A.I. and School Counseling

Transcript

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It seems like everywhere you look, people are talking about AI, about the advancements in artificial intelligence and about how everyone can use AI for everything, everywhere At least, that's what it feels like right, and our field of school counseling is no different.

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It seems like every day, I'm seeing more and more posts of people asking for AI resources or claiming to have some sort of magic key into an AI wonderland for school counselors.

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I have some big thoughts on this subject, so I thought I would share them with you this week on the podcast and welcome back to the School for School Counselors podcast.

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I'm Steph Johnson, your host.

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I'm a full-time school counselor, just like you, on a mission to make school counseling more sustainable and more enjoyable, because you deserve real support, not just lip service.

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You deserve the true supports that help make your work not only manageable, but something that you look forward to walking through the doors and going into each and every day.

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My goal is to help you feel competent day.

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My goal is to help you feel competent, connected and inspired to make a difference, even if you're working in a challenging situation, and so I think you're going to find this week's conversation about AI really interesting, whether you end up agreeing with my points of view, or whether you walk away saying, ah that Steph lady, she's full of baloney.

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It does not matter to me either way.

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What I want to do really is just get the conversation going.

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I want to expand your thinking on this topic just a little bit and get you thinking critically about some of the things that you're seeing and hearing in the school counseling world, and I'm going to take you through a lot of territory.

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In this episode.

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We'll talk about AI platforms using artificial intelligence for generating school counseling materials one big, dangerous and pretty scary thing that I'm seeing on the horizon in our industry and some of the things that we need to make sure we're not selling short as we're endeavoring to meet and shake hands with the future.

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All right, so let's get into it.

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Let's talk about AI in school counseling.

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I think this is a big conversation that's going to be going on for quite some time and it's super trendy, right.

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A lot of people are ready to jump on this bandwagon, but I'll show my cards right now and tell you I'm pretty worried and I don't think that now is necessarily the time to be jumping in AI with both feet, even when we know that's the way the world is headed, like it or not, this is what is going to happen.

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But you know I'm a little bit of a purist when it comes to counseling.

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I believe completely in the power of connection, the power of relationship, the power of child centered conversation and about evidence based techniques.

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We talk about these all the time on the podcast, and that's never going to change, because we can't assume that just because we think something is cool or we think something is very intelligent, that it can be a satisfactory substitute for those kinds of connection, and so instead, I think we need to maybe be looking at how can we leverage AI intelligently without jumping the gun too quickly, if that makes sense.

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Let me kind of tell you what I mean.

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I have seen in the past few months certainly the past six months an explosion of people talking and asking about AI platforms for school counseling, about AI-generated school counseling activities, things like that, and while I get that our jobs are complicated, they're busy, they're messy, we feel like we're running a million miles an hour.

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We're running a million miles an hour, we've also got to keep in mind that the easiest way may not necessarily be the best way, and I do think we have an ethical obligation to be looking at what's best for our students versus what's best for us.

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Now, as I say that, I'm not implying that people who are interested in utilizing AI or people that are already using it in school counseling don't care about their kids or they don't want to do their best job.

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That's not what I'm saying at all.

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But I do think that in our eagerness to adopt these tools, sometimes we overlook the fundamentals, and I would go even further and say sometimes a lot of these early adopters have a little bit of tunnel vision about what they're doing.

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You know a lot of people that you see talking about AI and school counseling right now are content creators that are worried about the future of teachers, pay teachers, and rightfully so, because you are going to start to see that platform get flooded, absolutely inundated with a million tons of pure crap.

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It's going to be generated through AI, and it won't be terrible because AI has done a terrible job although in my opinion, it's still not great at tasks like that but because the people who are turning that out don't know how to work with it.

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They don't know how to prompt it.

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They want to put in some basic instructions and have AI turn something out for them and blindly accept that and then move on.

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It's a lot of the way a lot of school counselors use TPT resources already.

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Right, they look up I need an anger management group and they scroll and they find one that looks the cutest and they download it and they run with it and they don't look at the underlying mechanisms.

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They don't consult any of the treatment planners.

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They take it at face value and run with it and then, when it doesn't work, they sit and wonder why.

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Ai is going to be like that for a long time.

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It is going to flood the self-created curriculum market unlike anything you have ever seen, and a lot of the people that are at the forefront of that industry right now who are your big names in content creation a lot of them are looking toward AI.

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They want to be the first to market.

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They want to begin creating prompts and tools for AI to guide school counselors in generating even more of that crap, because it's going to be easy to slap on a website, tell school counselors you can copy and paste these prompts, use them and you'll get extraordinary results.

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But it doesn't work that way.

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Here's how I see AI currently.

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I do use AI sparingly for other purposes.

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I do not use it for school counseling, but sometimes I do use it for school, for school counselors purposes.

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Now, to be clear, I do not use AI to create my content.

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I don't use it in the way most people do because I think it's very disingenuous.

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As a matter of fact, on the majority of my emails that I send out, there is a disclaimer at the bottom that says no AI.

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This email was generated by a human being and it was me.

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And if you don't see that footer on an email, it's not because the email was generated by a human being and it was me.

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And if you don't see that footer on an email, it's not because the email was generated by AI, it's probably just because I got busy and forgot to put it on there.

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I don't like to use AI to communicate because I think it takes the human element out of the connection.

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And again, that's what I'm all about.

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Right, that is the core foundation upon which we've built School for School Counselors, and I don't ever, ever want to lose that.

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We need to be mindful of connection, we need to be mindful of human interaction and collaboration, and so, for that reason, I will never use AI to generate the emails that I send to you daily.

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I will never use AI to create podcast episode scripts or to create articles or anything like that.

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In the past, I've used it sparingly for some social media posts, but I'm going to be honest with you.

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I dabbled in it a little bit and I hated it because it wasn't truly interactive.

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And the more experienced we all become with AI, the more we're going to be able to spot these kinds of things at 30 paces.

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You can probably already do it now.

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Right?

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You've probably started to pick up on the words that instantly signal that AI has written something.

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Things like let's dive into, or this is a game changer.

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Ai has taken the kinds of things we've always used in a normal conversation and decimated the nuance out of it and just recycles it over and over and over again.

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Anyway, I digress.

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You are going to start to see people who are blindly using these AI tools and prompts to generate a bunch of baloney.

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They're going to take it in their schools, they're going to use it and they're going to wonder why they're not getting the results they're wanting.

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And further, they're going to start wondering why they're not gaining the professional reputation that they want on campus, why they're not being deferred to in serious matters of social and emotional health.

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And a lot of that comes back to how you talk about your work.

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How fluent are you in the things that you're using?

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How quickly can you talk about them at the drop of a hat?

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How informed and capable are you in guiding your staff in accessing some of the right solutions?

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Ai cannot do that for you, not yet it can't intervene on your behalf when you're standing outside your principal's office and they're saying I just don't know what to do with this kid.

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They've been in in-school suspension four times this week.

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They keep turning over furniture and chairs and we just don't know what to do next.

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The worst thing that you could do in that situation is say, hey, wait, give me a minute, let me go consult my AI and I'll get back to you.

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That is an opportunity 1,000% lost when, in contrast, you could stand there and say, well, best practice says that approaches A, b and C are the way we need to be looking.

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Have we implemented those with fidelity?

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What are some ways I can support that implementation?

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How truly trauma-informed are we on this campus?

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Let's talk about the nuance of that.

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Let's talk about how I can work with that teacher to really understand the impact of the student's past on their current behavior.

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I would love to work with them and do X and Y and Z, because we know when we do that we expect these certain outcomes, these kinds of conversations.

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Here let me pull the research and show you that's professional fluency.

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That's what we should all be developing as school counselors and really it's the bedrock on top of which we created our School for School Counselors mastermind.

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We hold support and consultation chats every single week and really those are misnamed.

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We do provide support, we do provide case consultation, but really what we're doing is we're building professional fluency and we're doing it in a couple of ways.

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First, we're providing a forum where we can all discuss, collaborate, share ideas, share outcomes, what we're doing to address issues, and so everyone's getting exposure to that.

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The second way that we're addressing professional fluency is that when you show up to these chats and you become comfortable enough that you feel empowered to speak and you offer ideas or you offer to talk through things, you're essentially putting yourself in the hot seat right.

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You're testing your ability to be able to speak to an issue in real time, on the fly.

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And that's where the beauty of support and consultation comes from, because the more that you do that, the more you're willing to put yourself out there in addition to just absorbing conversation.

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You then begin to become an expert practitioner, and I think this is just personal opinion.

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I think we have stagnated in that category.

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In school counseling, we see fewer and fewer people who aspire to be masters at their craft in the way they can be when they're content experts, where they know approaches like the back of their hand, where they have certain zones of expertise and they can dive into it 1,000%.

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Those people aren't readily available on our campuses and part of this is and again I'll come back to it the belief that you can just go download a printable curriculum, see my air quotes there and be able to deliver it and just instantly be successful with it.

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Sometimes it works, but a lot of times it doesn't.

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And again it comes back to your fluency.

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Do you understand the mechanisms that are happening?

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Do you understand why certain activities were selected?

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Does the creator understand why they put them in there?

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And if they do, why the heck haven't they provided an explanation?

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These are not trade secrets.

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We have treatment planners everywhere.

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But again, I'm getting off topic, thinking out loud, right, but anyway, the first issue with using AI in school counseling is that even if AI is churning out a bunch of information to you, you're going to need to be an expert at your craft.

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The second thing, something that you may know or maybe you've heard, but just don't understand the true implications of it because you haven't had the opportunity to work with it a lot.

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Ai makes up a lot of stuff.

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It has a tendency to hallucinate information when it doesn't know the answers, information when it doesn't know the answers, and it will rarely tell you that it doesn't know, unless you specifically instruct it to do so.

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And even then it will sometimes fly off the rails, and so a lot of times it will just make things up that it thinks will be plausible, but it doesn't have a human's depth and breadth of experience to really understand if that information is actually plausible at all.

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Here's a confession I tried using AI to help me find research.

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I wanted to find academic papers on certain topics, and even though you would think that finding resources like that in published journals would be pretty easy and straightforward, I'm here to tell you right now it was not, and as I was looking for those resources, I would go back because I wasn't willing to take the information at face value.

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Just knowing what I know about AI, I would go find those papers through the different databases that I'm a member of, through Google, through things like that.

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I wanted to identify the paper and read it with my own two eyes.

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I wanted to download it, archive it.

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I wanted to have tangible proof of its existence and probably 50 to 60% of the time that I asked chat GPT for resources, it just flat made stuff up.

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It would make up article titles, authors' names, even journal names.

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Sometimes it would go so far as to create fraudulent abstracts.

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It was crazy and it was scary the amount of information that it could falsify in half a second, even when instructed not to do so.

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So I thought maybe I just need to train it up a little bit, and so I consulted some people in that field and tried training it up, and that's been going on probably almost a year and I'm no longer using it for podcast research purposes.

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I just kind of dabble in it here and there when I'm interested in something, but it has, hands down, not been a reliable resource.

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So do you have the fluency to be able to discern whether or not AI is hallucinating?

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Because, I'm going to be honest, sometimes it is very convincing.

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It can sound really good but be 100% false.

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And so we are not yet to a point in our world where I think this is ready for prime time in school counseling, not in a world where we have people blindly just downloading resources and using them without questioning them at all.

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And I'm not trying to take away from your expertise and the level of commitment to your craft, but you know and I know this is going on, and do we really want to turn everybody loose with AI?

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With that kind of mindset?

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That starts to feel really, really scary.

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You probably also need to know that AI is famous for its biases Lots and lots of biases built into those different kinds of software, lots of things that are almost impossible to unteach it.

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And so when we're working with things as sensitive as emotional health, mental health, interpersonal skills, identifying cultural nuance of behaviors and beliefs, we can't rely on a biased model.

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It's ridiculous, and yet we have people out there trying to convince you that this is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

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Now I will say I do sometimes feel like I have the curse of looking too far into things, but I'm here to tell you, just based on the bias aspect alone, I would not trust AI in my school counseling program at this point in time.

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All right, well, that was a lot of thoughts and a lot of feelings.

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I'm going to pause it there, but I have more thoughts for you and I'm going to come back next week with the rest of what I'm thinking about Things like how the online resource world for school counselors is going to change, what some of the things are that we need to be looking toward as we see those changes start, and the way that we may be undermining our own efforts to advocate, to elevate our position on campus with the resources that we're opting to use.

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So, if you've been doing the things that everybody else is doing, if you've been following the crowd and just downloading things or trying to generate things because you think that's what everybody's doing, I want you to make sure that you join me again next week.

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And again, I'm not trying to convince you to change the way you're doing things, but I do want to expand your knowledge base.

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I want you to be able to think through the things you're doing critically so that we can make sure that we are using these resources ethically while still retaining our integrity.

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All right, so it's getting deep, friends.

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It's getting deep, but it's well worth thinking about.

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We got to get ahead of this power curve and just considering all of the angles right.

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We don't want to blindly just jump on the bandwagon because everybody else is doing it.

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All right.

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Well, I'll be back next week with part two of the AI and school counseling conversation and until then, I hope you have the best week.

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I know many of you are headed back to work this week.

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May the force be with you, and I know the kids are going to be so excited to see you, and I can't wait to see my students when they return this Wednesday.

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It's going to be a great day, for sure.

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So have the best week and we will talk again soon.

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Take care.

A.I. and School Counseling

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