Our Books
EMPOWER MOVES FOR SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL LEARNING offers tools and strategies that help students make school a source of meaning, vitality, and community in their lives. Using this book’s interconnected processes—exploration, motivation, participation, openness, willingness, empathy, and resilience—students clarify and commit to the values they want to live by. You will learn 28 activities, as well as extensions and variations for each, that increase student engagement not only in school but in building meaningful lives. This book will help educators:
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Discover a process-based, personally relevant, culturally affirming approach to SEL.
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Implement SEL as its own curriculum, as a pedagogy for academic units of study, or as a one-to-one intervention.
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Facilitate 28 adaptable SEL activities that invite students to identify their own values, choose how they live, and overcome internal struggles.
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Evoke students’ personal values without instilling particular values.
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Enhance intrinsic motivation, psychological flexibility, student and teacher self-reflection, and student voice.
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Build relationships, community, a sense of belonging, and compassion in the classroom.
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Have productive conversations with students and their families about living meaningful lives.
THE PD CURATOR is about how to design inclusive, participatory, cohesive, and effective professional learning experiences. Leaders play a role that isn't so much administrative as it is curatorial. Just as art curators can legitimize artists by including their work in a gallery or exhibit, PD curators have the power to legitimize work of a diverse community of educators. Learn to create immersive intellectual, emotional, and social experiences — all while caring for the professionals and the profession. This book will show you how to:
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Structure teachers' schedules to make time for in-house professional learning.
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Select content and create a process for how people interact with it.
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Fit professional learning events together into a meaningful whole.
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Discover whether the event has been successful.
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Use practical tools and protocols to plan professional learning that affirms the expertise and interests of a diverse faculty.
TEACH MEANINGFUL is a practical guide to designing curriculum that meets standards, serves personal and institutional values, and intentionally leads to successful student learning. Identifying which understandings, knowledge, and skills are “most important” for students to learn is always a question of values, so getting clear on values gives teachers a starting place to design cohesive and meaningful units, courses, and programs. Written by a teacher for teachers, the book includes:
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Stories of failures and successes in designing curriculum for various subjects and grade levels.
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Metaphors from everyday life to help teachers understand curriculum design as a process rooted in values and culminating in meaningful learning.
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Examples of essential questions, assessment guidelines, lesson calendars, unit plans, and curriculum maps.
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Exercises and templates teachers can use to create and assess curriculum.
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Protocols designed to encourage inclusive participation and critical reflection when colleagues look at curriculum together.
TWO-FOR-ONE TEACHING is an approach to instructional design that integrates student-centered social-emotional learning into every stage of an academic unit. The book contains 30 protocols, rooted in evidence-based psychological science and progressive pedagogy, that actively teach social-emotional and academic skills. Readers will:
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Develop an understanding of what values are, how they impact the way we live, and the need for students to choose and live by their own values.
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Understand how to develop a classroom culture of willingness that empowers students to discover and do what matters.
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Help students approach academic work in ways that align with their values.
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Explore ways to integrate values exploration into student learning throughout instructional units in any discipline.
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Receive 30 customizable protocols rooted in scientific and behavioral research that simultaneously facilitate academic and social-emotional growth.
EMPOWER YOUR STUDENTS offers strategies for how teachers can put students’ own values at the center of their learning, so that school becomes a source of meaning and vitality in students’ lives. EMPOWER stands for exploration, motivation, participation, openness, willingness, empathy, and resilience. Readers will:
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Understand what values are and how they are different from preferences and goals.
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Discover how to help students determine which values they want to enact at school and in life.
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Examine how to incorporate values work into all content areas.
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Explore 21 classroom practices that empower students to do meaningful work, develop meaningful relationships, and live meaningful lives.
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Learn how to bring your own values to the classroom to become the teacher and colleague you want to be.
VALUES & QUESTIONS invites students into conversations about values they can bring to their learning, their work, their relationships, and other aspects of their lives. The cards are designed for any adult who works with students in grades 6–12 — including classroom teachers, administrators, counselors, psychologists, social workers, learning specialists, and support staff — who wants to start meaningful conversations with individual students or groups.
Values & Questions has two decks. Values cards have words that describe ways of being that make life meaningful, such as curious, generous and imaginative. The questions on the Questions cards contain blank spaces. Any value can fit into any blank space, and students respond to the resulting question.
The instruction booklet described various ways players can use the cards, either through individual reflection, partner conversations, or group discussion. With 5400 possible questions to which players can respond, Values & Questions helps students imagine new ways to live by their values. In this game, everyone wins.