Empathy in Action: Using Collaborative Problem-Solving in School Counseling

Hey there, school counselor, and welcome back to the School for School Counselors podcast. I'm Steph Johnson, your host, a full-time school counselor just like you, so excited to be back with you for another episode where we can geek out on school counseling best practices to become the healthiest and most effective school counselors that we can possibly be. I'm going to do something a little bit different this week, so as I'm recording this episode, we just started Spring of 2024. And even though the weather outside isn't showing it in a lot of places, we can surely see spring fever already taking hold in our school buildings. Have you seen it? I know I have. Tempers are flaring, tensions are escalating, stress levels are rising and unfortunately, we're going to be seeing a lot of this through the end of May or June. So we've really got to be thoughtful and intentional about the ways that we're approaching some of these situations on campus, because often we have things that have sort of been simmering right underneath the surface for the majority of the year, but there's something about spring that makes it boil over and we want to prevent that as much as we possibly can.

We just released a new masterclass for our School for School Counselors, mastermind members about collaborative problem solving and, as I reflected on the time of year we're in now and what could be some of the best supports for you in the moment, this masterclass really spoke to me. Normally, when we provide a masterclass for our mastermind members, we keep it in our mastermind library. It's available to members only. I'm going to break with tradition this week and I'm going to let you listen in on the video portion of the masterclass, because I really want you to either learn or refresh your memory on the collaborative problem solving approach that was first developed by Ross Green. You may be familiar with some of his work lost at school, the Explosive Child and since developing that model, there have been lots of other folks that have come in and tweaked it, refined it, created more tools for it, and it's really become a beautiful, robust intervention for students who are experiencing chronic issues in school. So, as I said, although we have supplied this to our mastermind members and they have some supplementary materials to go along with this, they're able to watch the video in real time.

I did want to send this information your way for two reasons Number one, I want you to know about this approach and number two, it helps give you a little bit of insight into what's going on in our School for School Counselors, mastermind. So, without further ado, may I present to you collaborative problem solving for School Counselors. Hey there everybody, I wanted to give you a quick video about the collaborative problem solving approach and this is going to go along with our playbook that we are making available in the Mastermind Library for you. Collaborative problem solving is pretty cool. It's a different way of looking at solving problems in conjunction with students, so they feel like they have support, they feel like they have a voice and they're being heard as we're trying to solve some of these big problems that they're experiencing at school. Let me share my screen with you and show you what I am talking about. This won't be a long presentation, for sure. I just want to give you the basics of what's going on here so that you can really understand the components of collaborative problem solving and how it's different from a lot of conversations you hear around your school campus building.

Collaborative problem solving was first described by Ross Green. You know we're a huge fan of his around the School for School Counselors Mastermind. He wrote a book called the Explosive Child in 1998. And that was the first place that this problem solving approach was outlined. It blends a lot of different things that we know and love like developmental theory, problems theory, social learning theory and neuroscience research and kind of packages it all together in a best practice approach for problem solving.

Collaborative problem solving is built on the idea that kids do well if they can, not because they don't want to. That's not what's going on, but a lot of people in your school building may believe that If you're anything like me, you've had the privilege of working with some folks or maybe misprivileged who believe that kids just aren't trying hard enough, they just don't want to do it, their parents just aren't present enough, they haven't been doing their job at home, those kinds of things, and it really muddies the waters when we're trying to solve problems with kids. We don't feel like we have buy-in from the parent at home a lot of the times, where sometimes parents don't have the resources to be able to be present and engaged in this process, and so we need some sort of way to allow for those things. We need to be able to compensate for them and still make progress. So we're going to be focusing on lagging skills and unsolved problems for students, not a lack of motivation, not attention seeking. How many times have you heard that one? Not manipulation, not poor parenting. We're not going to lean on these as an excuse as to why we cannot intervene or be effective with this student. We're not going to take those for an answer. The key principles of collaborative problem solving are empathy, collaboration and skill building. We're going to come together to create this beautiful symphony of change.

Now, when we talk about the collaborative problem-solving approach, or what they call the CPS approach which I admit is a really, really bad acronym there are five major pathways within which skills may be lagging. One is emotion regulation. Two is problem-solving. So do they have that cognitive flexibility to be able to think their way through a problem or do they just kind of explode or melt down? Communication is the third. Sometimes social skills comes into play. Here Could be an issue of maybe expressive or receptive language. It may be a communication deficit, or it may be lagging social skills. It may be lack of exposure. It may be the difference between home and school expectations. There could be all sorts of things going on there.

Language supports is the fourth potential lagging pathway. So again, language skills. Going back to can they use the language and then do they know how to Do? They know how to verbalize when they need help. Can they verbalize how they're feeling in the moment? Sometimes kids can't recognize those emotions or can't name them, and they get frustrated because no one seems to understand what's going on. And then, lastly, executive skills Can they shift gears? Can they move from one thing to the next? Do they require a lot of prep time or prompting to be able to switch tasks quickly? Can they organize and plan? Can they think their way through a process? Can they remember for themselves the way they go about solving a problem, those problem-solving steps, whether that be an academic pursuit or whether that be social or emotional. And how's their working memory? How are they holding on to things in real time? These are all concerns and could be some lagging skills that are contributing to their difficulties at school.

Collaborative problem-solving says that difficult behavior can be viewed through a lens of sort of a developmental delay, and I don't love that terminology. But what they're saying is it's not that there's something that's broken in this kid, it's not that there's anything wrong with them. They're just delayed in building this cognitive flexibility and building this frustration, tolerance that they need in real life, or they're lacking the skills to handle frustration, to adapt to these requests that always seem to be changing or applying skills in the moment. A lot of kids have trouble there. They know what to do, when they're calm and collected they can tell you what they should have done, but in the moment they have difficulty applying those skills. How many kids have you had in your office just like that? I'm going to bet it's been quite a few.

So the goals and the collaborative problem-solving approach are first, to reestablish positive relationships. Sometimes these are the students that have kind of been written off by everybody else. They just don't care, they just won't try, they're just so angry all the time those kinds of things, and so they really need the opportunity to reestablish those positive relationships on campus. But second, creating experiences that provide practice so that they can really hone in on their skills to problem-solve, to be flexible, to tolerate frustration, where we can walk with them and guide them in those solutions and really help them feel like they're capable and competent. This is kind of a fun comparison. So this is a typical view of behavior. So listen to these and see how many people on your campus have you heard say these kinds of things First, that children do well if they want to.

Well if they just try. Well if they just wanted to. This is just this is a motivation problem. Have you ever heard those Believing that difficult behavior is attention seeking? Or they're just trying to get adults to give in to them Like it's a power play? It's a power struggle See this a lot in classrooms, I think Coercing students to comply. If you do this, I'll give you that. A lot of the behaviorism kind of approaches come into play here often times. Have you ever heard those kinds of bargaining approaches, incentivization, so reward and punishment If you do this thing, I'll give you a candy. If you didn't do it too bad, sorry. Nine times out of ten. What does that do to the student? It either makes them really sad or really mad if they didn't earn the reward. Right.

And then typical views of behavior are reactive. They focus on the behavior after it's already happened. There's not a lot of proactive components to it, right? We see the kid amping up, amping up, amping up. They have some sort of reaction and then we're like man, that shouldn't have happened. What are you going to do different next time? Have you heard people say that the CPS view of behavior is a little bit different. It believes that children can do well if they can, if they have the skills they need and if they have their needs met, they're going to be able to do well because they're going to want to. It believes in that basic drive and all kids to be able to do well, to be part of the status quo and to be able to be successful in the school environment.

We look at difficult behaviors through the lens of a learning disability. That does not mean that behavioral problems are a learning disability. But just like students with learning disabilities cannot help the gaps they may have or the challenges they have in completing their academics on campus or managing their social-emotional well-being, same goes here with behaviors. We're looking at it through that lens of learning disability. There are some things we need to give this student to accommodate their experience. We need to build them up. We need to fill those gaps so that they can be successful. We're going to teach the lagging cognitive or emotional skills so that they have them in hand ready to go. That's that lagging skills unmet needs piece. We're going to work toward mutual solutions. That means everybody's at the table. They may not all be at the table at the same time and you're probably going to be the one doing the collaboration with the student. But at some point in this process, everyone is going to have some insight, they're going to be able to contribute and they're going to be able to be heard. And, lastly, the CPS view of behavior is proactive. We're seeking to prevent problems before they start. We're going to gather a lot of information about where these are coming from, what the potential skills or deficits might be, and then we're going to build a plan that seeks to be proactive and cut all those explosions off at the pass.

Typically, when you see adults on a school campus implement a behavior plan whether that be formal or informal, it can go both ways you typically see one of these two plans Plan A, which is an adult oriented plan, or plan C, which is a child oriented plan. So plan A is imposing your will. It's the adult knows what they want. Their solution is the only one on the table. You will either do it or you will be punished. Right, you must do this thing. I need to see this in five minutes. No, you may not do that. And at the end of the interaction, the teacher walks away with the feeling of I made him do it. I sure did. I made him do it.

In contrast, plan C, which is child focused, just reduces the expectation. When we are in plan C, we're reducing those unnecessary demands. We're kind of picking our battle, sometimes not picking the battle at all. Right, when we sit down and talk with kids about why are you having this difficulty, where do you think this is coming from, the adult is saying things like okay or oh, because they don't have a lot to add. All they do is just take away the expectation. Whereas the whole class is expected to do one thing, this kid gets a special role. They don't have to do it just because the teacher does not want to see them explode. We see this a lot with work refusal Kids who put their heads down, put their hoodies on and just refuse to complete work and the teacher's just looking at them and gone. I mean, I'm not gonna make them. You heard that that's been a lot lately. It feels like too.

So plan A or plan C? I would say neither is probably the best approach. Instead, in collaborative problem solving, we look toward plan B. Plan B integrates the needs, the wants, the wishes of both parties the adult and the child. We're looking toward collaborative solutions to address those triggers in the school environment. We want to address the unmet expectations. What are the things the student has not been able to complete successfully or execute successfully while they're at school? The adult in the process serves as the surrogate frontal lobe, meaning we're helping them think through these things, we're helping them identify triggers, we're helping them come up with possible solutions, but we're not providing them. That sounds like a school counseling role to you, because that's what we do for a lot of our day right, or wish we could do for a lot of our day. This is our jam, this is where we shine right here, and the overarching feeling to all of this is let's work it out together, let's figure this out and let's make it happen. These plans you can see when we break them down into how it trains the student to meet the expectation or prepares them to meet the expectation, how it reduces meltdowns and how it teaches essential skills. Plan B is the only plan that checks every single box, and so it's going to be a phenomenal tool in your toolbox to be able to really work within plan B, to really utilize it to its fullest extent and to be able to guide these students toward a feeling and success when they're on campus.

Briefly, the flow of the collaborative problem solving process looks like this First we're identifying those lagging skills. We are not identifying those with the student in front of us. We're doing other things. We're having meetings and completing things like pathways, inventories, situation analysis, which Ross Green calls his ALSUP and I believe now may have changed to the ASUP they took the lagging piece out or sometimes formal testing. If it's really severe, really prevalent, it may merit some testing.

Before you get much further into this, you've got to make sure the student can handle the collaborative problem solving process. Second, we're going to uncover the unsolved problems. The problem is different from the lagging skill. Those are two different things. As you get into these worksheets and this playbook you're going to see the difference. But basically the unsolved problems are the verb-related things, the expectations that the student is having difficulty meeting while they're in the school environment. We're talking with the student about these things. We're also involving family members as much as we can because we want to get this really comprehensive, well-rounded picture of what the student is capable of and what their current unsolved problems may be.

Then we go into problem solving with the student, feel the front loading that has to be done in this. It sounds like a really big, huge, hairy process. It's not. It can go pretty quickly, pretty expeditiously. You've got to be really bought into doing all the front loading, gathering all the data and the information, because if you don't do that nine times out of ten, this collaborative problem solving is not going to be as effective. When we problem solve with the student, we're leaning in first with gathering info, but we are hard and heavy in the empathy side, which again is where we shine as school counselors. This is the part we love getting to know the student, building that relationship and rapport with them through empathy, and we're gathering information about what they think the problem might be. Sometimes they see it completely differently than we do.

Second part is defining the adult concerns After you've spent some time with the student. That's not going to be a quick conversation where you're looking into these perceived problems on the student's end of things. We're not walking in with an agenda. We're not saying you know, I know you've had trouble doing this or trouble doing that, I think you're having difficulty with this. We don't start that way. We let them talk, we let them identify, we let them determine what it is we're going to be looking at and then, after we've had that conversation and they've talked about what's not going great and what they think might need to happen, we're going to define our adult concerns. We're going to say, hey, I hear you, but you know, at school we have to do certain things. This is something that we have to be able to do. Then what do you think we can do about it? We invite collaboration. We let them be the architect of the solution. They're going to propose these preliminary ideas. They're going to give us the inspiration for the plan that follows, so that they can feel capable, they can feel in control and feel like they're being heard.

Here's some resources here. We're going to link to these in the Mastermind Library as well. The Lives in the Balance website is absolute gold. It has so many resources, so many opportunities to learn more about the collaborative problem-solving process. Think Kids, also from Massachusetts General Hospital. That's where Ross Green originated the collaborative problem-solving approach. They have a lot of research foundation information on their website. Then at the bottom is the citation for the book. If you want to go pick that up and study more about it. All right. I hope that was helpful for you in learning more about collaborative problem solving and how you might implement it on your campus, as we're releasing this module we're releasing it in the spring and, of course, collaborative problem solving can be appropriate at any time in the school year, but in the spring, when temper start flaring a little bit more, things seem to feel a little more heated. Stuff that we've been able to ignore so far and by we I mean teachers are now coming to a boiling point. Collaborative problem solving can be a really great approach to help minimize some of that angst, some of the discord in classrooms and things like that, and so I encourage you to give it a try. Go to the collaborative problem solving playbook. It will take you step by step through the collaborative problem solving process. Go try it, see what you think and let me know. Okay, I'll see you soon. Have a great week ahead.

Hey, I hope you enjoyed that peek into one of our School for School Counselors Mastermind Masterclasses. We have such a great time in the mastermind together. We have a monthly masterclass on a special topic of interest that's pertinent to that time of the school year. As you know, our school year feels pretty seasonal. We have different concerns and different things that pop up at different times throughout the year, and so we try to address those in our mastermind. We also have a monthly data cohort meeting for those who are working on collecting use of time data, collecting program data and how to utilize that to its fullest extent once they have it, as well as our weekly support and consultation chats.

Now you'll notice I didn't say anything about resources. We don't provide curriculum or lesson outlines in our mastermind, but that's for a reason Number one we're not great at making it honestly. We haven't really tried, because we know what the research says about teachers, pay, teachers materials, and this ruffles a lot of feathers in our school counseling world. But I'm going to challenge that by saying when have you ever seen a school counseling resource creator provide data on the effectiveness of the lesson? The answer is never. You never, ever see that. So until we start seeing that in our industry, we're going to continue to warn you to really be mindful, be intentional and really scrutinize the materials that you're downloading. Just because they look cute doesn't mean they're effective. Until we begin seeing some numbers that illustrate how effective resources are, we're going to approach them very, very rarely.

Instead, in our mastermind we publish what we call playbooks. Playbooks are outlines. They're guidebooks or playbooks that's why they're called that that are designed to help you be effective in interventions without the need for any additional materials. You may need some colored pencils here and there or a deck of cards, but they're very basic materials you likely already have in your counseling office. You don't need a bunch of papers runoff. You don't need a bunch of stuff downloaded, anything like that, because we believe school counselors should be leaning on and relying on their counseling expertise. So, as a member of the mastermind, again, you're getting a monthly masterclass, a monthly data cohort meeting and weekly support and consultation chats with our additional mastermind library that houses our playbooks as well as a multitude of other resources. That library has grown so big we now have an index in it so you can go to behavior intervention and immediately pull up all the modules having to do with that concern. I think it's a thing of beauty.

I really love what we're creating in the School for School Counselors Mastermind and if you'd like to know more about it, if this masterclass has piqued your interest, go to schoolforschoolcounselorscom slash mastermind. You can read all about it and we would love to welcome you to our mastermind family. All right until then, remember the collaborative problem solving approach. Remember the key ingredients of empathy really digging down to the unsolved problems, the unmet needs of the student and allowing them to lead in the collaboration for problem solving. It sounds so simple on the surface. We know it can get kind of tricky in the middle, but it's all worth it because it's going to help guide our students toward the best versions of themselves. I'm so glad you're in this with me for the long haul and I'm so appreciative of the work you do each and every day and I can't wait to spend more time with you here on the podcast. I'll be back soon with another episode and until then I hope you have the best week. Take care.