Nearly one in three adolescents has experienced cyberbullying. School counselors are often among the first adults students turn to, yet the standards that shape their training say little about it. ASCA has no cyberbullying-specific position statement, and CACREP standards do not name cyberbullying competencies.
I wanted to understand how the people who train school counselors work within that gap. My article with Dr. Yung-Wei Lin, now in press at Professional School Counseling, grew out of my dissertation. We interviewed 12 counselor educators in CACREP-accredited programs about how they prepare school counseling students to address cyberbullying in K–12 schools.
Six themes
A normalized reality
Cyberbullying is part of everyday life for K–12 students and graduate trainees alike, which can dull how seriously it is taken.
Learning by doing
Educators threaded cyberbullying through ethics, development, and other courses using real scenarios and simulations.
Generational gaps
Platforms change quickly, and many educators learn about new apps from their own students.
An ethical mandate
Without a standard curriculum, educators described uncertainty and grounded their teaching in protecting children.
Policy gaps
Participants pointed to gaps in ASCA, CACREP, and school protocols, and asked platforms to share responsibility.
Empathy and prevention
They called for teaching digital empathy and for stronger research on interventions that work.
Across these themes, educators were doing adaptive, reflective work. Many treated the limits of their own platform knowledge as a resource, inviting younger trainees to serve as what we call digital cultural informants. Others pushed students to examine their own reactions to online harm.
Do you have the same amount of empathy online as you do in person?
A participant, describing a question they pose to trainees
What we recommend
For counselor education programs
- Thread cyber-ethics and digital safety across foundational and clinical coursework, using case-based learning rather than a single lecture.
- Assess readiness with digital empathy rubrics or pre-practicum case evaluations.
- Build reciprocal mentoring that draws on younger trainees’ digital fluency.
For practicing school counselors
- Add digital threat assessment to crisis and risk protocols, noting the platform, persistence, audience, and identifiability of the harm.
- Teach cyber-ethics and digital empathy in Tier 1 classroom lessons, not one-time assemblies.
- Convene student-led digital advisory groups to stay current on platforms and to shape Tier 2 groups.
We also call on ASCA to issue a dedicated position statement on cyberbullying.
The educators we spoke with are adapting with ingenuity and care, but individual effort is not a substitute for systemic change. The profession needs explicit competencies in digital empathy, backed by accrediting bodies, professional organizations, and technology providers, so that every school counselor is ready to protect students online.
The article
Karkhanis, S., & Lin, Y. W. D. (in press). A phenomenological inquiry: Counselor educators’ experiences training school counselors to address cyberbullying. Professional School Counseling.
This study grew out of my doctoral dissertation at the University of Iowa. I’ll add a link here once the article is published.
