Single‐Session Brief Counseling in a High School

Counseling designed to be time‐limited is a valuable tool for counselors in school settings. Three approaches to brief counseling were investigated in this naturalistic study: problem‐focused with task, problem‐focused without task, and solution‐focused with task. Quantitative and qualitative measures were used to explore aspects of single‐session brief counseling. High school students made significant changes from the second‐week follow‐up to the sixth‐week follow‐up in alleviating their concerns and increasing the percentage of goal achieved. Students dramatically decreased the intensity of undesired feelings from before the counseling session through the second follow‐up. Solution‐focused counseling was as effective as the other two approaches, while taking less time.