Stop Using AI Like This: What Every Counselor Should Know

Transcript

WEBVTT

00:00:00.080 --> 00:00:20.914
Have you ever felt like you're not being taken seriously on your school campus, that you're just kind of seen like this extra set of hands that could do pretty much anything and your expertise, your knowledge base isn't really being valued and sometimes isn't even asked for?

00:00:20.914 --> 00:00:22.664
Do you ever feel like that?

00:00:22.664 --> 00:00:46.295
This week on the podcast we're going to talk about that, but in a little bit different way than you're used to, and we're going to be looking at a continuation of a conversation we started in the previous podcast episode where I was talking about artificial intelligence, or AI and using it in school counseling and kind of some of my thoughts on that approach.

00:00:46.295 --> 00:00:55.451
So if you haven't heard that conversation, you might want to jump back to the previous episode really quickly and catch the gist of what we were talking about.

00:00:55.451 --> 00:00:57.878
We covered a lot of ground there.

00:00:57.878 --> 00:01:33.191
We talked about the power of connection, the importance of human interaction and the importance of really developing a concrete professional fluency where, if AI generates something for you, you would be able to look at it and discern if it was a quality resource or a quality recommendation upon just looking at it, and although that sounds like it should be a pretty easy task to do after all.

00:01:33.191 --> 00:01:35.483
You have a master's degree in school counseling.

00:01:35.483 --> 00:01:47.867
The truth is, it's really good at tricking you and making you believe its ideas are great when they're actually not founded in anything that we know in reality.

00:01:47.867 --> 00:01:50.887
Ai has a way to go, my friends.

00:01:50.887 --> 00:02:21.203
We also talked a little bit about online content, about a lot of folks just blindly downloading things and utilizing them and wondering why they're not working and how introducing AI into our school counseling world like that is going to bring even more headaches for people who are trying to build some clout on campus, who want to be looked at as an essential part of the administrative team on their campus.

00:02:22.004 --> 00:02:34.651
If we're just blindly throwing resources at the wall and hoping something sticks, we're not going to achieve that kind of reputation, and so this week we're going to continue that conversation.

00:02:34.651 --> 00:02:47.549
I am going to kill a lot of sacred cows and I hope it isn't too painful for anybody, but I do want to be real about this and I do want to be honest about some of these implications.

00:02:47.549 --> 00:02:52.419
All right, but before we jump in that, let me introduce myself.

00:02:52.419 --> 00:03:00.008
If you have not listened to the podcast before, it is great to meet you, and if you have listened before, thanks for coming back.

00:03:00.008 --> 00:03:01.966
My name is Steph Johnson.

00:03:01.966 --> 00:03:24.126
I am a full-time school counselor, just like you, and I am on a mission to make school counseling more sustainable and more enjoyable, because you deserve real supports, not lip service, not the same old tired suggestions you see and hear everywhere else, but real support.

00:03:24.126 --> 00:03:50.867
And so, through the School for School Counselors podcast, through our community and through our School for School Counselors mastermind, I'm looking to bridge the gap between what grad school taught you and what's actually going on on your campus, so that you can feel competent, connected and inspired to make a difference, even if you're working in a really difficult school.

00:03:52.290 --> 00:03:58.868
Okay, so let's jump back into it, and I'm talking off of some notes that I made over the Christmas holiday.

00:03:58.868 --> 00:04:18.853
I had my AirPods in and I was just kind of talking in stream of consciousness style, all of my thoughts about AI school counseling, what I've learned from true experts in the field and where I think this is going for us in not only the school counseling industry but in education as a whole.

00:04:18.853 --> 00:04:49.630
So I want to start by talking about the perception of our work, and I've hit on this in a previous podcast episode when I was talking about the perception of teachers' pay teachers' materials and I really feel like I'm harping on this in this AI podcast series and I guess I am but there are just so many unintended consequences from those things and at face value they look great, right?

00:04:49.630 --> 00:04:54.125
Hey, we're all helping each other, we're creating these resources, we're sharing them.

00:04:54.125 --> 00:04:54.908
This is great.

00:04:54.908 --> 00:05:01.589
We're all going to help each other out when, in actuality, the research tells us otherwise.

00:05:02.831 --> 00:05:10.540
The truth here tells us otherwise.

00:05:10.540 --> 00:05:13.389
The truth here, the empirically validated research, says that most Teachers Pay Teachers materials are absolute garbage.

00:05:13.389 --> 00:05:17.963
And I'm not calling out any one creator, I'm not calling out any one person.

00:05:17.963 --> 00:05:20.370
There are a few good ones out there.

00:05:20.370 --> 00:05:29.786
I have about three Teachers Pay Teachers resources in my office that I do use, but for the most part I don't even look at that website.

00:05:29.786 --> 00:05:31.391
It's not worth my time.

00:05:31.391 --> 00:05:45.473
And, going back to what we talked about in the previous episode, a lot of that is because I've worked hard to develop the fluency to be able to conduct school counseling business without having to rely on printables.

00:05:46.901 --> 00:06:04.161
But, more to the point, that I started to make and kind of got sidetracked, there are already misunderstandings on campus about what our role should actually be and with all of the bargaining in the school counseling industry about what are school counseling duties?

00:06:04.161 --> 00:06:06.747
What are non-school counselor duties?

00:06:06.747 --> 00:06:07.968
What should we be doing?

00:06:07.968 --> 00:06:09.132
Dang it.

00:06:09.132 --> 00:06:13.865
I just want to do what I was hired to do Conversations about advocacy.

00:06:13.865 --> 00:06:15.509
Prove it with your data.

00:06:15.509 --> 00:06:16.632
Blah, blah, blah.

00:06:17.353 --> 00:06:28.372
One piece that everybody's missing and maybe this should be a whole other podcast episode is that we don't even really know what we want to be doing as a whole.

00:06:28.372 --> 00:06:41.630
In our industry, we have a lot of people who are perfectly content to download resources off the internet and use them and call it a day, and they don't want to give any more thought to it.

00:06:41.630 --> 00:06:52.903
And then we have people who are more like me on the other side of the spectrum, that are very into evidence-based, very into empirically validated resources.

00:06:52.903 --> 00:06:56.452
And then we have people all along that spectrum in between.

00:06:56.452 --> 00:07:13.072
So we've got to start agreeing what we need to be focusing on, because I've had a lot of run-ins online with people when I've suggested that perhaps social emotional learning lessons should not be provided by the school counselor.

00:07:13.940 --> 00:07:29.064
You would have thought that I had suggested we all go out and commit a crime because so many people are so invested in these SEL lessons and they've been led to believe that that is the holy grail of school counseling.

00:07:29.064 --> 00:07:46.053
But I'm going to be honest with you I have never seen and I have never heard about, in the thousands of school counselors that I've worked with over the years, about any tier three kid that came around because of a teacher's pay teacher's lesson.

00:07:46.053 --> 00:08:08.302
Correct me if I'm wrong and I am open to feedback, give me the evidence and show me how I'm wrong, but I can tell you that again, through thousands of school counselors that I worked with over the past four years, never, ever, has anyone ever shown up to a support and consultation chat and said I found the magic key.

00:08:08.302 --> 00:08:26.108
In fact, there have been maybe only I'm trying to remember two or three downloadable resources that have ever even been suggested in that forum, and even those were created by licensed therapists.

00:08:26.108 --> 00:08:53.945
So just to give you some perspective on the kinds of conversations going on in our mastermind when we rely on these print and pray resources, when we rely on the easy button, when people see us doing that, when people see us doing that, and even as people in our schools watch us deliver those lessons which I do thousand percent believe should be a part of every school campus everywhere.

00:08:53.945 --> 00:08:55.365
Not debating that at all.

00:08:56.486 --> 00:08:57.788
Who should be providing it?

00:08:57.788 --> 00:08:59.249
That's a different story.

00:08:59.249 --> 00:09:19.399
But if our jobs only needed to boil down to printing these curriculums and delivering them, maybe doing a pre and post-assessment and calling it a day, we wouldn't have needed a master's degree to do this job.

00:09:19.399 --> 00:09:26.943
And so a lot of folks who take this track in their careers are selling themselves seriously short.

00:09:26.943 --> 00:09:46.033
They are seriously underestimating their potentials for impact, and it makes me sad, because one of the core beliefs in School for School Counselors is that students deserve access to capable, competent and healthy school counselors.

00:09:46.033 --> 00:09:57.408
And if we are capable and competent, we should be beyond providing these lessons, especially when they're printables.

00:09:58.743 --> 00:10:28.524
Think about it this way when our staff sees us show up with these materials because they're unmistakable right, because of the graphics and the fonts that are used and the way they're presented on the page, because they're almost always worksheets or printable games, right, sometimes slides, but they're unmistakable Anybody on a school campus can look at that material and say that's a TPT resource.

00:10:28.524 --> 00:10:30.668
There's no question about them.

00:10:30.668 --> 00:10:33.533
What does that do?

00:10:33.533 --> 00:10:39.422
What does that do to elevate the perception of your role on campus?

00:10:39.422 --> 00:10:42.323
Think about that for a minute.

00:10:42.323 --> 00:10:59.456
Are you showcasing your expertise and the depth and breadth of your mental health knowledge when you're printing things off the internet and presenting it to students all day long.

00:10:59.456 --> 00:11:04.855
Now, for some of you, you don't have a choice, and I get that.

00:11:04.855 --> 00:11:23.714
Some of you are in situations at schools where you have been told you are an SEL teacher, essentially, and you've been provided a set schedule with set amounts of time and you're just grinding it out with no provided curriculum, so you have no choice but to rely on that stuff.

00:11:23.714 --> 00:11:24.336
And I get it.

00:11:24.336 --> 00:11:26.130
I so get it.

00:11:26.644 --> 00:11:38.030
That's a whole other conversation that we need to have another day about advocacy and about how your national organization right now was failing you, getting pretty opinionated in this one.

00:11:38.030 --> 00:11:40.157
But bear with me Back to the point.

00:11:40.157 --> 00:11:47.879
When you show up with these printable materials, how does that elevate you in the eyes of your school staff?

00:11:47.879 --> 00:11:52.264
How does that elevate you in the eyes of your school staff?

00:11:52.264 --> 00:12:13.447
Because, like it or not, if you want to advocate for your role, if you want to be able to do the school counseling job that you expected when you got hired, you're going to have to be able to make a case for that, and part of making your case lies in your staff knowing you and liking you and trusting your professional expertise.

00:12:13.447 --> 00:12:34.514
But if you're showing up with that stuff that looks just like the stuff they're downloading in social studies and math and English, it's not elevating you, it's not building trust in a higher level of expertise, and so that's where I think a lot of things have gone wrong in the school counseling world.

00:12:34.514 --> 00:12:50.365
We haven't agreed on what our role should be and we are using a lot of subpar materials and undermining our own efforts to elevate our field.

00:12:50.365 --> 00:12:53.168
It's kind of profound when you think about it, isn't it?

00:12:53.168 --> 00:12:53.729
It's a lot to think about.

00:12:53.749 --> 00:12:56.354
But then let's turn back to the AI conversation.

00:12:56.354 --> 00:13:16.212
A lot of people online are talking about this stuff right, either directly, as in they're sharing resources or they're trying to tell you how to prompt AI, or they're indirectly showing up in school counseling groups, and that's a nice way of saying disingenuously Can anyone recommend XYZ?

00:13:16.212 --> 00:13:20.475
Y'all know a lot of times those people are planted in those groups.

00:13:20.475 --> 00:13:25.756
You know this right In social media if you see a really open-ended question.

00:13:25.756 --> 00:13:29.291
Or could somebody tell me a little bit more about Platform X?

00:13:29.291 --> 00:13:31.826
I'm considering using it in my program.

00:13:31.826 --> 00:13:35.014
A lot of the times they're asking that because they're a plant.

00:13:35.014 --> 00:13:54.921
They've been encouraged to post that question so that they can get the conversation going about that resource, so that maybe other people will get interested in it, maybe they'll go Google it, maybe they'll check it out and use it, and sometimes it gives the creator a chance to show up and say, hey, so glad you asked.

00:13:54.921 --> 00:13:56.245
Let me tell you all about it.

00:13:56.245 --> 00:14:02.458
It's all a farce, and so if you think all of those are innocent questions, think again.

00:14:04.066 --> 00:14:13.370
If you ever see a question in a group marked anonymous post, approach it with caution, because that's the veil under which a lot of these things are going through.

00:14:13.370 --> 00:14:19.889
That's why we don't allow anonymous posts in our School for School Counselors Facebook group.

00:14:19.889 --> 00:14:38.493
The only way that we allow anything even close to that is that if someone submits an anonymous request to me or to a member of my team, we know who they are, we review it, we determine if it's legit and then we post it on their behalf.

00:14:38.493 --> 00:14:41.431
Does it take a lot more work?

00:14:41.431 --> 00:14:43.168
Yes, is it easy?

00:14:43.168 --> 00:14:45.408
No, but is it effective?

00:14:45.408 --> 00:14:53.928
Yes, because you don't see half of that baloney going on in our group as you do in other groups, and there's a reason for that.

00:14:55.071 --> 00:15:00.730
A lot of the people who are talking about AI right now are actually affiliates of programs.

00:15:00.730 --> 00:15:09.553
If you see them talking about one thing over and over and over again, there's one called Magic School right now.

00:15:09.553 --> 00:15:10.817
That seems to be a big push.

00:15:10.817 --> 00:15:11.525
You know why?

00:15:11.525 --> 00:15:14.552
They just introduced an affiliate program.

00:15:14.552 --> 00:15:25.245
That means, if these people can get permission to private message other people, they'll send you their link to join it or to get a free trial.

00:15:25.245 --> 00:15:26.808
And then you know what they get.

00:15:26.808 --> 00:15:27.591
They get paid.

00:15:27.591 --> 00:15:30.817
They get paid for recommending the platform.

00:15:30.817 --> 00:15:37.908
It's not always on the up and up and they won't always tell you they're an affiliate, even though they're supposed to.

00:15:37.908 --> 00:15:47.422
They present themselves as an expert, someone who knows all about the field, and give the impression of you know.

00:15:47.422 --> 00:15:55.817
Based on my rigorous research, this is the best option for you and in actuality, the only thing they know about it is what the company has told them.

00:15:55.817 --> 00:16:01.855
They're just going after the Benjamins and they're going to recommend whoever's paying them.

00:16:01.855 --> 00:16:05.091
So just be vigilant out there.

00:16:05.184 --> 00:16:07.273
I'm not telling you not to use any of this stuff.

00:16:07.273 --> 00:16:16.726
I'm not telling you that if you and I were friends, I would be disappointed in you if we were having coffee and you told me you were using something with AI.

00:16:16.726 --> 00:16:21.736
But I do think we need to pump the brakes a little bit.

00:16:21.736 --> 00:16:27.188
To me, this situation is a little bit like buying a car.

00:16:27.188 --> 00:16:34.991
You never want to buy the first new model of a car when it comes out, because there are always problems.

00:16:34.991 --> 00:16:42.033
There are always blips and burps, things that don't work right, lots of recalibrations needed.

00:16:42.033 --> 00:16:46.368
You want to wait to get yours until it's established.

00:16:46.368 --> 00:16:49.613
Then you buy the car.

00:16:49.613 --> 00:16:53.539
Talk to some of the people who own Teslas right now.

00:16:53.539 --> 00:17:08.190
My apologies if you're a Tesla owner, but those things are having a ton of safety concerns, electronics concerns, all kinds of things, and the people who were early adopters a lot of them are regretting their decisions.

00:17:08.190 --> 00:17:11.917
Wait until it's been validated in the market.

00:17:11.917 --> 00:17:20.949
Wait until it's been proven to be able to do what it's supposed to do, and AI is no different.

00:17:20.949 --> 00:17:28.816
If you want to brag, if you're interested in the power play, if you want the online swag of being one of the first people, you do you.

00:17:30.059 --> 00:17:41.711
But in school counseling, my primary obligation is to my students on my campus and then personally, my listeners and members, and that's you, and so I'm going to be a straight shooter on this.

00:17:41.711 --> 00:17:47.111
I'm not going to pretend like it's automatically the most amazing thing that's ever happened in our field?

00:17:47.111 --> 00:17:48.994
It's not yet.

00:17:48.994 --> 00:17:51.727
It could perhaps be Again.

00:17:51.727 --> 00:17:58.147
I think it's going to be a poor substitution for connection, for empathy, face-to-face conversation.

00:17:59.171 --> 00:18:06.432
Those characteristics are going to become even more important in this new AI world because a lot of people are going to let those skills go.

00:18:06.432 --> 00:18:15.270
They're going to forget what it's like to sit across from a student and have to be able to come up with something on the fly.

00:18:15.270 --> 00:18:34.114
Think about this how many times has a kid walked in your office and you thought you knew exactly what you were going to be dealing with and then, as you talked with them for five, 10 minutes, you realized the real issue was completely different, and then you had to adjust course quickly.

00:18:34.114 --> 00:18:38.615
You had to figure out how to handle this new reality.

00:18:38.615 --> 00:18:47.424
Y'all that's professional fluency, it's empathy, it's expertise, and that's what we're going to need now more than ever.

00:18:47.424 --> 00:18:51.585
We're going to need now more than ever.

00:18:56.025 --> 00:18:59.435
We are going to be absolutely flooded with these AI prompts, ai suggestions, ai generated resources, use, quotation marks around that.

00:18:59.435 --> 00:19:11.074
That's going to start flooding the school counseling marketplaces, and a lot of the people who are going to be at the forefront of this are the people who are already creating those kinds of content.

00:19:11.074 --> 00:19:13.553
They see the writing on the wall.

00:19:13.553 --> 00:19:15.751
They know what's about to happen.

00:19:15.751 --> 00:19:18.512
They're working to adjust track.

00:19:18.512 --> 00:19:22.795
Maybe I'm not creating these materials anymore.

00:19:22.795 --> 00:19:29.618
Maybe now I'm going to show up and teach quote, unquote people how to generate their own through AI.

00:19:29.618 --> 00:19:31.088
That sounds like a great idea.

00:19:31.088 --> 00:19:41.669
No, it's not, and if you want to know about the limitations of AI and why that's not a good idea, go back to the previous episode and listen to it.

00:19:41.669 --> 00:19:47.617
Because AI lies, it hallucinates, it has biases.

00:19:47.617 --> 00:19:51.605
It's not ready for prime time in school counseling.

00:19:52.471 --> 00:20:12.534
Actually, that brings to mind a related topic with AI in school counseling, and that would be using AI for more routine tasks, not necessarily counseling plans or advice on interventions, but things that are kind of more mundane.

00:20:12.534 --> 00:20:14.239
I'll give an example.

00:20:14.239 --> 00:20:31.760
Let's look at it through the lens of recommendation letters for high school juniors and seniors, because that seems to be one topic that comes up a lot online where high school counselors are saying this is great, I can use AI to generate these letters about my students.

00:20:31.760 --> 00:20:33.527
It's going to save me a ton of time.

00:20:33.527 --> 00:20:36.494
It's going to be so fantastic.

00:20:36.494 --> 00:21:06.941
I hate to burst your bubble, but I don't think it's going to be as awesome as it first seems, and here's why you may know, over the past few years we've run a program through School for School Counselors called Get the Job, and in Get the Job, we helped school counselors really hone in on their areas of expertise, the best way to present that expertise in an interview and how to create a phenomenal resume.

00:21:13.250 --> 00:21:25.057
As part of that journey, I was working with national organizations on things like resume writing, interview skills and things like that, because I wanted to make sure that the information that I was providing was current and relevant and valid.

00:21:25.057 --> 00:21:33.638
So, as we were working with school counselors on their resumes, a lot of them were having trouble even getting a call for an interview.

00:21:33.638 --> 00:21:40.465
They would come to us then and they would say hey, I don't understand why I'm not getting calls for interviews.

00:21:40.465 --> 00:21:44.335
I've put out 35 resumes, I haven't gotten a single call.

00:21:44.335 --> 00:21:46.058
I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

00:21:46.058 --> 00:21:50.794
And so we would have them send us a copy of their resume.

00:21:50.794 --> 00:21:58.491
We would look it over and there were usually some very specific problems that we could identify.

00:21:59.752 --> 00:22:10.306
But one of the issues was that the resume was not created to be successful with what are called ATSs Applicant Tracking Systems.

00:22:10.306 --> 00:22:21.834
That is really some older school AI that school systems have been using for a long time to weed out resumes online.

00:22:21.834 --> 00:22:22.915
Did you know this?

00:22:22.915 --> 00:22:57.605
And so when you go to a website and you upload your resume to a school district, a lot of times especially if it's a bigger district they're using an ATS, and so if your resume isn't formatted correctly, if it doesn't have the right wording with it those kinds of things your resume gets kicked out and you don't even get the opportunity to get a call for an interview, and so that's kind of the beginning of the AI that we're using now.

00:22:57.605 --> 00:23:22.938
So think about this If we've been using ATSs to weed out resumes for this long ATSs to weed out resumes for this long because this is not a new phenomenon it's only a matter of time until universities, which have multi-million dollar budgets, begin using this technology to weed out recommendation letters that have been AI generated.

00:23:22.938 --> 00:23:32.999
That's just the long and short of it, and maybe, as the technology becomes more nuanced and more sophisticated, that threat will be eliminated.

00:23:32.999 --> 00:23:38.755
But for now, I don't think that AI generated recommendation letters are your best option.

00:23:38.755 --> 00:23:46.839
So keep that in mind, and if you decide to go down that road and your students are not being successful with those letters.

00:23:46.839 --> 00:23:49.732
That may be a large part of why.

00:23:51.257 --> 00:23:57.691
Last thing I'll bring up is a lot of people in online school counseling groups asking for prompts.

00:23:57.691 --> 00:24:04.839
I need help working with this student on this issue that has these kinds of concerns.

00:24:04.839 --> 00:24:05.862
Blah, blah, blah.

00:24:05.862 --> 00:24:16.476
We need to consider, as we are consulting with technology, that students still have a right to privacy.

00:24:16.476 --> 00:24:20.521
Consider how AI learns and grows.

00:24:20.521 --> 00:24:30.635
It learns and grows through the information that's provided to it, what it does with it and the kind of feedback it receives because of its actions.

00:24:30.635 --> 00:24:41.453
And even if it's telling you that it's not storing information, at least overtly, it's still storing aspects of that conversation.

00:24:41.453 --> 00:24:49.939
In my opinion, in my opinion, kind of unethical to enter student information into AI.

00:24:49.939 --> 00:24:56.343
I don't think a lot of people are talking about this or even thinking about it, but it's worth bringing up.

00:24:57.503 --> 00:25:01.727
You might remember back in 2020, the good old COVID times.

00:25:01.727 --> 00:25:03.587
Whole world shut down.

00:25:03.587 --> 00:25:13.404
A little bit before that and a little bit after was really when the big Google push was happening in schools and everybody was heading over to Google.

00:25:13.404 --> 00:25:19.559
Google at that time was getting slapped with all kinds of lawsuits from school districts over student privacy.

00:25:19.559 --> 00:25:35.046
Did you know that they were not protecting student information in the way that they were saying they were protecting student information in the way that they were saying they were, and they got sued and they lost a lot of money over that and eventually, hopefully, they refine their practices.

00:25:35.046 --> 00:25:48.423
But it just goes to show that an assurance isn't a guarantee, and even big companies like Google know that information is the new currency.

00:25:48.423 --> 00:26:09.503
That's just currency in our modern world, and so, on our end, when we value things like student privacy and confidentiality so greatly, we should never, ever, be putting anything remotely close to student information in an AI system.

00:26:11.750 --> 00:26:15.837
Now, you know I get pretty passionate about my opinions.

00:26:15.837 --> 00:26:45.279
I'm very direct about my thoughts on these things, and so, again, I don't necessarily expect you just to grab onto them and believe those at face value either, but I do want to provide you with some different viewpoints so that, hopefully, you'll do one of two things You'll either go do your own research and become informed on your own, or you will pick the route that feels like it has the most integrity.

00:26:45.279 --> 00:26:49.557
You are smart, you have expertise.

00:26:49.557 --> 00:27:20.462
You do have the ability to discern a good resource from a bad resource once you have developed a certain level of professional fluency, but when you're working in an industry that's as high stress as ours, that demands so much of us, literally minute by minute, it just becomes the default mode of the majority of the people that do the work we do to just grab on to what's ever easiest because it feels the most sustainable.

00:27:20.462 --> 00:27:23.115
And that's an industry issue.

00:27:23.115 --> 00:27:26.271
Right, that's an advocacy issue Again.

00:27:26.271 --> 00:27:29.391
That's a whole other topic of conversation for another day.

00:27:29.391 --> 00:27:35.443
But within this world I feel like I have to present these opposing viewpoints.

00:27:35.443 --> 00:27:46.377
I want to broaden your perspective and hopefully invite you to challenge some of the beliefs that you have about your work currently and then make up your own mind.

00:27:47.460 --> 00:27:50.613
Decide what's best for you and your students and your campus.

00:27:50.613 --> 00:28:04.075
Utilize the professional expertise that you have and if you've been relying on the easy button too long and you feel like you've lost some of your expertise, be diligent about building it back.

00:28:04.075 --> 00:28:05.880
You can do that.

00:28:05.880 --> 00:28:11.457
Get reinvested in all those journal articles you had to look at when you were in grad school.

00:28:11.457 --> 00:28:14.248
Just look at five or six every month.

00:28:14.248 --> 00:28:15.613
Log into your ASCA account.

00:28:15.613 --> 00:28:18.821
Go to the Professional School Counseling Journal, see what's come out this month.

00:28:18.821 --> 00:28:42.633
You could pick out a topic that you would really like to build expertise in Something like solution-focused approaches, dialectical behavior therapies, motivational interviewing, something like that, even play-based counseling techniques, and immerse yourself in that world, read books on it, refamiliarize yourself with what you already know and then learn some more.

00:28:42.633 --> 00:28:53.885
Or, if you have the gumption, invest in our School for School Counselors Mastermind, where we meet every week without fail to build that professional fluency.

00:28:55.131 --> 00:29:04.961
I don't think that anybody spends years and tens of thousands of dollars pursuing a career with an intention of half-assing it right.

00:29:04.961 --> 00:29:12.955
But I also know that the circumstances that we work within, day after day, wear down your resolve.

00:29:12.955 --> 00:29:18.011
And then you're working hard at school, and then you still need your personal time.

00:29:18.011 --> 00:29:21.541
You have family obligations and other things going on in your life.

00:29:21.541 --> 00:29:30.594
You don't want to have to invest 100% of your time thinking about your work, so you enter default mode because it feels easier.

00:29:30.594 --> 00:29:40.038
There's a happy compromise between those two, and so what I'm really urging you to do is kind of look in that direction.

00:29:40.038 --> 00:29:44.955
Reignite your passion that you have for your work.

00:29:45.878 --> 00:29:57.530
Whether you agree with me or you disagree with me, think critically about these conversations, think about how you feel about it, what feels right and what feels wrong, and y'all.

00:29:57.530 --> 00:29:59.615
I'm always open to healthy debate.

00:29:59.615 --> 00:30:19.212
That's why we meet in our mastermind every week, because when we have elevated professional discourse, when we can disagree but we can do it in a productive way, we are all going to learn and grow and at the end of the day, that's what I am here for.

00:30:19.212 --> 00:30:22.781
All right, so that was a mouthful.

00:30:23.483 --> 00:30:52.175
We started with AI, we went into some different topics, but I hope that, even through being sort of a stream of consciousness conversation, that it was interesting and relevant and useful to you and, most of all, I hope it invited you to think about your work in a little bit of a different way, because ultimately, when we do that, that's when we grow, that's when we get better and when we get better we can better serve kids.

00:30:52.175 --> 00:31:13.401
If you're interested in the mastermind and the conversations we're having over there, if you're interested in developing your professional fluency in all the ways that I described and how to use that professional fluency to advocate from the inside out, you can find out more at schoolforschoolcounselorscom.

00:31:13.401 --> 00:31:14.944
Slash mastermind.

00:31:14.944 --> 00:31:24.919
I'll be back next week with another episode, but in the meantime I hope you have the best week, be careful out there and take care.

Stop Using AI Like This: What Every Counselor Should Know

Listen On

Featured Episodes

Recent Episodes