Advisors in schools are facing unprecedented challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. School buildings across the country closed last spring, and as we move into the new school year this fall, some students will only attend school remotely through online learning. Others will be in the school part-time with reduced capacity, while others may return to a full-capacity school but will be asked to stay away physically and keep their faces covered during the long days.
In addition, as a result of pandemic management measures, students have spent an unusual amount of time with their families, some of whom are under new and severe emotional, health and financial stresses. The ubiquitous spread of COVID-19 is linked to higher unemployment and poverty, increased use of illicit drugs, and new and persistent trauma experiences. Add to this the ongoing series of horrific news reports of black violence and ethnic hatred that add to social stress.
School counselors need to be ready to support a variety of student concerns related to COVID-19 and the social isolation it brings. Advisors who can provide short and flexible support to many students with significant needs in both remote and personal locations are particularly valued.
Fortunately, the solution-oriented counseling model is highly adaptable to a wide variety of problems, including grief, trauma and fear. It's suitable for suicide prevention efforts, classroom teaching, and even brief check-ins with students who are showing no external signs of struggle. Rather than delving deeply into the origins and causes of problems, this form of counseling targets customers' hopes, resources, exceptions to problems, and descriptions of a preferred future for customers. It also promotes vicarious resilience, which will help counselors who may have their own decreased stamina due to personal struggles related to the pandemic.
Solution-oriented counseling was started in the 1980s by Insoo Kim Berg and Steve de Shazer from their work at the Brief Family Therapy Center in Milwaukee. It has developed and spread in the following decades through the work of many advocates in counseling, therapy and coaching. It is sometimes referred to as a "brief consultation" as it can be very effective in some 20- to 50-minute sessions, or even during a brief hall or classroom conversation.
Counseling in a modern, virtual world now means counseling through video calls with no confidentiality guarantees, as students may only be in a semi-private or even public setting. Solution-oriented counseling is not problem-phobic, but because of its embedded focus on goals, preferred future, assets, resources, and exceptions to problems, there is less risk of revealing private, sensitive information that could be overheard by a family member at home
Three minute check-in
Given the long absence from school and the limited amount of time students can spend with school counselors, short check-ins of three to five minutes are a practical way to support students and measure their emotional state. School staff are major rapporteurs on child abuse, and there are serious concerns about whether students may suffer abuse because of their limited access to these trusted adult lawyers.
Consider the following eight check-in questions:
What's your best hope for this year?
Where are you on a scale from 1 to 10, when 10 means things are going as well as you can hope and 1 is the opposite?
What are you most proud of when you've been home for so long?
If this turns out to be a really good year, what did you do to make it so?
Who will notice?
Do you feel safe at school and at home?
Who can you talk to when you are upset?
Is there anything else I should know?
These type of questions allow students to ask their preferred future, their resources to help them get there, and a description of what that future will be, including those who will notice. Humans are social animals, and when students describe what others see in them when they are successful, the path becomes apparent to them.
Even if there is not time to ask all these questions, it helps them to get the students to describe their preferred future, resources and social support in order to take small steps towards something hopeful. It will also enable the counselor to assess the students' emotional states and resources.
Mourning students
Helping students deal with grief does not have to focus solely on challenges and sadness. It can also effectively involve conversations about joys and happiness. Students first need a counselor who will actively listen to their history of pain in losing a loved one (or other loss). However, a solution-oriented counselor will also ask questions that describe what the loved one likes to do and what are positive aspects of the relationship.
Questions about what the deceased did for the student, what he enjoyed about the student, and how the student knows these things can bring back memories of the relationship and help the student develop his or her own assets and strengths through this relationship to recognize. The question, what do the students see in themselves that the late saw can provide rich descriptions of the strength of this connection.
Grief involves coping, so a solution-oriented approach may include questions about how the student managed to get out of bed and get to school and what the deceased would be most pleased about about how the student is doing. For those students who are less verbal, if they can use their coping skills or positive aspects of their relationship, it can replace or aid dialogue.
Suicide prevention
All school counselors must be ready to assess the risk of suicide in students. Unfortunately, given the different requirements of school counseling, sometimes only individual meetings with students are possible in the near future.
Fortunately, solution-oriented counseling offers a framework that goes beyond the mere assessment of the suicide risk. It paves the way to hope and critical prevention work. In addition to the classic questions about scaling (e.g., "What is stopping you from being a number lower? What will you do when a number is higher?") And questions about best hopes and a preferred future can be more nuanced Questions generate additional solutions -oriented thinking. Some examples are:
If we asked the version of you that was happier, what would that version tell you?
What would this version remind you that it works for you?
How did you get this far
When was it a little better in the last week?
Who is on your support team?
Who could we bring into this conversation?
What job should we give this person?
Now what would that person advise on how you are feeling?
According to John Henden in Suicide Prevention: The solution-oriented approach is one of the most effective interventions in having the student imagine themselves witnessing their own funeral and describe who would be most upset and what advice that person would want to be given, and what options other than suicide would the student wish they had tried.
Group counseling
Group counseling in schools is often based on topics such as fear regulation, development of social skills or anger management. In the midst of a pandemic, school counselors may want to expand groups across narrow topics to include more students.
A solution-oriented approach enables a single group to include people with different social and emotional needs. In the first group session, ask students about their best hope of how the group might help them. They can approach their preferred future by describing what life would be like if things were better. By describing cases in which this has happened and exceptions to the problem, they can imagine the possible change. The group members can then scale their current position, followed by questions about what idea they would try until the next meeting to get one step closer.
Subsequent meetings would begin with each member reporting what is better since the last meeting, scaling their status and whether there have been any setbacks, describing how they have dealt with them and detailing what signs they will see as they progress . To use the group dynamic, some of these questions could come from other members, or members could make suggestions for what worked for them. Ensuring the group includes compliments from the leader and his colleagues will be a positive and rewarding experience.
In addition, including activities in groups helps children express themselves in different ways. Fortunately, there are plenty of solution-oriented activities. An excellent resource for solution-oriented activities with children is Pamela King's Tools for Effective Therapy with Children and Families: A Solution-Oriented Approach.
The following activities can be particularly useful:
Cartoon Panel: Ask students to mark their Wonder Day with a cartoon with six panels or, alternatively, six resources / strengths or six challenges that they provide with the names of the people who have supported them and the skills that they have learned to master.
Mock Interview: Encourage students to record a video interview of another student or to have each other interviewed on a live video group stream. The prompts could include: What strengths did you use to meet your challenge? How did you move on and not give up? What advice do you have for others who are struggling with what you are struggling with? What are you doing well today when you are your best self?
Rainbow Questions: Have students choose three different Lego pieces to deliver (when you meet in person) or ask them to name their three main color choices. Then have them answer color-coded questions based on the colors you selected. For example:
Green: Imagine you are talking to your 5 year old self. What's the wisest advice you would give yourself on how to deal with quarantine?
Orange: What did you do to get along with your family during the quarantine?
Yellow: What is the nicest compliment you have received since the COVID-19 outbreak?
Dark blue: Who supported you best during the quarantine? What have you done?
Schwarz: What will your friends notice when you are your best self?
List it: Ask students to take a piece of paper and draw a line in the center. List challenges on one side and strengths, resources, and trusted advisors on the other to help you with these challenges.
Face Mask: Have students draw an outline of their face (or body) on each side of a page. On one side, ask them to draw or list what others see in them. On the other hand, have them draw or list strengths and resources that others don't know about.
News Reporter: Have students interview key people in their lives and learn what they see as their strengths, skills and resources. Invite students to identify examples and stories, then write the information down as a newspaper article.
Morning meeting
According to the Responsive Classroom Approach, the goal of a morning class meeting is to “set the tone for respectful learning, create a climate of trust, motivate students to feel important, create empathy and encourage collaboration as well promote social and emotional aspects and academic learning. "Morning meetings are an easy opportunity to include crisis dialogue so that individual students can identify their best hopes, personal resources, and examples of preferred futures.
The best hopes for the school year can be placed individually or as part of a group; B. "What do we need as a group to finish this school year well?"
Questions about resources and strengths could be: “When things were difficult, what was the most helpful? What have you tried to cope with what you have never done before? Imagine stepping into a time machine, driving a year into the future and COVID-19 is done. Now look back and describe something you are proud of, how you handled all of this. Who helped you What would this person say if they described something here that you did well? Who do you admire and why? How are you doing with this person? "
Lessons
Solution-oriented lessons can include both scaling and movement. The best hopes or objectives can be ground points numbered 1 to 10 (or writing numbers on separate pages). Students can take turns standing by their number and then step forward and describe what they will do when they get a number higher. Alternatively, in class, a number line from 1 to 10 can be drawn and hung on the wall, and students can put a post-it sticker on the line where they are. For a video chat you can simply enter your current number.
The representation of your preferred future and your resources can be done by writing letters. Students may be asked to think about what they would like to do in their career and life 20 years from now. Let them imagine that they are living this life and they will find that they can bring messages back to the past. Ask this successful adult living the life they hoped for to describe to their younger self the challenges they faced, the internal assets that helped the most, and the people who supported them. Then let them give their best advice on how to navigate over the next 20 years.
Students can also interview each other to learn about each other's recent challenges and resources, including who has helped them, what has been most helpful to others, and what advice they have for others.
The ongoing pandemic requires school staff to adjust the way they learn. Solution-oriented techniques enable school counselors to provide brief, flexible, and efficient support to students facing a range of social, emotional, and learning challenges.
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Photo of young students having lunch, which was spread out at a cafeteria table on a school day in autumn 2020
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Mark M. Jones has been an elementary school counselor in Arlington, Virginia for four years. Prior to that, he was a trial lawyer for 30 years. Contact him at [email protected].
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