School for School Counselors Podcast

Episódios

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  What to Do When Everyone "Needs" Counseling 14.09.2026 14min

  When a student is struggling, school counselors often hear, “Can you talk to them?” But in determining if a student needs counseling, we tend to skip some very important steps. In this episode, I'm talking about a common jump everyone on campus tends to make (and nobody ever questions)- and why it's such a big deal. You’ll hear why context matters more than the referral itself, how easily schools move from observation to interpretation to prescription, and the one question that can keep...
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  How School Counselors Become Influential 01.09.2026 19min

  It doesn’t work. And if you’ve tried it, you know it's true. The school counseling advocacy model most of us were taught was supposed to be simple: explain your role, show your data, cite the standards, make the case. THEN we were supposed to be able to MAKE THINGS HAPPEN. The problem is- information isn’t influence. So in this episode, we’ll talk about how school counselors can become influential long before "advocacy" meetings ever happen. We’ll talk about why your principal does NOT need t...
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  The School Counselor Advocacy Trap 25.08.2026 20min

  School counselor advocacy is supposed to create change. But what if some of what we’ve been taught to call advocacy is actually doing something else? You can explain your role, bring the data, cite the standards, and make a compelling case... And still walk out with the same testing assignment, MTSS responsibility, impossible caseload, or non-counseling duties you walked in with. This episode takes a hard look at the advocacy model our profession has inherited, why school counselors can do ev...
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  School Counselors: You’re Advocating... So Why Isn’t Anything Changing? 17.08.2026 13min

  You’ve explained your role. You’ve shown the data. You’ve pulled out the appropriate and inappropriate duties list. You’ve advocated. But... nothing changes. So- what are you supposed to do now? Just advocate harder? (Spoiler: Nope.) In this episode, I’m questioning one of the biggest assumptions driving school counselor advocacy. Because there’s a big difference between someone not understanding what your job is supposed to be, versus someone understandi...
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  Four Decisions to Make Before the School Year Starts 10.08.2026 20min

  Everything difficult or weird on a school campus somehow gets shuffled to the school counselor. And nobody is likely to stop you from taking it all on. In fact, sometimes the whole campus seems perfectly happy to let you do ALL the things. So before the school year really gets rolling, there are four decisions worth making. These aren’t decisions you can make with a list of “appropriate” and “inappropriate” duties or another lecture about setting better boundaries. They require a bette...
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  Why You Need Sanity-Based School Counseling 03.08.2026 23min

  School counseling on paper and school counseling in real life are not the same job. You were trained to support students, build relationships, and run a comprehensive program. Then you walked onto a campus with an impossible caseload, unclear expectations, constant interruptions, and demands coming from every direction. So you did what good school counselors do: you worked harder. But what if effort was never the missing piece? In this episode, I'm looking at: three places where school counse...
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  When Good School Counselors Go Quiet 27.07.2026 17min

  The educational system doesn't need to plot to keep you quiet. It just needs to keep you tired. And after that, the silence takes care of itself. A few nights ago, I watched over a hundred school counselors simultaneously go quiet. It was weird. They'd been engaged in my presentation. They were animated and alive. The conversation was popping. But then... I changed the subject from talking about the problems to talking about what to do next... and suddenly the entire room changed. Som...
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  You’re Planning Your School Counseling Program Backwards 13.07.2026 17min

  Most school counselors plan their programs in the same order they were taught: start with the data, identify the need, choose the intervention, and try to make the model fit. But that's exactly why so many carefully built plans fall apart by October. In this episode, Steph explains why school counselors may be planning their programs backwards — and the two questions that should come before goals, calendars, initiatives, or action plans. Because the goal is not to reach May with the most comp...
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  What Makes You a Remarkable School Counselor? 06.07.2026 16min

  Most school counselors can describe what they do all day. Crisis response. Small groups. Student check-ins. Parent calls. Schedule changes. Behavior support. Data meetings. The fifty small things that happen before 9:00 a.m. But ask a school counselor what makes them remarkable, and things can get quiet fast. In this episode, Steph talks about why it can be so hard to name the specific instincts, patterns, and abilities that make you unusually effective in your role. This is not about g...
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  The Student Mental Health Bot Nobody Asked For 29.06.2026 18min

  Last week, we looked at what happens when schools finally put a price tag on the mental health fallout of social media. This week, we're looking at the strange second half of that story. If technology is part of the problem... why are some schools turning to even more technology as the solution? Across the country, districts are adopting AI-powered mental health tools that monitor students, flag concerning behavior, and even carry on conversations with kids in emotional distress. The ma...
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  Social Media Drama Just Got a Price Tag 22.06.2026 21min

  Social media drama has a price tag now. A Kentucky school district recently settled a lawsuit against social media companies for approximately $27 million, arguing that the platforms helped create a student mental health burden schools have been forced to absorb. But school counselors didn’t need a lawsuit to know this was costing something. The screenshots. The group chats. The parent emails. The cyberbullying investigations. The friendship blowups that started online and landed in your offi...
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  I Broke My #1 School Counseling Rule (Here's What Happened) 15.06.2026 33min

  I don’t buy printable counseling resources anymore. Haven’t for years. But to test a theory on the air, I broke that rule. I bought a popular, well-reviewed anxiety resource from one of the big teacher marketplaces and ran my paper test on it live. I expected to find junk. I didn’t. It was polished. Thoughtful. Well-organized. It even cited real research. And that’s what made the problem harder to ignore. In this episode, I look at what happens when a school counseling resource looks right, s...
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  Is It an Intervention, or Theatre? 01.06.2026 29min

  If somebody else could do exactly what you're doing after reading the same slide deck- Why did you go to grad school? That's the question that hit me after I reviewed a state-sponsored training that handed school counselors a watered-down counseling model and called it evidence-based. And once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it. But this episode isn't really about one training. It's about what happens when a profession starts confusing the appearance of counseling with co...
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  When They Want Your Spreadsheets, Not Your Insight 25.05.2026 10min

  On the last day of school, the district sent an email about spreadsheets. But not one person asked what you needed to do your job better next year. Not what you were seeing. Not what students needed. Not what kept support from reaching kids faster. Just the spreadsheet. There’s a name for that kind of silence. This episode is about why nobody asks school counselors what they’re observing… and what it costs all campuses when the people seeing the most are treated like support staff instead of ...
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  The Kids Just Like You Too Much 18.05.2026 25min

  A school administrator once told me the reason I couldn't finish a single classroom lesson was because the kids just liked me too much. She meant it as a compliment. It took me years to understand what it actually revealed. This episode is about the gap between the job we were trained to do and the job we're actually allowed to do. How that gap gets handed to counselors as personal failure. And what happens to a profession- and to the people in it- when nobody's willing to name th...
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  3 Decisions You’ll Regret Not Making Before August 12.05.2026 23min

  Most school counselors think the new school year starts in August. I don’t think it does. I think a huge part of your August gets decided right now… in May… while you’re mentally saturated, emotionally exhausted, and trying to crawl to the finish line. Because the things you leave unresolved this time of year have a way of following you right back into the building. The role conversation you keep avoiding. The administrator dynamic you replay in your head at 2 a.m. The resentment. The confide...
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  “It's Been Happening All Year.” So Why Is It a Referral Now? 04.05.2026 25min

  You’re about to get a referral that says: “It’s been happening all year.” And somehow… now it’s urgent. This episode is about why that happens, and why treating May referrals like October problems will burn you out fast. Because most of what’s hitting your desk right now isn’t new. It’s late. We’re talking about: The predictable end-of-year referral surge (and what’s actually driving it) How adult burnout reshapes what gets labeled a “problem” The one triage questi...
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  No One Knows What You Do- And That's Dangerous 27.04.2026 24min

  You’re doing meaningful work. You’re supporting students. You’re handling things no one else on campus is equipped to handle. But somehow, when big decisions get made, it’s like none of that exists. This episode looks at why that happens... and why it keeps happening. The school counseling profession has made its impact almost impossible to see. So in this episode, we’re talking about the visibility problem in school counseling… how confidentiality plays a role in it… and why showing up with ...
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  This Isn't Burnout. It's Gaslighting. 22.04.2026 23min

  You know the feeling. The one that says: If you were better at this, it wouldn't be this hard. If you had advocated more effectively, the caseload would be manageable. If you were really cut out for this work, you wouldn't be sitting in your car wondering if you can walk through the doors.That feeling has a name. And it isn't burnout. In this episode, Steph Johnson makes the case- through peer-reviewed research and a story she's never told publicly before- that the school counseling...
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  A Year Full of “Yeses”… and a Lot of Regret 13.04.2026 26min

  You’re not overwhelmed because there’s too much work; You’re overwhelmed because too much of it is not your job. You're not saying yes because you "lack boundaries". You're saying yes because, in that moment, saying yes made sense. And that’s the problem. ******** Join our new Skool for School Counselors community ******** Want support with real-world strategies that actually work on your campus? We’re doing that every day in the School for School Counselors Mastermind. Come join us!&nb...