Is It an Intervention, or Theatre?

A Technique That Lost Its Purpose

A school counselor is sitting in a training. It's a state sponsored or district recommended one, the kind that you get an official email for, right? That you have to actually wait for the date to come around and then you have to show up. And while she's in that official training, the presenter, who is somebody highly esteemed in her state, puts up a slide. And that slide has a few words on it. So she writes them down because that's what good school counselors do in trainings. We take notes. We want to do this right. And then she goes back to her campus. And the next Tuesday, she sits down with a kid and she runs the thing that she wrote down off of that slide. And from the outside, it looks like counseling. It has all of the staging of counseling involved. The office and the chairs, maybe a worksheet and a calm voice. It all looks right. But she has no idea that what she just did was a broken version of one of the most studied questions in solution-focused brief therapy. She has no idea what that question was even designed to do, or when it should be used, or when it shouldn't, because nobody in that training told her. And that's the part that's been sitting in my brain about this since I saw a very shocking presentation from a State Department of Education. If what that school counselor did on a Tuesday morning off of that slide could have been done by anybody else in the building who had the same slide, then what exactly did she go to grad school for? Hey school counselor, welcome back. Today we're talking about what happens to a counseling technique while it's on its way to you, where it comes from, how it gets handed down, what happens when it gets simplified and cleaned up to the point that the thing you're using looks nothing like the real thing and doesn't even work anymore. And what that's costing us. Not just our students, but us, our profession as a whole. So if you're ready for some straight talk, my friend, some clarity on your work and maybe a little bit of rebellion, you are in the right place. I'm Steph Johnson, and this is the School for School Counselors podcast.

Why Good Tools Stop Working

Let's have some fun. Let's start in a place that has absolutely nothing to do with school counseling. All right, so stay with me.

The Supplement Aisle Warning Sign

The next time that you're at the drugstore, go and stand in the supplement aisle. The wall of vitamins and gummies, you know the one, right? Pick up a stress bottle. There's always a stress bottle, right? And read the front of it because the language on this bottle is a thing of beauty. It'll say something like, find your calm, same-day stress support, two-in-one blend, powered by science, clinically studied to reduce stress and occasional anxiousness. And I know they say that because those came directly off the bottles in the drugstore. Powered by science, clinically studied. This bottle is basically wearing a lab coat. And then look at the shape of it. It's shaped like medicine. It's sitting on the shelf near the actual medicine. The label reads like medicine. But there's this little asterisk after every promise. Find your calm, asterisk. And if you follow that asterisk all the way down to the tiny print, it says the thing that hardly anybody reads. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. So the front of the bottle is communicating every signal of real medicine. And then the back of the bottle admits that it's not medicine. Maybe the dose is too low to actually do anything. Maybe the one study on it might be an ingredient that's barely even in it, but it looks legit, right? It's got the vocabulary of the real thing, and almost nobody checks because why would you? It's on the shelf. It says clinical. So somebody somewhere must have vetted it. Hold on to that feeling. Hold on to that gap between what the label is promising and what's actually in the bottle. Because that exact gap is sitting in a lot of our school counseling offices right now. And this week I found it sitting in a training run by a state agency. So here's what happened.

How A Model Gets Flattened

It was about solution-focused brief counseling, and it was presented to school counselors by someone whose actual job title is supporting counselors across the state. Someone with a high degree of education, who has reportedly been vetted, who's been given a stamp of authority by a state department of education. And solution-focused brief counseling is real. It is a legitimate counseling model. I want to be clear about that. I use it every day. So this is not me telling you that solution-focused brief counseling is junk. Actually, it's exactly the opposite. Solution focused counseling has good bones, which is exactly why the next part of this matters. And real quick, if solution focused isn't your thing, if you're sitting there thinking, well, I don't even use that, stay with me anyway, because the model is just the example. What happened to it is going to be the point. And the same thing is happening to whatever you do reach for. So don't check out the man, because by the time it made it to these state presenter slides, three things had happened to the solution-focused approach. First, the presentation presented a model of one to four sessions. One to four. And it said that for a reason, it was making a case. The whole pitch in the presentation was about efficiency. This is a fast one, y'all. This one reduces your overwhelm, fits your caseload, it's going to get kids in and out. And it contained this hard session cap as a feature. There was no citation involved with this, no clinical reasoning or rationale, just this is the efficient method. So this is how many sessions we think it should be. And hold on to that word, efficient. We're going to come back to that. Secondly, it listed techniques. And all of the techniques had catchy little names like cheerleading and detailing and my personal favorite, mindfielding. Then third, it had a signature activity. It was a visualization exercise where you walk the student into imagining a better future. They called it future land. It's cute, right? But if you don't know the solution-focused literature, every bit of that probably sounds pretty good. It sounds pretty clinical. It sounds like a real framework with real pieces. That's the lab coat around the supplement bottle. So I did the thing I do. I went looking for where these pieces actually came from, because according to my background, these weren't quite fitting into a true solution-focused frame. I wanted to know which of the foundational solution-focused texts these words came from because I had never heard them. Steve DeShazer and Sue Kimberg, the people who actually built this model, or their proteges, somebody. Who in the actual development of this technique signed off on these labels? And y'all, they weren't in there. None of them. I couldn't find them in DeShazer. I couldn't find them in Berg. I couldn't find them in the technique sets I reviewed. We'll get there. So where did they come from? And I started tracing them. I traced them all the way back to a handout. A 2013 school counseling handbook from another State Department of Education. A practitioner toolkit. Not a study, not a peer-reviewed anything, a handout. So follow this chain with me because this is the whole problem. Years ago, somebody at a State Department of Education made a handout and gave these techniques cute, memorable names, and that's where it started. We'll chalk it up to practitioner shorthand in the best of intentions. Fine, okay, that's sometimes what handouts do. But then nobody upstream ever checked. The handout got treated as if it were the model. And then years later, a second state agency, maybe even more, I don't know, but a different agency in a different state picked up those handout names and put them in front of an entire state's worth of school counselors as the established vocabulary of an evidence-based practice. And I'm not telling you this to throw shade on any one presenter or state. That's actually the opposite of my point. The point is that nobody in this chain is the villain. The first state didn't set out to distort anything. The presenter who picked it up wasn't being lazy. They were just trusting the source upstream of them, the same way that that source trusted whatever was upstream of it. Everybody was trusting the lab coat. Nobody opened the bottle. And that's how a prop travels. They're not bad actors, but these things travel through a chain of good people who each trust the last. And before this starts sounding like me standing on a hill pointing down and barking at everybody else, I will admit

When Activities Look Like Change

I used to use these too. Earlier in my career, I would pull cute activities off the internet, the catchy named techniques, the things that looked authoritative and seemed to have all the pieces I needed. I'd run them and I'd feel good about running them. I remember one anger management group in particular. We had a curriculum, the kids were engaged, they could tell me the skills, they could explain the concepts, and honestly, I thought it was going pretty well. By the end of the group, we were celebrating. We brought mini cupcakes, we talked about everything they'd learned, everybody was smiling. It felt successful. And then Monday came. A couple of the kids showed up asking when the group was again. And I reminded them, it's over. Remember the cupcakes? Remember the celebration? Y'all, we finished. And within days, they were right back where they started. Back in classrooms, in conflicts, back to shouting, back to raising cane. And that was one of the first times I remember realizing something that I just didn't have the words for. The kids had participated, the curriculum had been completed, but nothing had actually changed. What I'd had was a room full of kids who could tell me about anger management. What we did not have was anger management. Because somewhere along the way, I confused participation with change, completion with change, engagement with change. And those are not the same thing. I'd confused exposure to a skill with the acquisition of one. And I think a whole lot of us do that. What changed for me was a couple of things. When I started training interns, I actually had to start explaining why we do what we do. And for some of it, I couldn't. And then because of that, when I started really investing in school counseling research, I'd be sitting with the literature or with an actual treatment manual, and I'd realize the activities that we were looking at didn't match what I was seeing in the publications. So I started looking deeper. And then I kept looking. I have been researching the efficacy of school counseling printable materials off and on for about six years now. So this is not a hunch. This is something that I keep circling back around to again and again. But at the core of the issue is this. When we take a technique and we strip the theory out from underneath it, it is not a shortcut. It is a prop. And props do not work. They only aid a performance. Let me show you that this is a real thing and not just my opinion, because I always want to back this up with some evidence. There is an umbrella review from 2024, and that's just about the highest tier of evidence there is. It is a review that sits on top of about 25 other systematic reviews and meta-analyses of solution-focused brief therapy. It's like a review of the reviews. And the one thing that it looked at was fidelity. What happens when you deliver the whole model the way it was designed versus when you just pull out a few pieces that you like and run those? When the full model was delivered, the effect size was roughly double what it was when people only use selected elements. And that makes sense, right? We don't write counseling treatment protocols for the fun of it. We don't add a bunch of extra stuff in there if we know that our clients or our students aren't going to need it. So back to that cap on sessions in the slide, the one that claimed that we could do solution-focused brief therapy with students in one to four sessions. That's the efficient approach, right? But the research average lands closer to five or six sessions for maximum effectiveness, with more sessions generally relating to better outcomes. So that cap doesn't just have no research behind it, it actually points in the opposite direction from what the literature says. And now go back to that word I ask you to hold in your brain. Efficient. Here is the cruel joke in that. When you strip the model down to its fastest version, the evidence says you're trading away effectiveness. And a kid who doesn't see improvement doesn't just give up and disappear. They come back. Or the problem grows or it lands on somebody else's caseload. Or it shows up in the office as behavior or in the nurse's office as a stomachache. Abbreviated work that doesn't resolve anything

What The Research Says About Fidelity

isn't efficient. It's just fast. And fast that doesn't work is the thing that actually fills your caseload right back up and drowns you. The shortcut is the thing that is making the overwhelm worse. And future land, remember the visualization into a better future? That was a flattened, counselor-driven version of something you may have heard of called the miracle question. And the miracle question is not the counselor steering the boat. The whole point of it is that it's the student's vision, in the student's words, that the counselor follows. Flip it so that the counselor is the one driving the way it was presented in the presentation, and you've broken the mechanism. You kept the shape of the boat, but you lost the engine. And since I mentioned it earlier, let me remind you what the real solution focus model actually contains. Now, different authors organize it in different ways, but these are kind of the widely recognized core components. And I like the acronym MECSTAT, M-E-C-S-T-A-T, which is miracle question, exception questions, coping questions, scaling questions, timeout, accolades, and task. These are the real parts that have actually been studied straight from the people who built the model. And again, this is more than just knowing the label and executing what you think it might be. This requires training. But notice what is not on that mech stat list: cheerleading, detailing, future land. The handout names and the real names don't even overlap. And that is not a small thing. That is the bottle wearing the lab coat, where the words sound like the model, but they're not the model. So now we can see how some of these approaches get taken. And with the best of intentions, I want to believe these people have the best of intentions. They get modified, tweaked for efficiency, and diluted to the point that they don't work. But there's another problem in all of this, too. There's a concept in school counseling research we talk about a lot on this podcast called role diffusion. Role diffusion is when you take on work that other people in the building could do just as well as you could. And the finding, this is the one you need a giant poster of somewhere in your office, is that the single most unique thing we do, the thing that's least diffusible to anybody else on our campus, is the actual counseling work rooted in theory. That is the part that solely belongs to us. And the research is just as clear on the flip side. Load a school counselor up with tasks anybody can do. That sound familiar? And we stop getting seen as practitioners. We become managers, schedulers, the people who cover the cafeteria. So here's the connection in this that nobody else is making. And we have to use a very specific, uncomfortable word for this. It's blame. We are fluent in blame in the school counseling world. We are so good at it. We blame the admin who buries us in lunch duty. We blame the caseload. We blame ASCA. We blame the legislature, the schedule, the people who don't understand what we do. And I want to be clear here: some of that blame is fair. The system really does diffuse our roles in those ways. But blame pointed outward is also where we tend to stop. It's the exit. And once it's the system's fault, we never have to turn that lens around. And the prop problem is the one place where the call is coming from inside the house. When we run a technique we don't understand or an activity we can't fully explain, we are diffusing our own role. We're handing away the one part of this job that nobody should be able to

Role Diffusion And Where Blame Lands

take from us. And we're doing it voluntarily. It is the one form of role diffusion we never acknowledge because we are so practiced at pointing the blame at everybody else. So let's make this a little more concrete. Think about a calm down corner. The bend of fidgest, there's a glitter jar, a laminated feelings poster on the wall with 40 little faces. How are you feeling today? We get it set up, we feel good about it, and then we act surprised when it doesn't do very much. But pointing at a cartoon face and identifying the emotion was never the skill. And co-regulation is not a bin of fidgets. Co-regulation is a regulated adult nervous system sitting down next to a dysregulated one. That's the active ingredient. The posters, a prop. The bins, a prop. And honestly, look at what that corner actually is. It's a set. It is the staging of a calm, regulated moment. And we mistake the scenery for the scene. Our job is to know what the magic actually is, that it is the co-regulation, not the corner. And then make sure that the real thing is the thing that happens. The second that we forget that, the second that we believe the materials in that corner are doing the work, we've handed our jobs to a laminate a chart and a plastic tub from Amazon because we stopped being the ones who could point out the difference. And notice what we just did there. Because I'm going to hand you a tool to get you out of this in a minute. But the way we caught the calm down corner conundrum was pretty simple. We asked, if you took the bin in the poster away, is there still something here that helps? And with the corner, the answer is yes, if there's someone there to co-regulate. The active ingredient survives. Hold on to that move because we're going to use that one in just a minute. But I want to make this point. A tool you do not fully understand is just a prop. And props

Calm Down Corners As Theater

do not elevate our profession. In fact, they may erase it. Because a prop only aids a performance. And a performance of counseling, no matter how good it looks, no matter how engaged the kids are, no matter how many cupcakes are on the table, is not counseling. It's theater. Because what's never optional in this job is the ability to know the difference between an intervention that is sound and real and justifiable and a prop wearing a label. That is the whole job. So, what do you actually do with this in your school counseling office? I am not going to hand you a checklist that assumes you already know every theory cold, because if you did, you wouldn't need a checklist. And if you don't, the checklist is just going to make you feel bad. That is a lot of knowledge to hold in your head. Instead, I'm going to give you one question. And it is a question that any school counselor can ask, brand new counselor or a 30-year veteran, whether or not you can name a single counseling theory off the top of your head. Before you use any resource with a kid, any worksheet, any packet, any download, ask it this. If you took all the paper away, every worksheet, every printable, every page, every slide, would the intervention. Intervention still be possible. That's it. That's my paper test. And here's why it works. It is the same move that we have been making through this whole episode. The paper test is how you find the active ingredient. Take the paper away, and whatever's left standing is the real mechanism, the doing, the practice, the co-regulation, you delivering something real. If something's still there, the workshop was a support. So keep it. But if we're going to be truly honest, and you know me, I'm honest almost to a fault, almost nothing that actually helps a kid happens on a piece of paper. The paper can teach a concept, it can provide psychoeducation, it can keep a conversation on track. But the actual change happens in what the kid does off the page. If you take that paper away and there is nothing left, no doing, no practice, no you, just the worksheet, and that was a whole thing, you found a prop. The paper wasn't supporting the intervention. The paper

The One Question To Ask

was pretending to be the intervention. And if you run that paper test on your favorite resource and your very next thought is, okay, well then what is the change part for this kid? What actually moves a student through anxiety or grief or defiance if it's not a worksheet? Then I want you to hear this part very clearly. That is the smartest question you could ever ask. That is the win. Because asking that question, what is the change part for this kid is the whole game. And it's a different answer for anxiety than it is for grief, than it is for the kid who shuts down every time you try to start to talk to them. There's no single worksheet, no single training, no slide that can hold all of that. Building the clinical foundation to answer it for the kids sitting in front of you takes time. And it takes a room of people doing it with you, giving you feedback, and challenging your perspectives. That's the mastermind. That is literally what we do in there every week. We sit with real cases and we work out what actually changes things for a kid, not just what looks good. So if running that paper test left you kind of hungry for seeing what comes next or made you want to get better at spotting these materials and knowing the theory and the mechanisms underneath them, here is your open invitation. And I'll say too, that is going to be the whole spirit of our summer meetup in Columbus, July 17th and 18th. It's not going to be a room where I just hand you more worksheets or checklists. It's going to be a room where we get underneath all this stuff, where you build the kind of thinking that lets you walk into any training, see any shiny new slide or framework, and know in about 10 seconds whether or not there's an engine under the hood or whether it's just a vitamin bottle wearing a lab coat. So if that's the room you've been looking for, the details and the links to both are in the show notes, and we would love to have you come join us. But let's get back to our counselor. The one with Future Land written in her notes. She is not the villain in this story. She did everything she was supposed to do. She showed up, she took notes, she tried her best to help a kid. The problem is the system handed her a prop and called it training, and she trusted it, the way we trust the vitamin bottle. And for that matter, our whole profession keeps hunting for the thing that does the counseling, the perfect curriculum, the magic worksheet, the slide deck with all the answers already on it. We keep looking for the object that holds the skill so that we don't have to be responsible for it. But the judgment, knowing what is foundationally sound, and refusing to put anything less in front of a kid, whether we're

An Invitation To Build Real Skill

recommending it to a teacher or coaching a staff member through it or doing it ourselves. That's the part nobody can download. That's the part that can't be diffused to anybody else in the building. That is what your grad school training was for. So we need to control the next tool, the next slide, the next download. We can run the paper test and we can ask what's actually real and relevant. And then we can refuse to hand our jobs to a prop. So there's gonna be a part two to this because I decided to test all of this out on myself. And to do it, I had to break my number one school counseling rule. I have not had a single printable school counseling material in my office for years. I've refused to buy any or have any. But this week I went on to Teachers Pay Teachers, and I bought something, but I did it as an experiment. I did not hunt for the worst resource I could find. I searched anxiety counseling and I grabbed the first resource that came up that wasn't a bundle and that was priced at $12 or less, just at random. I bought it, downloaded it, and gave it a hard look. And what I found inside of it shook me harder than this state presentation I've been talking about did. Because this little $12 download, lo and behold, actually cited some research. It had a reference list, it had real studies, real textbooks, and it still did not matter a Hill of Beans. This next week, I know you can't wait. Honestly, I can't wait to tell you about it either. I'm Steph Johnson. I'll be back soon with the next episode of the School for School Counselors podcast. And until then, as you're waiting on pins and needles, I hope you have the best week. Take care.