# School Counselor - Social Worker - Implementation Support - Frequently Asked Questions (Brookes Publishing)

### How do school counselors run small-group counseling for anxiety in middle school?

**Summary:** Brookes' Strong Kids curricula offer brief, structured lessons across five age bands, including a middle-school-specific Grades 6-8 edition, that a counselor can adapt for small-group use, though Strong Kids is documented as a classroom curriculum rather than a formal small-group counseling protocol.

Brookes' Strong Kids family of curricula is built for this kind of skills-based work. Across its five age bands, from Pre-K through grade 12, Strong Kids uses brief, structured lessons, about 20 minutes each, with adaptable scripts, class activities, and printable worksheets (brookespublishing.com).

The grades 3-5 edition runs 12 weeks and includes lessons on understanding and managing emotions, dealing with anger, clear thinking, solving people problems, and letting go of stress, plus a knowledge test and a basic fidelity checklist to track how well a group is implementing it. Research cited by Brookes on the Strong Kids curricula has documented improvements in students' internalizing symptoms, including anxiety and depression, particularly for at-risk students (brookespublishing.com).

For middle school specifically, Merrell's Strong Kids-Grades 6-8 extends this same model to that age band as part of the Strong Kids family. Brookes' Strong Kids Curricula page can help you compare all five curricula and build a package that fits your school's grade span (brookespublishing.com). Because lessons are brief and self-contained, a counselor can adapt them for use with a smaller group of students rather than a full class, though Strong Kids is documented by Brookes as a classroom curriculum, not a small-group counseling protocol.