Relationship, Responsibility, and Regulation: Trauma-Invested Practices for Fostering Resilient Learners


Kristin Van Marter Souers - 2018
    To get there, they explain, educators need to build a "nest"--a positive learning environment shaped by three new Rs of education: relationship, responsibility, and regulation.Drawing from their extensive experience working with schools, students, and families throughout the country, the authorsExplain how to create a culture of safety in which everyone feels valued, important, and capable of learning. Describe the four areas of need--emotional, relational, physical, and control--that drive student behaviors and show how to meet these needs with interventions framed around the new three Rs. Illustrate trauma-invested practices in action through real scenarios that identify students' unmet needs, examine the situation from five stakeholder perspectives, and suggest interventions to support students and their families. Offer opportunities to challenge your beliefs and develop deeper and different ways of thinking about your role in your students' lives. Educators have a unique opportunity to influence students' learning, attitudes, and futures. This book will invigorate your practice and equip you to empower those you serve--whatever their personal histories.

Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School


Carla Shalaby - 2017
    Time and again, we make seemingly endless efforts to moderate, punish, and even medicate our children, when we should instead be concerned with transforming the very nature of our institutions, systems, and structures, large and small. Through delicately crafted portraits of these memorable children—Zora, Lucas, Sean, and Marcus—Troublemakers allows us to see school through the eyes of those who know firsthand what it means to be labeled a problem.From Zora’s proud individuality to Marcus’s open willfulness, from Sean’s struggle with authority to Lucas’s tenacious imagination, comes profound insight—for educators and parents alike—into how schools engender, exclude, and then try to erase trouble, right along with the young people accused of making it. And although the harsh disciplining of adolescent behavior has been called out as part of a school-to-prison pipeline, the children we meet in these pages demonstrate how a child’s path to excessive punishment and exclusion in fact begins at a much younger age.Shalaby’s empathetic, discerning, and elegant prose gives us a deeply textured look at what noncompliance signals about the environments we require students to adapt to in our schools. Both urgent and timely, this paradigm-shifting book challenges our typical expectations for young children and with principled affection reveals how these demands—despite good intentions—work to undermine the pursuit of a free and just society.