When I worked as a counselor in a behavior classroom I would meet with the students every morning. Often the students would often come in with sad or frightening things on their mind. It was difficult for them to focus on school when their minds and bodies were full...
Stories can do a lot of things – soothe, entertain, enchant, even teach. And it’s not just the content of the story itself that teaches. It’s what stories require of us: the use of our imagination. Imagination lays the groundwork for critical social skills such as...
When I was a young teacher, I was given some good advice by a mentor: Start off the year firm. You can always loosen up. But if you start too loose, you will have a hard time getting the classroom under control later. It took some practice to become very precise and...
Great things can happen when people collaborate. We can develop dynamic solutions to seemingly intractable problems. We can uncover ingenious responses to our most pressing challenges. We can accomplish more together than any single one of us could possibly do alone....
When I was a counselor, I used to tell the young girls about the time I got suspended from school for a week. “I got in BIG trouble,” I’d say, then ask them to guess what I did. Usually they’d guess that I had skipped school. Or had said something really mean. Or had...
