Lauren Porosoff

Lauren Porosoff is the founder of EMPOWER Forwards, a collaborative consultancy practice that builds learning communities that truly belong to everyone, and where everyone truly belongs. An educator since 2000, Lauren has taught at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in the Bronx, New York, the Maret School in Washington, DC, and the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville, Maryland. She has taught the 2nd, 5th, 6th, and 7th grades, mostly in English and history, and has also served as a DEI coordinator, a grade dean, and a leader of curricular initiatives.

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Lauren’s commitment to transforming the psychological experience of school has been a constant in her teaching practice, leading her to learn about values-guided behavior change in contextual psychology. Informed by research and practices from this field, and by her 18 years as a classroom teacher, Lauren develops tools and protocols that empower students and teachers to make school a source of meaning, vitality, and community. Her work includes the instructional design processes she describes in her book Authentic Engagement (2023), the professional learning strategies in The PD Curator (2021), and the approaches to social-emotional learning in EMPOWER Your Students (2018), Two for-One Teaching (2020), and EMPOWER Moves for Social-Emotional Learning (2022). Follow Lauren on Twitter at @LaurenPorosoff.

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Articles about Empowering Students to Access Their Values at School

• Building a Better Check-In (Edutopia, October 2021): Improving a common classroom practice to deepen relationships and wellness.

• Addressing the Suffering Underneath (Educational Leadership, October 2021): Developing compassionate responses to student misbehavior.

• Four Problems With “Show Me What You Know” (AMLE Magazine, August 2020): Assessing knowledge with meaningful, equitable, and student-centered approaches.

• How Our Word Choices Can Empower Our Students (Kappan, November 2018): Choose words that help empower our students to discover where they are as learners, what seems important to them, how well their learning strategies serve them, and what else they could try.

• Moving from Telling Our Stories to Inviting Stories (AMLE Magazine, April 2018): The importance of getting beyond writing that argues, informs, or narrates

• Motivating Students to Turn the Page on Reading (Kappan, October 2017): Frame schoolwork not as a precondition for an outcome but as a component of a meaningful life.

Articles about Empowering Teachers Through Professional Learning

• Accounting for Vulnerability in Peer-to-Peer PD (Educational Leadership, February 2021): Education leaders can empower teachers to embrace their vulnerability in the service of their values.

• Jailbreak Your PD (Kappan, April 2020): Educators can benefit from a variety of professional learning opportunities outside the education field. 

• The Power of In-House Professional Development (Independent School, Fall 2017): Structure PD to tap into in-house expertise.

• Healing from Moral Injury (Teaching Tolerance Issue 51, Fall 2015): Overcome acts of injustice at school by showing self-compassion, recommitting to students, and continuing to act for justice.

Articles about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Curriculum​

• Which Curriculum Audit Is Best for Your School (Educational Leadership, February 2022): Distinguishes between diversity, inclusion, equity, and justice audits.

• Why I’ll Never Teach This Powerful Book Again (Learning for Justice blog, March 2018): A response to allegations against the author of a former English 6 book.

• Teaching for Racial Justice (Solution Tree blog, September 2017): Reimagine academic units as contexts for anti-bias work.

• How I Teach about the Holocaust as Living Memory Fades (PBS NewsHour, May 2016): How people’s thinking about the Holocaust has shifted, and why it’s important to continue to teach its history.

• A Midsummer Night’s Gender Diversity (Rethinking Schools, Fall 2015): Use classic texts to teach about the gender spectrum.

Lauren and Jonathan grew up in neighboring towns but didn’t meet until 1992, through a mutual friend. After many years apart, they reconnected on social media and were married in 2010. As Lauren described her ongoing mission as a teacher—to make school meaningful for students—Jonathan quickly realized that she would benefit from learning about contextual behavioral science (CBS), which is all about helping people find meaning and purpose in life by connecting their actions to their values, and accepting the pain and struggle that always comes along with living a meaningful life.

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Although Lauren resisted at first, she and Jonathan eventually started to discuss the interconnections between her work as a progressive educator and his as a CBS-trained clinical psychologist. Together, they developed a variety of CBS applications for education, in areas ranging from instructional design to social-emotional learning to professional development. Lauren and Jonathan live in New York with their two spectacular children and a cat named Benedict. When they’re not nerding out about relational frame theory or arguing about whose turn it is to make the kids’ lunch, Lauren and Jonathan enjoy hiking, cooking, high-concept fantasy shows, and cake.