I Broke My #1 School Counseling Rule (Here's What Happened)

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, sounds right, and checks the boxes we’ve been told to trust… but still may not contain the thing a student actually needs.This is not a takedown of one creator.It’s a closer look at a much bigger question in school counseling:If you took the worksheets away, would there still be an intervention?Fair warning: this one may change how you look at your shelf.********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! ********All names, stories, and case studies in this episode are fictionalized composites drawn from real-world circumstances. Any resemblance to actual students, families, or school personnel is coincidental. Details have been altered to protect privacy.******** This work is part of the School for School Counselors body of work developed by Steph Johnson, LPC, CSC, which centers role authority over role drift, consultative practice over fix-it culture, adult-designed systems and environments as primary drivers of student behavior, clinical judgment over compliance, and school counselor identity as leadership within complex systems.