EMPOWER Your Students. Lauren Porosoff

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Porosoff, Lauren, 1975- author. | Weinstein, Jonathan, author.

      Title: Empower your students : tools to inspire a meaningful school experience, grades 6-12 / Lauren Porosoff and Jonathan Weinstein.

      Description: Bloomington, IN : Solution Tree Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2017011523 | ISBN 9781945349249 (perfect bound)

      Subjects: LCSH: Motivation in education. | Classroom environment. | High school teaching. | Middle school teaching.

      Classification: LCC LB1065 .P585 2017 | DDC 370.15/4--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017011523

       Solution Tree

      Jeffrey C. Jones, CEO

      Edmund M. Ackerman, President

       Solution Tree Press

      President and Publisher: Douglas M. Rife

      Editorial Director: Sarah Payne-Mills

      Managing Production Editor: Caroline Cascio

      Senior Production Editor: Tonya Maddox Cupp

      Senior Editor: Amy Rubenstein

      Copy Editor: Miranda Addonizio

      Proofreader: Kendra Slayton

      Text and Cover Designer: Abigail Bowen

      Editorial Assistants: Jessi Finn and Kendra Slayton

      Acknowledgments

      • • • • •

      We want to start by thanking all of the teachers who empowered us by showing us that our learning mattered and that we mattered, especially Hadassah Bar-El, Billy Barrios, Janis Birt, Edward Black, Robert Clancy, Judy Dorros, Joan Freedman, Kent Johnson, Gregg Quilty, Paul Sheehey, Roy Sparrow, and Barbara Silber.

      We also want to thank our professional and academic mentors: Melanie Greenup, Laura Johnson, Kate Kellum, Arlene Molovinsky, Cindy Nash, Claire Pettengill, Kelly Wilson, and the faculty at the University of Mississippi’s Department of Psychology.

      Many thanks are due to our friends and colleagues at the Mississippi Center for Contextual Psychology and in the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, who gave us the fundamentals of mentorship while teaching us some cool stuff about behavioral analysis, relational frame theory, and acceptance and commitment therapy.

      Matthieu Villatte’s course on relational frame theory, and his book Mastering the Clinical Conversation that he wrote with Jennifer L. Villatte and Steven C. Hayes (2015), shifted our thinking about how teachers can master the classroom conversation to help students act in accordance with their values.

      We also want to thank the teachers currently and formerly at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School whose work inspired the examples in this book, especially Tony Marro, Njeri Semaj, Kyle Silver, and Dina Weinberg, who helped us understand what it can look like to empower students in athletics, language, mathematics, and art classes.

      We greatly appreciate the teachers and clinicians who participated in our workshops through the Progressive Education Network (PEN) Conference, the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science (ACBS) World Conference, and the New York State Association of Independent Schools (NYSAIS) professional development programming. Their insights helped us refine this work. The teachers at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School have also supported this work by trying out the activities and discussing their implications.

      This book is significantly better than it would have been because of our colleagues and friends who read and gave us feedback on our chapters: Yash Bhambhani, Kathleen Brigham, Chad Drake, Liz Fernández, Jason Ford, Judy Hagemann, Meg Hanson, Laurie Hornik, Kate Kellum, Tinia Merriweather, Amy Murrell, Claire Pettengill, Stuart Quart, Kelly Sigro, Tom Szabo, Noni Thomas López, and Jessica Wolinsky.

      Amy Rubenstein is an absolute godsend of an editor. Watching her edit our work was sort of like watching Sherlock Holmes solve a mystery: we never would have noticed the things she noticed, but once she pointed them out it was so obvious that she was exactly right every time. She’s generous with her time, thought, and kindness, and this book is so much better because of her. We also want to thank Tonya Cupp for helping our writing make actual sense, answering our bajillion questions, and handing us the metaphorical water bottle as we were on our final sprint. We also want to thank Douglas Rife, Kendra Slayton, Kelly Rockhill, and everyone else at Solution Tree.

      Our dear friend Laurie Hornik, in addition to reading even the bad early drafts and giving helpful feedback, is a constant supporter of this work and holds us accountable to our values in the most compassionate ways possible.

      We thank our parents, Leslie and Harold Porosoff and Eve and Lou Weinstein, and our two magical children, Allison Porosoff and Jason Weinstein.

      And most of all, we thank our students, especially those who found school boring, pointless, exhausting, embarrassing, or painful. They’re the ones who inspire us to do this work. The best we can do is to keep becoming the teachers we want to be, so we can empower our students to become the people they want to be.

      Solution Tree Press would like to thank the following reviewers:

      Kimberly Church

      Spanish Teacher

      Languages Other Than English Instructional Coach

      Lebanon Trail High School

      Frisco, Texas

      Patrick Hill

      Principal

      Portal Middle High School

      Portal, Georgia

      Luke Spielman

      Assistant Principal

      Riverside Middle School

      Watertown, Wisconsin

      Corey St. John

      Director of Teaching