it is delicious, and when I got married and I moved into my own home, I thought that making her gravy would be easy. I'd watched her do it for years on our stovetop and it looks so simple, but y'all it was not. Turns out. Watching somebody master their craft and actually doing it yourself are completely different things. Mom's gravy is more than just flour and milk. It's years of knowing when the roux is ready, how much seasoning feels right and when to trust her instincts over any recipe that anybody would give her. That's exactly what's happening in school counseling. We are trying to replicate mastery by following step-by-step instructions created by people who've never stood in our kitchens. They don't know what ingredients we have on hand, they don't know how fast we're being asked to cook or how hot the stove is, and when our results don't measure up, we blame ourselves instead of questioning whether we're using the right recipe at all. So in this episode we are going to throw out a lot of very popular recipes that have been ruining perfectly good school counselors. Hey, school counselor, welcome back.

Speaker 1:

If you've been wondering which practices are actually helping kids and which ones are just making you look busy, this is your episode. For the past eight weeks, I've been grading our field's most beloved tools. Today I'm pulling it all together the best, the worst and the ones you've been told you have to do, even though the research says otherwise. But this isn't just a recap, my friend. This is your permission slip to stop doing theater and start doing work that matters. So if you're ready for some straight talk, my friend, some clarity and maybe a little bit of rebellion, you are in the right place.

Speaker 1:

I'm Steph Johnson and this is the School for School Counselors podcast. All right, before we dive into this, let me tell you what this isn't. This isn't about roasting trends or tearing down people who believe in these tools. This is about freeing you from performative work so you can do the powerful work on your campus. If you're new to this podcast series, this highlights reel is going to be like a quick on-ramp for you.

Speaker 1:

I'm going to give you the big picture. I'm going to show you which full episodes you might want to queue up next, and if you've been with me since episode one, this is going to help you connect the dots between all the things we've ever talked about on the podcast and make wiser choices with your time. So today, for each tool, I'm going to give you my verdict and yes, I've been actually grading these, just like a report card, from A to F, and that grade is based on three criteria Does the research support it, does it work in real school conditions and does it help or harm school counselors who are trying to do their job? Most of these tools are getting grades that their creators don't like, but I'm going to share the truth. I'm going to share the traps that catch a lot of school counselors, and for each and every approach, I'm going to give you a takeaway that you can use as soon as you want to. All right, so are you ready?

Speaker 1:

Let's start with the biggest sacred cow of all. The ASCA national model received a D in episode number 157. Picture this it's your first week on a new campus, the office still smells like somebody else's coffee and your principal wants to sit down and talk with you about your expectations and responsibilities. You don't have any class lists yet, but you do have a voice in your head saying build a comprehensive program, define, manage, deliver, assess. Follow the ASCA national model. So you start mapping lessons, you schedule groups, you color code your calendar and by week two you're already feeling like you're burning out. Your walkie is going off nonstop. Somebody needs 504 information, another kid needs crisis intervention. You're covering classes, doing lunch duty and you're wondering why you're already failing.

Speaker 1:

Here's what's true about the ASCA national model. It gave the school counseling profession some language and structure when we were really scattered. It helped us understand the charges to define our programs, manage our resources, deliver services and assess impact. And in a vacuum, that framework makes perfect sense. But reality in schools doesn't live in that vacuum. Most of us are handled this ideal model with zero infrastructure to actually make it possible. Student to counselor ratios are off the charts, non-counseling duties multiply like rabbits and you're told to advocate, print your time charts and educate your administrator about what you should be doing. That setup makes you feel like the problem Instead of revealing what the real problem is that educational systems refuse to change while simultaneously demanding that you perform at an impossible standard.

Speaker 1:

So treat the ASCA national model as a reference guide. Do not use it as a ruler for sitting in judgment on yourself. You can use its language to set boundaries, but don't use it to beat yourself up. If your campus cannot resource a comprehensive school counseling program, stop grading yourself by comprehensive standards. So if you've been blaming yourself for not hitting that magical 80-20 ratio, I want you to remember you weren't given backup. You were given a script. If you want to hear more about that, you can go back just eight episodes or so to our ASCA National Model episode, episode 157. I'll link to that in the show description so you can hop right on over there if you want to hear more. All right, so that ASCA national model promises structure. But what happens when your campus demands the appearance of collaboration without that support? Sometimes the pressure to appear comprehensive sends us reaching for tools that look data-driven and inclusive, tools like needs assessments, which seem like the responsible way forward until they bury you alive. So next we'll move on to the highlights for episode 158, needs assessments. They received a C so not a great score either.

Speaker 1:

If you remember your first weeks on a new campus, you probably wanted to hit the ground running show initiative. So you fired up a Google form and crafted the perfect needs assessment and this felt like the responsible, data-driven way to get started right. You had this vision in your head of teachers feeling heard and administrators being impressed and creating a clear roadmap for your year, but what you got instead was less roadmap and more junk drawer. It was a wish list of every single thing that anyone on your campus could think of. The truth about needs assessments is that they can trap you by drowning you before you even begin. Your stakeholders end up generating this unfiltered list that is almost impossible to prioritize, and once you open that suggestion box, people expect you to deliver. And when you don't deliver all those things, or you simply can't, you become the counselor who asked for input but didn't listen. So instead of clarity on your school counseling program, you get pressure, and instead of focus, you get scattered in a hundred different directions.

Speaker 1:

So when you consider needs assessments, don't crowdsource yourself into burnout. You can use needs assessments as a tool, maybe, but don't use them as your starting line. Asking everyone what they want can turn you into the school's junk drawer. So if you're feeling pressure to run a needs assessment, stop first and ask what specific questions am I trying to answer? Then decide if a needs assessment survey is truly the best way, or if your time would be better spent observing, listening in meetings or checking the existing campus data.

Speaker 1:

And speaking of pressure to deliver quick results, let's talk about the intervention that promised you it could solve everything in just six weeks. Hear me laugh when I say that we're talking about short-term counseling. In episode 158, I gave short-term counseling a B minus, so a little bit better than the ASCA national model and the needs assessments, but not quite a gold star just yet. So even if we choose not to run things like needs assessments, we're still under pressure to deliver fast results. Six weeks, goal-focused, neatly packaged.

Speaker 1:

And the truth about short-term school counseling is that it can work. Brief cognitive behavior therapy or solution-focused techniques can produce real, measurable gains. And for students with very mild concerns, six sessions might be exactly what they need. Sessions might be exactly what they need, but the trap that we keep falling into is not recognizing that student gains can fade fast without reinforcement. Students with trauma histories don't heal in six weeks, grief does not resolve on our timeline and family dysfunction does not respond to a curriculum. When you try to squeeze deep student needs into shallow time frames, you're essentially giving aspirin for a broken leg.

Speaker 1:

Short-term counseling isn't a cure-all. It's one tool in your toolbox and, like any tool, it only works when you match it to the right job. Like any tool, it only works when you match it to the right job. So before you launch your next short-term group or short-term individual intervention, take 30 seconds and name out loud, literally say it, what your approach cannot do. Then share that boundary with your teachers and administrators and maybe even parents. Set realistic expectations from day one, not week seven when things start falling apart.

Speaker 1:

Now, speaking of expectations that don't match reality, nothing gets pushed harder these days than school counselors needing to prove their worth by tracking every single minute of their day. Think about the end of a chaotic week. You know, you worked your guts out every second. You touched tons of crises, you solved 12 problems every day before lunch. But if somebody asked you to remember and account for all those hours in neat little categories, you'd freeze right. You'd stand there like a deer in headlights and say I know I was busy, but I honestly can't remember.

Speaker 1:

Enter use of time tracking that I talked about in episode 160. I gave use of time tracking a solid B. It promised us that if we tracked our minutes proved our alignment with our goals. We could advocate for our role and in theory, it sounded super empowering. However, it doesn't always work out that way. When you do use of time tracking for you, by you, it can be genuinely eye-opening. It's one of my most favorite things about it, because it will start to show patterns that you hadn't noticed and it will help you spot the time drains that are not helping you serve kids. It also gives you some really concrete data for some tough conversations, but when it's required and in many states it is it feels like surveillance.

Speaker 1:

Only school counselors are asked to prove their time this way. Not teachers, not administrators, not other support staff Typically just us. My home state of Texas, as well as several other states, have written this into law, and what was supposed to protect your role has now become this compliance exercise that leaves you feeling like you're always falling short. But even worse, most of the data that you collect because it's been mandated gets shoved into random binders or dashboards that no one ever looks at, much less interprets correctly, and so all of that labor becomes nothing more than expensive, busy work. So the takeaway here is learn to appreciate use of time tracking for what it can do for you, not just because your state or your district demands that you do it inordinately valuable to school counselors, but the way that it's being mandated makes it feel gross and overwhelming and not good for anybody. So this week you could try logging one week of your time just for yourself. You don't have to share it with anyone. Just log it in a spreadsheet and then look at the pie chart that you can generate from that and say, does this reflect the priorities of my campus or does this reflect problems within the system? And then start to look at how you can adjust little pieces based on what you discover. All right, so from there we're going to turn to everyone's favorite intervention that looks great on paper but doesn't always match what students need.

Speaker 1:

In episode 161, I gave small groups a B minus and I started it by talking about the day a teacher just walked up to me very casually and said so when are you going to pull Julio for counseling? And I asked what did I need to pull them for counseling for? And the teacher shrugged and she goes. I mean, I don't know, he's just always in all the counseling groups. And I realized that counseling groups had really kind of become labels for kids and not tailored interventions. When small groups are built on solid research and they're matched to actual student needs and they're delivered with fidelity, they can produce real academic and emotional gains. There is research to back this up.

Speaker 1:

But and this is a huge issue most group plans floating around online aren't therapeutic interventions. They're activity groups with a counseling label. They look polished, they feel productive, but they don't actually shift behavior or skills. Too often we grab resources from sites like Teachers Pay Teachers that claim to be evidence-based when really they're just borrowing credibility because someone somewhere read one research paper loosely aligned to their topic. So that's problem one. But then when we pull students into groups focused on deficits, we risk stigmatizing them. Plus, districts sometimes mandate groups just because the ASCA model recommends them or school improvement plans say you should run them regardless of whether or not they actually fit your campus and student needs. So that turns your small groups into compliance theater instead of effective support.

Speaker 1:

So the takeaway from this one is don't just run groups because it's expected. Run them when they're the right intervention, backed by actual research and targeted to students who need exactly what you're offering. Because a coloring page about feelings isn't counseling, it's a coloring page. Ask yourself three quick questions for your groups. What research supports this approach? How will I know if it's actually working and what's my backup plan if a student doesn't do well? And if you can't answer those questions in 60 seconds, you need to rethink your, your group, all right. So from groups let's move to another widely celebrated strategy that's supposed to be the go-to gold standard of behavior intervention Check-in check-out.

Speaker 1:

I talked about this in episode 162, where I gave check-in check-out, or SECO, a grade of B In that episode I told you about Jake. He was a fourth grader. He had spiky hair that never quite laid flat the way it was supposed to and a grin that could light up any room. When he wasn't melting down in the hallway. His teacher was at her wit's end. Jake would interrupt lessons, blurt out answers and sometimes get up and just wander around. So I put him in check-in checkout and I was really actually excited about it. I followed the protocol perfectly Daily behavior, goals, point sheets, morning check-ins where we talk about his plan for the day, and afternoon debriefs to celebrate wins and problem solve the challenges. And for six weeks it looked like we were doing a perfect tier two intervention until I sat down to analyze the data. Jake actually had more behavioral incidents on the days that we checked in than on the days that we didn't. I remember looking at that spreadsheet feeling like I had completely failed this kid who trusted me every morning with hopes to have a better day.

Speaker 1:

Check-in checkout has solid research behind it and for students whose misbehavior is driven by attention seeking, this intervention is beautiful because it builds relationships, it provides structure and it gives immediate feedback, which are all the things these kids crave. But where it falls apart is with kids like Jake, whose behaviors come from things like ADHD or skill deficits or sensory overload. Seco can actually make things worse for these students because we can't relationship our way out of brain-based differences. And here's what those enthusiastic training sessions about check-in checkout don't tell you that even in large-scale research studies, 25 to 40 percent of students on check-in checkout needed more intensive supports. So it's not the magic bullet that it's often presented as. Districts that push check-in checkout as the default tier two option are overselling it and they're setting you up for frustration when even your perfect fidelity to the method doesn't yield results.

Speaker 1:

Perfect implementation of the wrong intervention is still the wrong intervention. So before putting any student on check-in, check-out. Spend five minutes and do a quick function analysis what happens right before the behavior, what does a student get from it, and, if the pattern doesn't point to attention seeking, pause and reconsider. All right, so we've recapped the first six episodes of the Graded series and I would love for you to go back and listen to those episodes in their entirety if they spark some curiosity for you and you want to hear more about what I have to say about them.

Speaker 1:

Second, because listening to all of this, all of these tools that don't work the way they're supposed, to all of these systems that are setting us up to fail, that information can feel pretty heavy and you may be sitting there thinking great, steph. So basically everything I've been taught to do in school counseling is wrong, and I get it. I have been there and had those exact same thoughts. There was a time in my career that I thought that I was the problem. I wondered if I just wasn't smart enough or maybe not skilled enough or dedicated enough to make these interventions work the way everyone else was reporting them. And I'll be even more honest with you.

Speaker 1:

I wrestle with providing this information, sometimes Before every podcast episode, every social media post, every school counselor consultation, I stop and I ask myself is this too negative? Does this sound too harsh? Am I being too politically incorrect to call out all of these beloved practices? But then I remind myself of this you deserve the research-based truth more than you deserve all these pretty little lies that are floating around the school counseling world. You are absolutely drowning in school counseling fluff. Everywhere else You're getting pretty graphics that don't change outcomes, feel-good strategies that don't survive past Monday afternoon and inspirational quotes that won't pay for the therapy you need after the really, really rough weeks and I say that tongue in cheek, but I know you know what I mean.

Speaker 1:

What I've decided is this Questioning broken tools isn't negativity, it's wisdom and the ability to recognize that you're not failing the system, but the system is failing you is the first step toward doing sustainable work that actually matters on your campus. Believe it or not, there's a lot of power and optimism that comes from not only recognizing that the cards have been stacked against you, but in being able to really describe and discuss those challenges from a research-based, matter-of-fact perspective when it's needed on your campus. That's exactly what we do in my School for School Counselors Mastermind, where we take these frustrations and we turn them into articulate advocacy. Now, with that understanding in place, I want to show you two more practices that perfectly illustrate this gap between good intentions and terrible outcomes. And these final two might hit closest to home because they're everywhere and they are presented as the most caring, most inclusive approaches that we could possibly use, as the most caring, most inclusive approaches that we could possibly use. So imagine this nightmare scenario A student is hospitalized for severe depression just weeks after breezing through a minute meeting with all of the standard fine, good, okay responses.

Speaker 1:

Meeting with all of the standard fine, good, okay. Responses. On paper, that school counselor had checked every box and contacted every kid on campus to identify needs, but in reality the system failed that child. The truth about minute meetings, which I talked about just a few episodes ago and gave a grade of a D, is that they look proactive, they promise equity in every student getting FaceTime with the counselor and they produce these really colorful spreadsheets and charts that administrators love to see. But they're performative, they're not relational. A one or two-minute check-in cannot uncover deeper struggles in students period and there's a legal reality to these that nobody talks about Quick surveys or meetings that gather sensitive information can fall under federal rules like PPRA, and without a clear educational purpose and parent awareness, you're collecting data that can actually create liability.

Speaker 1:

So you've got to be careful. But more toward the point, I think we need to really recognize the fact that equity doesn't mean giving every student the same thing. It means giving every student what they need. Minute meetings don't accomplish equity. They're equality disguised as equity, and there's a massive difference there. If you want to hear more about that, scroll back just a couple episodes and listen to the episode on minute meetings. But at the end of the day, here is the question I want you to consider Are you measuring what matters or just what's easy to measure? And instead of minute meetings, spend some time scanning your school's naturally collected data Attendance patterns, grade drops, discipline reports, nurse visits. Those are going to show you where to focus faster and more accurately than a spreadsheet full of fine and good responses.

Speaker 1:

All right and last, let's tackle the phrase that every counselor has memorized and repeated without question. I'm talking about confidentiality statements, which I graded as a D. You may be shocked by that if you haven't listened to this information yet, because most school counselors, I would say, would grade it an A or a B, no, no, no, it's nowhere close. So when we talk about confidentiality statements, we're talking about things like this what you say in here stays in here unless you want to hurt yourself, hurt others or someone is hurting you. We have all said that. We memorized it in grad school. You probably printed it on a poster and you made it part of your school counseling routine.

Speaker 1:

It sounds professional, clinical and protective of kids, but in schools it is a promise that we simply cannot keep. It was designed for clinical counseling, where formal informed consent makes these boundaries viable. Private practice therapists have signed paperwork and clear legal frameworks and parents who've explicitly agreed to these limits. But schools operate differently. We work on implied consent, not formal agreements. On implied consent, not formal agreements, and we're part of educational teams, not isolated treatment providers, and those factors alone change everything about confidentiality. When we make a statement like that and we make promises, we can't keep. Students feel betrayed. The moment we have to involve other people, parents feel shut out of their child's support system, administrators see you as a walking liability and lawmakers increasingly see secrecy where we intended privacy. That's why we're seeing legislation in states like Texas and Florida that restricts how schools handle sensitive student information. What we call privacy or confidentiality the public often hears as secrecy, so rewrite your confidentiality script to match the actual context. Context Try something like what you share with me is private, but sometimes we may have to talk to other people to help keep you safe and successful and if that happens, we're going to talk through it together first.

Speaker 1:

All right, so those have been the first eight episodes of the Graded Podcast series. Here's what I really want you to remember these tools are often failing you, and to be able to recognize that difference that the failure is in the tools and not in your effort is wisdom. And in our school counseling world, now more than ever, you need the reassurance and the confidence that comes from knowing it's not you doing it wrong. You might have just been given the wrong recipe. If this Highlights Reel gave you a little bit of relief or maybe lit a fire of some righteous anger in you, don't stop here. Go back and binge the full episodes, because each one goes deeper than what we covered today and they all give more stories and research and strategies that you can wake up and start using the very next morning. And if you're craving a place where these insights turn into actual plans, where these verdicts become action steps that actually work in your real live school situation. That's exactly what happens inside the School for School Counselors Mastermind.

Speaker 1:

I am in our weekly support chats every single week, giving guidance just like what you heard today, except it's custom, tailored to your campus, your caseload and your actual challenges. Tailored to your campus, your caseload and your actual challenges. You'll be surrounded by some of the smartest and most strategic school counselors on the planet. These are people who are moving past this compliance theater and into work that not only changes lives, but that they genuinely enjoy day to day. This is real support, real cases and real courage.

Speaker 1:

To stop pretending like these ridiculous mandates is the same as working effectively, because here's the truth you didn't get into this profession so that you could decorate your program with pretty interventions that don't work. You came to lead change. You came to be the person who stands between students and the systems that don't serve them, and the mastermind is where you're going to find the backup you've been missing to do exactly that. All right, I'll be back soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast. Until then, keep questioning, keep learning and keep putting kids first. I know you will. I hope you have the best week. Take care.

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Steph Johnson

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