Brief Counseling That Works: A Solution-Focused Therapy Approach For School Counselors And Other Men
Toccara Delacerda
"The solution-focused counseling approach is teaching us that strengths and resources are already available and dormant within students, parents, and the school. This book is a highly readable and practical guide for harnessing the power of problem-free talk and exception-seeking to support and empower our students."
Since that early development, SFBT has not only become one of the leading schools of brief therapy, it has become a major influence in such diverse fields as business, social policy, education, and criminal justice services, child welfare, domestic violence offenders treatment. Described as a practical, goal-driven model, a hallmark of SFBT is its emphasis on clear, concise, realistic goal negotiations.
Brief Counseling That Works: A Solution-Focused Therapy Approach for School Counselors and Other Men
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Solution-focused brief therapy is an evidenced-based psychotherapy approach. There have been close to 150 randomized clinical control studies with different control populations in different clinical settings in multiple countries, almost all showing positive benefit of SFBT. There have also been eight meta-analyses on a range of outcome studies with an overall effect size ranging from small to large, for child, adolescent, and adult populations, for presenting problems such as depression, stress, anxiety, behavioral problems, parenting, and psychosocial and interpersonal problems (Kim et al, 2010; 2019). Click Here for more about the research in SFBT.
Provides insights and applications for solution-focused brief counseling (SFBC). Includes information about how to conduct brief, short-term sessions that lead to rapid, observable change and work with individuals in school and community settings. Useful for review of competency 1.
One of the most promising areas of intervention for Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) is with children, adolescents, and teachers in school settings. SFBT was applied in schools during the beginning of the 1990s and since that time the use of SFBT in schools has grown across disciplines with reports of SFBT interventions and programs implemented in schools in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, South Africa, and in the provinces of Mainland China and Taiwan. The brief and flexible nature of SFBT, and its applicability to work with diverse problems, make SFBT a practical intervention approach for social workers to use in schools. SFBT has been used in schools with student behavioral and emotional issues, academic problems, social skills, and dropout prevention. SFBT addresses the pressing needs of public school students that struggle with poverty, substance use, bullying, and teen pregnancy. It can be applied in group sessions, as well as individual ones, and in teacher consultations. There is also increasing empirical support that validates its use with students and teachers. SFBT has been applied to improve academic achievement, truancy, classroom disruptions, and substance use. The history and development of SFBT in schools, basic tenets of SFBT, the techniques that are used to help people change, and the current research are covered along with the implications for the practice of social work.
The origins of SFBT happened while a team of therapists worked in a family services clinic behind a one-way mirror, where some practitioners would interview clients in a room and the others would observe the sessions. This team discovered that change happens when they focus on client strengths and future-oriented interventions that facilitate clients toward solution-building instead of problem solving. Specifically, the solution building process directs clients toward exploration of resources, past successes, and the identification of goals and competencies, and future behaviors that lead to a solution. SFBT was influenced by the Mental Research Institute Brief Therapy model and the family systems therapy approaches of the day and had theoretical roots with ecosystems theories. Later, in the 1990s, SFBT became strongly associated with social construction models and social constructivist views within family systems therapies.
The Working on What Works (WOWW) program is another example of a successful SFBT school-based intervention. WOWW is a classroom approach developed by SFBT pioneers Berg and Shilts in 2002 (Berg & Shilts, 2005). Piloted in urban schools in Fort Lauderdale, Florida (Kelly & Bluestone-Miller, 2009; Kelly et al., 2008), the WOWW philosophy starts with the assumption that teachers want to have a positive influence on students and feel like good teachers.
SFBT has been used in schools since the 1990s, and there is empirical support that validates its use with students and teachers. The brief and flexible nature of SFBT and its applicability to work with diverse problems make SFBT a practical intervention approach for school social workers to use (Franklin et al., 2001; Kelly et al., 2008; Newsome, 2004). SFBT addresses the pressing needs of the public school students that struggle with poverty, substance use, bullying, and teen pregnancy. It can be applied within group sessions, as well as individual ones, and in teacher consultations (Berg & Shilts, 2005; Franklin et al., 2001; Franklin & Hopson, 2009; Franklin et al., 2007, cited in Kim & Franklin, under review; Kral, 1995; Metcalf, 1995; Murphy, 1996; Murphy & Duncan, 2007; Sklare, 1997; Webb, 1999).
All school counselors must be prepared to assess suicide risk in students. Unfortunately, given the diverse demands of school counseling, sometimes single meetings with students in the near term are all that are possible.
The ongoing pandemic requires that school staff members adjust how learning occurs. Solution-focused techniques allow school counselors to be brief, flexible and powerful in their support of students facing an array of social, emotional and learning challenges.
Solution-focused therapy, also called solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT), is a type of therapy that places far more importance on discussing solutions than problems (Berg, n.d.). Of course, you must discuss the problem to find a solution, but beyond understanding what the problem is and deciding how to address it, solution-focused therapy will not dwell on every detail of the problem you are experiencing.
Systemic-motivational therapy is a model of SUD family counseling that combines elements of systemic family therapy and MI. It was developed by Steinglass (2009) to treat alcohol use disorder (AUD) in the family but can be applied to other substance misuse. Goals include assessing the relationship between substance misuse and family life, understanding family beliefs about substance misuse, and helping the family work as a team to develop family-based strategies for abstinence.
Functional family therapy is another behaviorally based family counseling approach. Its goals are to change the dysfunctional family's behavioral and interactional patterns that maintain the adolescent's substance misuse and reinforce positive problem-solving responses to adolescent risk behaviors (Rowe, 2012). It is based on an ecological model of risk and protective factors.
Functional family therapy has been widely disseminated in the United States and other countries. A meta-analysis of comparison and randomized controlled studies found significant support for the effectiveness of functional family therapy compared with other treatment approaches, including CBT, psychodynamic, individual, and group counseling for adolescents, parenting education groups, and probation and mental health services (Hartnett et al., 2017).
In the 1980s and 1990s, Berg and Miller (1992) and de Shazer (1988) developed a family counseling approach to help family members find solutions to their problems instead of using the problemsolving approach of structural and strategic counseling. The main assumptions of solution-focused therapy are that pinpointing the cause of problematic family functioning is unnecessary and that counseling focused on solutions to specific problems is enough to help families change.
In solution-focused brief therapy, families generate treatment goals. The role of the counselor is to emphasize times when the problem (e.g., substance use behavior) does not occur and help the family identify achievable solutions that enhance motivation and optimism for behavioral change (Klostermann & O'Farrell, 2013).
In solution-focused brief therapy, the counselor helps the family develop a detailed, carefully articulated vision of what the world would be like if the presenting problem were solved. The counselor then helps the family take the necessary steps to realize that vision. Because of its narrow focus on a specific target problem, this therapeutic approach works well with many SUD treatment strategies.
Research supports the effectiveness of solution-focused brief therapy. A review of controlled outcome studies found that it provided significant positive benefits to adults with mental disorders and showed promise for improving family functioning, particularly for families under stress of having a family member with a mental disorder (Gingerich & Peterson, 2013). A study of parents with SUD and trauma-related symptoms who were involved in the child welfare system found that solution-focused brief therapy was effective in reducing substance use and trauma-related symptoms (Kim, Brook, & Akin, 2018).
Solution focused brief counseling, or SFBC as it is commonly called, is an incredibly effective and practical counseling model to include into your school counseling program. I have written briefly about SFBC in previous posts (like this one on individual counseling), but I figured it was high-time to devote an entire article to this model. Honestly, in all my years of school counseling, I have seen nothing that even comes to a close second in terms of effectiveness in the school setting.
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