As a young teacher back in 1990, my unconscious strategy for classroom management was to be really nice to students so they would feel motivated to do what I asked and be nice to me back. It worked. It turns out that being nice to students — treating them with dignity, as human beings with needs, hurts, and struggles of their own — creates the respect, safety, voice, and sense of belonging needed for authentic engagement and real learning. This strategy had a lot of positive

Workplace culture and the dynamics of meetings are two of the reasons that I do the work I do. It frustrates me that more people don’t know how to create the space for equal voice or the conditions for people to want to participate. All kinds of things can impact the quality of meetings as well as teams and how well they function. In turn this impacts the quality of the work and decisions they create, the workplace culture, and people’s job satisfaction. All of these can

The reason I became a consultant was because I began to see the "small" work I did in my classroom ripple out and impact the large. Other teachers asked if I would teach them. Those teachers experienced big changes. Students asked for circles. On and on it went until I chose to become a consultant full time.