Scaling

Hello there!

This video is about scaling in elementary school counseling. Scaling is a super simple counseling technique that you can use for lots of different presenting issues and lots of different ways. This will be a short little training, but you’ll learn what scaling is, why it rocks, and how to use it, including some scripting examples.

All right, so what is scaling exactly? At its core, scaling is asking a child to find a way to express how big something is, the intensity of a feeling, or the size of a problem. Scaling is a core technique inside of solution-focused brief counseling and many evidence-based cognitive behavioral interventions for anxiety and anger. Now, super traditionally, scaling is done with numbers. How intense is your feeling? How big is the problem? One through ten. That’s a great option, but you might work with some kids that connect more with something else. If you take a peek at this picture, you’ll see some other types of visuals or language that you might use. So, for example, if you’ve got a kiddo that’s super into sports, you can ask them to think about their situation in terms of points versus fouls. Or maybe the student you’re working with has a hope or a goal, something they’re working towards, and their scaling is the language of how close they are to getting there, how close they are to the moon. Or maybe the child is thinking about their presenting issue as, like, noise in their life, and they’re scaling how loud it is. Now, all of these scales, plus a few more, are inside the Solution-Focused Counseling Toolkit.

Now, there’s four reasons why scaling really rocks, and the first is probably my favorite. But scaling helps kids see that coping skills actually work. Now, I’m going to imagine that you have had at least one student, after you’ve taught them about a coping skill, say, that doesn’t work for me. Now, it’s possible that it doesn’t work for them. It’s also possible that the way that they’re defining works is not entirely accurate to the way that coping skills do, in fact, actually work. I think that, oftentimes, kids make this assumption that coping skills are supposed to erase their uncomfortable feeling, or, like, magically switch anger, sadness, worry to happiness and excitement. And so, when they’re feeling really upset and they use a coping skill and they still feel a little upset, they’re not happy, that upset feeling is still there, they think the coping skill hasn’t worked. When, in fact, if it has lessened the intensity of that feeling, it absolutely has worked. That’s what coping skills do, right? Like, I’m a grown-up. I teach and talk about and model coping skills constantly as part of my work here. But, I know, even when I use them on myself, they don’t magically make me happy. They just make me feel a little bit better about what’s going on. Scaling helps kids to see that because they see a starting size, they’re able to label how big or intense that feeling is to start, use a coping skill, and see how it has shrunk it a little. The thing is that when kids believe that coping skills actually work, they’re a lot more likely to use them. And that’s the whole goal, right? So, scaling increases student investment in the strategies that we’re teaching them. I talk specifically here about coping skills, but the same could be said, for example, for conflict resolution skills.

The second reason that scaling is so valuable is that it builds a skill that a lot of our students are genuinely still developing. The ability to identify the size of a problem accurately. Now, for lots of kids, everything feels catastrophic. Everything is the worst thing in the world. And we can’t just tell them, this isn’t that big of a deal because that’s so invalidating. And if you’re a kid, your experiences are much more limited. So small problems truly do feel extra big. But with scaling, kids can start comparing situations to each other. They maybe begin to notice that a 10 is like losing a parent, but what happened at lunch just now that was really upsetting? Maybe that’s more of a three. It’s a different kind of perspective taking. You can see an example here. It’s from the Big Kid Anxiety curriculum. It uses a rock to volcano scale for students to share how big different worries are, right? Because you might be somebody that experiences a lot of anxiety, but not all of those worries are quite so big and intense. Certainly, it can be done again with just pointing to visuals and pictures, but it also could be used maybe by creating little rocks or volcanoes out of Play-Doh to physically show those sizes.

The third reason, reason scaling is really helpful is all about motivation. So, one of the genuinely hard things about counseling kids is that progress can kind of feel a little invisible to them, but also to us and their teachers and their parents. But scaling makes progress visible. When a student who used to come in saying that they were at a 9 with their feeling or the problem going on in their life every week, and then they start coming in at a 6, they can see that more clearly. You have something really concrete to point out. And with their permission, it’s also something that you can point out to the other adults in their life as well. And not only does progress feel good, right? Like it feels good to know things are getting better, but it’s also super motivating because kind of like we talked about the coping skills, when students see that something is getting better, that something’s working, then they’re a little more invested in continuing to try things and make changes. And the same goes for their teachers.

And then last, scaling can be data. A super quick and easy data point. If you’re asking a student to rate their feeling intensity or how much a problem is bothering them in every single session, write it down. That’s a data point. Keep collecting, and then scaling turns into something that, it takes something that you are probably already doing informally or that you are going to start doing informally, scaling, and it turns it into a progress monitoring system that helps you advocate for both your students and your program. Now, I think about this in the context of scaling during counseling sessions, but scaling can also be what you have students complete themselves outside of sessions, either daily or weekly for progress monitoring as well. All right, so those are the four reasons why scaling is awesome. Let’s get into the how.

So, there’s two main ways to use scaling in your sessions. First, you can scale. You can the feeling. How intense is this emotion right now, or how intense was that emotion in that tricky situation? And then second, you can scale problems. How big of a deal is this thing that’s going on right now in your life? Here’s some feelings scaling prompts that you might kind of add to your toolkit. Maybe you ask, on a scale of one to ten, how worried do you feel right now? Super simple. Oh, show me on the scale how big your anger felt at recess. Or maybe you’re reflecting back, okay, when that happened, where were you on the scale? Okay, well, where are you now? Maybe you’re thinking about the past. Maybe their emotions, or they’re thinking about their emotions in terms of that threshold of when they feel in versus out of control. And you’re asking, what are the numbers on the scale where you’re still in control? How can you get to those numbers? What are some things you can do to get yourself to be living and experiencing those numbers on the scale? When it comes together in practice, some kind of, you know, deeper prompts that you might use to keep reflecting and processing. Hmm. Okay, when you lost the game, you looked pretty upset. On a scale of 1 to 10, how sad or frustrated were you? Ooh, a level 8. Okay, well, then you did some star breeding. What about now? What level of sad and frustrated are you? Well, a level of 5. Okay, so that’s like one situation all the way through. Or maybe you’re asking them a prompt like, okay, imagine you’re at a 7. What is your brain saying? What are you doing? What do the people around you think? With those, you’re getting them to understand kind of a bigger picture of what’s going on inside and outside of them when they’re experiencing a strong feeling. It also gets them to start identifying some of their own thoughts which are really important if you think cognitive coping, changing some of those thoughts might be helpful, and also to develop some self-awareness around their own barriers. Behaviors when they’re at that level of an emotion and how it might impact themselves and impact others, which can lead to some motivation for change.

And then when it comes to scaling a problem, here’s some examples of when you might do that. A student got in a fight with best friend, they’re scaling, like, how big of a problem is it? How big of a deal is it that they just had this fight with their friend? A student that’s consistently getting in trouble in class, it could certainly be for processing a one-off, but solution-focused counseling, which scaling is a huge part of, is considered most effective with externalizing issues, so those kiddos regularly getting in trouble in class, scaling might be a strategy that you use with them. If you’ve got a kiddo that’s just really having dreading an upcoming test, or a student feeling really overwhelmed about ongoing conflict or some other stressor happening at home, those are problems that a student might come to you with that you might use scaling for. And scaling the problem maybe sounds a little bit like this, okay, basic level, on a scale of 1 to 10, how big is this problem for you? Okay, maybe you get a little bit more specific and you’re talking about, like, they’re very, very specific problem of a very specific behavior, on a scale of 1 to 10, how well did you focus your attention today? And then a really valuable question you can ask is, what stops it from being worse? This starts to get a child to start to think about, well one, again kind of that, size of the problem, that this is not like the worst problem in the whole entire world ever, if they give you anything other than a 10. And they start to develop a little bit of that sense of, like, better and worse. They also might start to develop some ideas of things both internally and externally that were preventing it from being worse, right, either something that they were doing in the moment or something that an adult or a peer was doing that kept the problem a little bit smaller. Let’s think of a time that that problem was lower, let’s say at a 5. What was different about that time? This is a little element of exception finding which is another strategy inside solution focused counseling. The idea being that sometimes when we use prompts like this, a student is able to generate themselves a problem solving strategy, a coping skill, a form of action that they have taken before themselves that they maybe could take again to help with their problem, as opposed to it always having to come from us, or asking what would need to happen to move this from a 9 to an 8. Now, I’m going to say 9 times out of 10, not confusing with the numbers, a student is going to answer that question with something outside of their locus of control. And that’s okay. It makes sense that their mind is going to jump there, right? But that’s an opportunity to talk to them talk about, yeah, absolutely, that probably would help it to move down one level. I don’t know that there’s much that we can do to make that happen though, right? What are some things that maybe you could do that could bring it down from a 9 to an 8?

And then earlier, I shared about some different metaphors you can use with scaling, but there are some other options too. Of course, a traditional number scale is great. For younger students, you might choose to use 1 through 5 instead of 1 to 10. That might be a little bit more manageable and even more concrete for them. You could of course use emojis or some other sort of face for it or my favorite is a weather scale like you see there. I showed you an example earlier of a volume visual, right, if their problem was like noise, but it could also be something that is like a thermometer or something getting hot or higher, right, especially that could be a visual that they’re coloring in for their scaling. And then beyond visuals, you might also use manipulatives to have students illustrate the size of the problem or the size of the emotion. So, I showed you one with Play-Doh earlier. You could also use counters or mini erasers or anything else really small to use as piles to show a little versus some versus a lot or it could be using blocks to build together. Towers at different heights. I think balloons can be really fun, too. Now, I don’t know about your students, but I think blowing up balloons can be a little tricky. So it might be that you’re blowing up the balloon, and the student is telling you when to stop or when to make it bigger or smaller to represent the size of their feeling or their problem. And then you could consider using paint strips and then maybe paper clips or clothes pins to move along it for scaling where the darker the color, the more intense the feeling or the problem.

If you think about a counseling session as a whole, here’s where you might fit scaling in. You’re doing your check-in, and your check-in is scaling what’s going on with them. You’re exploring it a little bit more to get a better idea of why they’re at that number versus something higher or lower. Then you’re doing the focus of the session, some sort of counseling intervention, probably teaching, practicing some sort of skill. And then you’re rescaling again to check in and see where they’re at now. And then at the end, really reflecting on how, where they were on the scale changed and connecting it to what they did, what they learned, what they practiced, what you talked about together. Another example might be, you know, you’re checking in to start to see where they’re at, how they would scale a problem or a feeling. You’re asking them to identify what would get it to move down a little bit. What are some things that they would need to do or some things that would need to happen? You’re doing again your work together, which is probably talking through, practicing, identifying solutions, strategies, making game plans for them. You’re reflecting by just reviewing the plan. And then in this situation, you’re maybe rescaling at the next session. Okay, last time you were at this, we talked about how you could bring it down two levels. That was going to be your game plan. How did that go? And then moving from there. It seems like a lot of steps when it’s listed out, but it can actually be done pretty quickly. And it’s something that even younger students are able to connect to.

All right, so that is it for scaling. Now, if you are watching this during the school year, then your challenge is to give scaling a try at least once this week with a student. But if you are watching during summer break, then I encourage you to try using this on yourself. Just naming what level you’re at for different feelings or problems and then thinking through what shifting one level better might look like for you. And/or if you’re watching on summer break and you’re feeling particularly inspired, now’s a great time to download and print some of the scaling tools that you want to use this year.