You’re Not the Behavior Department

Is managing student behavior actually school counseling?

If you’re spending most of your week handling behavior referrals, putting out fires, and decoding defiance before you’ve even opened your calendar… this episode draws a line most schools never clearly defined.

Because somewhere along the way, behavior didn’t just increase.

It migrated.

And it landed in the school counselor’s office.

In this episode, we unpack how school counselors quietly became the default behavior managers in many buildings when discipline structures softened without being clearly replaced.

You’ll hear:

• How PBIS and trauma-informed shifts reshaped discipline systems- and what that meant for school counseling roles
• Why behavior intervention and school counseling are different specialties
• What burnout research actually says about non-counseling duties
• The simple line that helps you sort capacity from compliance in real time

If behavior has been swallowing your week, this conversation will help you see what belongs to you... and what doesn’t.

********

Join our new Skool for School Counselors community 

********

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! 

********

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

********

This work is part of the School for School Counselors body of work developed by Steph Johnson, LPC, CSC, which centers role authority over role drift, consultative practice over fix-it culture, adult-designed systems and environments as primary drivers of student behavior, clinical judgment over compliance, and school counselor identity as leadership within complex systems.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:07

By 10:15 a.m., you're already essentially running a behavior clinic, and your coffee

A Morning Of Behavior Referrals

SPEAKER_00 0:14

is still untouched. You just don't call it a behavior clinic. The first kid refused to work. Second kid cussed out a teacher. Third kid walked out of class again. None of them were scheduled to see you, but all of them were sent. You haven't even opened your calendar yet. So you listen, you nod, you ask what happened, and then you ask what they were feeling. You try to figure out what's beneath it all. And while you're doing that, an unsettling thought slides through your brain. Is this actually school counseling? You don't say it out loud because everybody says the same thing, right? Behavior is communication. So you take the student because that's what school counselors do. When I started in this field, I didn't question that logic for a second. Behavior is communication. Students communicate distress through behavior. So it must be my job. And nobody ever told me otherwise. And here's what makes this really ironic. I had the blessing, and depending on how you look at it, the misfortune of being mentored early on by a school psychologist. So I learned behavior intervention well. Function, reinforcement, data collection. I got really, really good at it. And do you know what happens when you get really good at behavior intervention? You get more behavior intervention. It didn't lighten my load, it deepened it. This past Saturday, inside our mastermind coffee chat, I just asked how everybody's week ended. And all of a sudden, everybody erupted. And school counselors from all over the country started talking all at once, saying things like, I feel like I do nothing but behavior now. I barely see my actual counseling kids. And this time of year is brutal. Y'all, they weren't being dramatic, right? They were just so tired. And it kind of hit me in that moment. You know, in school counseling, we never really defined the line between counseling need and behavior intervention. And if you don't, everything crosses it. Hey, school counselor, if that question is this really school counseling, has ever crossed your mind while a student was sitting across from you,

Is This Really School Counseling

SPEAKER_00 2:53

you've been asking the right question. And in today's episode, we're going to answer it. You are being asked to do work you were never trained for. And the system that put that work on your desk has no intention of explaining why. By the time we're done today, I want to give you a powerful line. One you can use to see your work clearly every time a behavior referral lands on your desk. So if you're ready for some straight talk, my friend, some clarity on your work and maybe a little bit of rebellion, you're gonna be in the right place. I'm Steph Johnson, and this is the School for School Counselors podcast. So before I take you through how this happened, let me just give you the powerful line I just mentioned.

The Guiding Line: Capacity Or Compliance

SPEAKER_00 3:40

Because once you have that, you're gonna hear everything else differently. Counseling builds capacity, discipline sets limits. If you can start sorting the referrals coming across your desk through that lens, your week changes. And today I'm gonna show you exactly how to do it, even when the behaviors look identical on the surface. Here's a quick example a student tells a teacher to shut up and storms out. If that student does it with every adult every day across settings, we're looking at a capacity problem. Regulation, skills, those are all in your wheelhouse. If that same student can keep it together for the coach but explodes every day in third period, that's not a counseling problem first. That's a structure problem first. One shortcut that you can carry into any behavior referral that you get. If the student can do it somewhere, it's not a question of capacity. It's a structure problem, and those go elsewhere. So hold on to that, and I'm gonna show you how this whole situation got started in the first place. Because it didn't just start in your building. I know sometimes it feels that way. We've got to go back about 10 or 15 years.

A Shortcut For Sorting Referrals

SPEAKER_00 5:03

School discipline data was getting serious attention and for very good reason. The racial disparities in school discipline are real and documented by the U.S. Department of Education's own civil rights data. Black students have been suspended at two to three times the rate of white students for the same behaviors. That data deserved to be taken seriously, and it still does. The pressure to change course back then was real and it was warranted. Zero tolerance policies had created real damage with suspensions for minor infractions and accelerated pathways to the juvenile justice system. And that harm was impossible to ignore. But here's what nobody said out loud during all of this recalibration. Pulling back from punitive discipline didn't mean that we replaced it with something better. In too many buildings, it was replaced with nothing. The accountability structure didn't evolve. It dissolved. Administrators who issued consequences, who held behavioral expectations, who sent students to the office, started getting a label. They were punitive, not trauma-informed, and behind the times, compliance became the path of least professional risk. You didn't have to believe in the philosophy of all of this. You just had to stop pushing back on it. And that's how the behavior system in schools stopped being a system and became a vibe. Formal consequences became really hard to find. And the behavior referral, the go figure this out somewhere referral, started landing in one place more than anywhere else. Your office. You and I both know what this looks like. You clear space in your schedule to stay available

How The System Lost Accountability

SPEAKER_00 7:03

for on-the-fly behavior intervention because you know it's coming. You tell people, I'll try to be there to help if nobody explodes. You've told yourself this is just what school counselors do now. And somewhere in the back of your mind, during all of this, you're thinking about the kids who actually need you. The ones who should be on your caseload who are still waiting. Student walks out of class for the third time this week, counselor. Student is verbally aggressive, refuses to work, and makes threats toward a peer, counselor. Teacher has run out of strategies and there's nowhere else to send them. You guessed it, the school counselor. Not because these types of referrals fit your training. You're not a disciplinarian, right? And you're not supposed to be punitive. It's because your door is open and in a building looking for somewhere to send it, that's enough. And if you zoom out, you can actually see this in the numbers. Nationally, we're at about 372 students per school counselor, according to ASCA's most recent national data. The professional recommendation is, of course, 250 to 1. We're not even close. And a 2024 replication study found that school counselors are spending nearly 37% of their time on non-counseling duties, which is composed of test coordination, scheduling changes, administrative coverage, and yes, behavioral holds. Nearly 37%. More than a third of your workday, not school counseling. You have been carrying the consequences of everyone else's decisions. A system stepped back from its responsibilities, left a vacuum in place, and your office was the closest available door. So you've been scrambling. And honestly, so did I. I can remember reading about behavior management on my own time, asking special education teachers to explain function-based thinking, uh, watching YouTube videos on how to run behavior intervention. I did all of those things. I was trying to piece together enough knowledge to feel competent in a role that nobody really prepared me for. So if you've ever felt behind with regard to behavior, it's not because you missed a training. It's because your role was expanded without your consent. And I want to be clear about this. This scrambling and trying to figure out how to handle behavior is not evidence of a gap in you. It's evidence of a gap in the system. So if you've ever let yourself think I should have this by now or I should know this by now, stop it. In a couple of minutes, I'm going to give you a few quick questions for those gray areas when maybe you get referrals where you genuinely can't tell whether it's capacity or compliance. But first, I want to show you a little bit more about why this gap exists

Counselors Become The Default Door

SPEAKER_00 10:12

because it is so illuminating. School counselors are typically trained under K-Crep or a close approximation of it, right? Person-centered approaches, developmental theory, systemic thinking, group counseling, crisis intervention, relational frameworks, clinical frameworks. That is the foundation of what you were trained to do. Behavior analysis is governed by an entirely separate credentialing body. It's the behavior analyst certification board. It's a separate degree, separate supervised field work, separate examination, and a completely different clinical world. These two systems were built for different purposes and they were never designed to overlap. K-Crep doesn't even require behavior analysis coursework. The BACB doesn't require counseling coursework. And the 2024 K-Crep standards confirm this. Behavior analysis is not in scope. And that's not due to an oversight. It was never part of the job. And then we can get even more specific with this because it wasn't just one reform movement that caused this problem. There were actually two. Two national school reform movements that required behavioral expertise from school counselors that came in from different directions at different times. And neither one of them brought any training along with them. The first was actually PBIS, positive behavior interventions and supports. If you've worked in a school in the last 20 years, I know you know PBIS. You've probably been asked to sit on a PBIS team. Maybe you have to implement it. Some of you monitor it and are responsible for it. But what most schools never told their school counselors is that PBIS is, at its foundation, an applied behavior analysis framework. Researchers Robert Horner and George Sugai documented that PBIS grew from and is infused with the principles and technology of behavior analysis. It is ABA at a systems level, the same clinical science that earned someone a BCBA credential. This is a training mismatch because school counselors were folded into PBIS teams without their role ever being formally defined. Counselor educator Christopher Sink documented this directly in 2016 that the roles and functions of school counselors within PBIS were, quote, not delineated until many years after they were first introduced. And there were few evidence-based resources for school counselor educators to draw upon in order to rework their pre-service courses to include MTSS curriculum. So, no preparation, no curriculum, just this new expectation. A 2024 survey of school-based behavior analysts found that BCBAs, the professionals who were actually trained for this work, were underutilized in general education settings. The people with the behavioral training weren't being

Training Mismatch: Counseling Vs ABA

SPEAKER_00 13:32

deployed. The people without it were being drafted. Then in the mid-2010s, a second movement arrived: trauma-informed practice, different language, different theoretical framework, and a different professional culture that was driving it, but structurally, it ended up in the same outcome. Get curious instead of punitive. Step back from traditional discipline. And really, if we're getting real in practice, send them to the school counselor. Behavioral work without behavioral training, landing in the school counselor's office again. So these were two national reform movements, both requiring expertise you were never trained to have, and they were both pointing kids to you. Sink, the same counselor educator whose 2016 study documented that PBIS preparation gap, described the mismatch this way. Imagine a physician who trained as a neurologist, completed the program, passed the boards, and went into practice only to be told, we need you to perform cardiac surgery today. You're here, the patient needs help, so figure it out. Same with us. And here's even one more layer. Most school counselors have no required postmaster's clinical supervision, right? Whatever supervision that exists is usually administrative, where the principal evaluates our performance, right? Not like in the vein of a clinician building competencies. The supervision structure, so to speak, that we receive doesn't develop the behavioral expertise that we need. And the organizational incentive to change any of that is not there because the current arrangement is working just fine for everybody who is not you. So essentially, you have been handed work that requires a credential you don't have in a system that provided no pathway to develop it, with supervision that wasn't designed to support it. Cool, right? So you didn't fail to learn something. You're not behind the power curve. It was never supposed to be part of your job. And so, because of this, it's costing people. Researcher Gerda Bardashi and her team at the University of Iowa, where she leads the Scanlon Center for School Mental Health, found that 20% of school counselors are already in the early stages of burnout. And when they looked at what was driving that, the findings were very specific. It was not the clinical work. It wasn't the students with significant trauma histories or the group sessions or the crisis calls. Y'all, all of that work is hard, but it's not what's burning people out. It's the non-counseling role stressors, the behavioral referrals that aren't really counseling referrals, the administrative work, the roles that are handed over to you without training or authority or infrastructure. Those kinds of role stressors drive burnout more than what our true jobs do. That's what the research keeps showing time and time again, which means the part of your job that's wearing you out is not the part of your job that you signed up for. And then there's this. Bardoshi and her colleague Oom in a 2024 paper found that professional identity, which is your clarity about who you are as a school counselor, what your role is, what it isn't, and what your work actually means in the world, is the single strongest protective factor against burnout that they could identify. So not smaller caseloads, not a better building, not even a pay raise, y'all. Professional identity. So the clearest line between where you are now and a sustainable career is not a policy change that you have to wait for. It's knowing very clearly, clinically, and without apology who you are and what your work is, and acting from that, even inside of a building that hasn't caught up yet. Your instincts about your role are not rigidity and they're not resistance. It's not you not being a team player, as you're often told. Your instincts about this are the things that can protect you. So let's make those instincts concrete. Let's let's draw that line in real time. Counseling changes internal capacity, discipline changes external behavior. Both can happen at the same time and often they should, but what matters is knowing which part of this really belongs to you. And the reason so much

PBIS And Trauma-Informed Waves

SPEAKER_00 18:37

behavioral work has landed on your desk is that the distinction was never made. So the question you can ask starting tomorrow morning when that next behavior referral finds its way to you is is this a capacity problem or is it a compliance problem? With capacity, the student genuinely lacks the internal skill to manage the situation. They lack the regulation, the coping, the cognitive flexibility. That's all based on clinical stuff. That's yours. Compliance concerns happen when the student has the skill. They know the expectation, but they're choosing not to follow it. That's not a counseling deficit. That's a structure problem. And structure belongs to administration. So let's make this even more concrete. The student who falls apart every time the work gets hard, who genuinely cannot tolerate frustration and who dysregulates the same way across every classroom, every adult, and every setting, that's capacity. The student who knows exactly what's expected, has been able to do it before on a calmer day, and is deciding right now that today is not the day. That is compliance. Same surface behavior on the outside, but requires a completely different response. You have to ask yourself, is this behavior consistent across all settings and all adults? Or is it specific to this classroom, this teacher, this time of day? Has the student ever demonstrated the skill? Can they do it on a good day, in a calm moment when they're with somebody they trust? Capacity is usually consistent. Compliance is usually contextual. And for a really fast shortcut, when you're feeling the pressure, if the student can do it somewhere, it's not capacity. And I mean, yeah, some kids do have both. Let's be honest. Um, they can have real capacity gaps and this willingness to test the limits at the same time. And when you're in this gray area, not being sure is not a sign of failure on your part. That's exactly where all of your skills and insight and consultation are in their keep. You document what you observed, you document what you're uncertain about and who you're handing it off to. Not every behavior referral needs a clean answer from you. Some of them just need a clear handoff. So if it's capacity, lean in. If it's compliance, consult, but don't immediately absorb it. What this does is give you a way to clearly see what's right in front of you. I've got to be real too for a second. I'm gonna pause for just a second, be super honest with you and say, I know the types of campuses that many of you work in, and I know that change is not going to happen overnight. The behavior intervention flood is probably not gonna change for you this week. And you may even be thinking, great, that's a wonderful distinction, but my school is not going to turn itself inside out because I listen to a podcast. I'm still gonna have behavior on my desk. So now what do I do? Well, first we have to start changing the lens, right? Just changing our perspective, becoming more aware of the nuance between the two behavior camps so we can start. Start making some of those discernments and distinctions in real time. The second part of that is inside our mastermind, we built tools for this conundrum. So we have a defiance versus dysregulation decision tree for the hard cases. We have a behavior next steps flowchart for when you know what you're looking at, but you just need the clear path forward. We have behavior intervention trainings designed to support your school counseling credential. And we have a full behavior playbook built specifically for school counselors, not behavior analysts. You are allowed to be a school counselor and still insist that someone else enforce expectations. Some of us have kind of covertly been converting discipline into therapy and doing it in the category of compassion. But I'm not sure that that's the right direction. So if you need a place where you can sort these kinds of referrals out, that's what the mastermind is, right? We have all the resources and the trainings, but mostly it's a room

Burnout Drivers And Identity

SPEAKER_00 23:12

where you can get with people who get it, who've seen it, who've done it, who have great feedback for you, and who actually know your name. If you're interested, the link to that is in the show notes. All right, my friend. Whoa, in the next episode, we are going to tackle another sacred cow of the education world, trauma-informed practice, which was the second wave of this behavior mismatch. And here's a spoiler for you. When people say the research supports trauma-informed schools, they're repeating a sentence that almost nobody on the planet has verified. So we are going to verify it line by line in the next episode. I'll see you back here for that explosion. But first, just remember where you are. If you've been feeling like behavior swallowed your school counseling role, you may not be wrong because nobody ever drew that line for you. School counseling can change internal capacity, but discipline is often needed to change external behavior. And if the student can do it somewhere, it's usually not a question of capacity. That's the line. And once you see it, you're going to start noticing how often you're asked to cross it. I'm Steph Johnson. I'll be back soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast. In the meantime, keep doing the work that's actually yours. Take care.