Tag: school-counseling

Student-centered Group Counseling in K-12 Schools – An Online Learning Session

murrayof

On Sunday, May 4th I’ll be providing an online learning session where you can earn CEs, through the American Group Psychotherapy Association. Groups are a very popular form of providing counseling in schools.

Groups also can be a source of frustration for school counselors, with a sense of missed opportunity.

In this session, I will share about effective group counseling in schools.
-Groups where students will develop self-regulation and build social ability, while remaining organized around the concerns of the students. Student-centered.

I’m excited to share what I’ve learned and developed with school educators, counselors, and other specialists who run groups in schools.

Registration link: https://portal.agpa.org/commerce/store?productId=commerce-merchandise%23AGPA-AU20250504CE

What Happened to Therapeutic Work In Schools?

murrayof

Given that you are reading this, the term “school counseling” is probably familiar. What about “school therapy”? This is not a term that people use. Why not?

Our word choices signal cultural concerns and priorities. While counseling and therapy are not clearly distinguishable, “counseling” connotes a goal-oriented, problem-solving approach with a relatively predictable arc, while “therapy” connotes deeper, exploratory, holistic, and less predictable mental health care.

Our culture has chosen the word “therapy” when we want to communicate depth in areas where some underappreciate the seriousness of the work: speech and language therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy. 

We don’t say “occupational counseling.” We have physical therapists, occupational therapists, and speech and language therapists. Using the word “therapy” reinforces for practitioners, students, and families that the work at hand is significant. 

“Psychotherapy” is therapy for the psyche. But generally, we don’t call therapy in schools “psychotherapy,” and we don’t refer to school counselors as therapists.

We know the psyche is powerful, complicated, and of great consequence to our development and lives. However, we don’t understand it as confidently as speech and language, or the mechanical workings of the body. So, we use the word “counsel” to reassure the fearful that we won’t be venturing too deeply into this unknown territory from school.

This same fear drives the types of mental health and behavior interventions prevalent in schools. Behaviorism dominates, -an explicitly and intentionally surface-level approach. After that, we find “strategies and toolboxes”, with their bases in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). 

Behaviorism addressed behavior (unsurprisingly). CBT can help a student try different ways of thinking, but only if the student cooperates with the therapist sufficiently to perceive the same issues and is willing to try what the counselor suggests.

Outside of schools, we find a wider array of mainstream mental health therapies. Among the important differences, we find therapists and therapies that acknowledge the importance of the unconscious in individuals, families, and groups. And, we find therapists and therapies supported by the long and mainstream tradition of ongoing supervision for mental health clinicians. 

Our schools imagine that they can address the complex and deep mental health issues and crises in schools without core concepts and supports from mainstream mental health care. As you probably are aware, this isn’t going well.

I can’t confidently account for why school’s responses to mental health concerns have diverged so significantly from mainstream approaches in mental health care. But, I can identify some of the forces at work. 

One is budgetary. The cyclical nature of school budget growth and cuts pushes relentlessly for efficiency. Despite clinical supervision being a core component of mainstream mental health care, it was cut from the budget for school counselors long ago, and no clinical supervision for school counselors has long been the norm. With no supervision, the scope of work that is possible narrowed toward simpler and more surface-level interventions.

There is also the economics of working on a large human scale. To be efficient, the schools must find the smallest interventions that are effective for the largest number of students. This naturally steers schools toward surface interventions and away from more sophisticated work.

Additionally, there is the force of fear on which this article opened. 

There are benefits to these tensions. Minimal effective interventions are a good thing, and preserve time and resources for other learning concerns, from both the school and student perspectives.

The problem is that school mental health has developed over decades under these forces, and has diverged from mainstream psychotherapies to the point where schools no longer have the knowledge reservoir or practice familiarity needed to effectively address many mental health presentations. 

CBT is a valuable approach and helpful to many people. Regarding behaviorism, it’s crucial to understand and apply the lessons of behaviorism in interventions concerned with behavior. However, the insights of behaviorism should be integrated into a larger relational and humane approach.

To better provide support for student’s mental health, we must provide clinical supervision for counselors and introduce concepts and approaches from mainstream and effective mental health care. This will benefit the school population at large, and especially those students with significant mental health concerns for whom CBT and behaviorist approaches are often ineffective. 

Frequently, these students are removed from their familiar home school communities and sent to much smaller private therapeutic schools that do not have the breadth of resources of larger public schools. These private therapeutic school placements are extremely expensive for the school district.

What do these private therapeutic schools offer? Many have a clinical supervision structure, and familiarity and comfort with more sophisticated mainstream mental health concepts and interventions. If school districts want to expand their capacity to serve students effectively in their home communities, and avoid expensive private therapeutic school placements, naturally they will have to build their capacity to do similar therapeutic work.

References 

Murray, M.A. & Balogh, L. (2023) The therapeutic inclusion program: Establishment and maintenance in public schools. Routledge.

Stone, M. (2023). Why America has a youth mental health crisis, and how schools can help. Education Week, https://www.edweek.org/leadership/why-america-has-a-youth-mental-health-crisis-and-how-schools-can-help/2023/10.

Be a Tolkien Ent: Responsiveness vs. Reactivity in Education and School Counseling

murrayof

Our students are reactive. As educators we are called upon – not to be reactive, but to be responsive. 

A responsive educator posture doesn’t always come naturally, especially when we are confronted with the reactive crisis-sense of a student, or a staff member for that matter. The sense of emergency is contagious. We are deeply attuned to it as fellow humans. Much in the same way that people will react to a snake before they are even consciously aware that they have seen one, we will react to others’ sense of crisis and emergency before we’ve paused to think about the nature of the issue. It is a healthy group survival response, but it is not conducive to developing self-regulation and maintaining a learning environment.

Deliberate responsiveness is the term I use to describe process-oriented, attuned, and thoughtful responsiveness. It is an over-arching theme to nearly everything I advocate for at the intersection of education and mental health. It requires significant practical planning and conceptual reframing to maintain a responsive position. Dr. Jacob Ham describes “learning brain vs. survival brain” in this popular video. To maintain conditions that support students being in learning brain, the adult staff group has to maintain its own collective version of learning brain.

Tolkien provides us with a fantastic and clear example of this with the behavior of the ents -Middle-Earth’s tree-like giants. Tolkien’s ents serve as a model of practicing deliberate responsiveness.

In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Frodo’s companions Merry and Pippin find themselves on a side quest recruiting reinforcements for the battle against Saruman’s armies.

They have the good fortune to encounter Fangorn, a tree-like giant. A battle is brewing, and Merry and Pippin’s compatriots are vastly outnumbered. They entreat the powerful Fangorn to help them in battle and to recruit more ents. Fangorn listens carefully, sometimes responding “Now don’t be hasty.”

Fangorn listens and explains at a pace we might associate with “mindful eating.” After much of this slow listening and explaining, he agrees to consider the hobbits’ request. However, he is not going to consider such an important question on his own. He calls a meeting (an entmoot) to consult and decide along with other ents. By using this special name, entmoot, Tolkien signals that this is an established process, not a reaction. The entmoot goes on for three days before they reach a conclusion. 

When reactivity meets process, everything slows down, and crisis-energy is dissipated. 

Tolkien was really on to something, both about human nature and the nature of trees. Real trees live for hundreds of years. They have a system akin to the human nervous system, though one difference is speed. Their electrical signals travel at the slow rate of one inch every three seconds (Wohlleben, 2105, p. 8). Peter Wohlleben’s popular The Hidden Life of Trees describes tree behavior, including their ability to communicate with each other through the air and fungal networks underground. Between their long lives and their rates of internal and external communication, trees are on a very different time scale than humans. Trees are active, but so slow relative to us as to be unrecognizable without special attention and effort.

As educators and school counselors, we can learn from trees and from Tolkien’s ents. Our students will turn to us reactively, frustratedly, and as desperate as Merry and Pippin begging Fangorn for assistance. We will likely feel activated to join them in their reactivity. But, we can strive to be as different from our students in our response as ents are from hobbits, and as different as trees are from people. 

We can welcome the student’s crisis into the safe, secure, and slow speed of thoughtful adult consideration. We can listen, long and engaged, like Fangorn. We can even use his “hm, hoom” sounds of considered acknowledgment. We can stop and think. And we can tell our students that we will continue to think about the issue they have presented, and we will consult with the other school staff about such a significant challenge. And yes, it may take a while to give this all the thought, consideration, and collaboration it deserves. But, like Fangorn again, we will dependably follow up and follow through.

References 

Tolkien, J. R. R. (1954). The two towers: the lord of the rings part two. Ballantine

Wohlleben, P. (2015). The hidden life of trees; What they feel, how they communicate. Greystone