3 F R E E REGISTRATIONS for SEATTLE BREAKTHROUGH WORKSHOP We are giving away three $169 registrations to our Seattle Breakthrough Strategies to Teach and Counsel Youth Workshop on May 7-8, 2009. Since this magazine is mailed all over the world and not just to the Washington State region, you may have an extremely good chance of winning if you live near Seattle, or can find a way to get there. To get this no-fee workshop slot,

It's Spring. That means you may work in The Hormone Zone. Let us help you find a way out. If it is challenging trying to teach and counsel "hormone-poisoned" youth, here are some absolutely terrific interventions to help your teens use their heads instead of their hormones. This blog issue has student social skills strategies and interventions that can save your classroom.

The Obama administration has already begun questioning whether contemporary teacher professional development training sufficiently prepares teachers to best educate contemporary students. As one of the nation's premier providers of innovative teacher professional development, we share that concern. At our workshops, teachers often express concern that their training did not adequately prepare them to win the race for the top.

Our Live Expert Help Line gets more requests for help with this child than almost any other. Every teacher, every counselor, every social worker, every principal knows students who won't do their work. Some of these work refusers often fail to show up. When they do show up, they often say little, and some may be nearly mute. Some may not even make eye contact, or even look in your direction.

Here is the surprising truth about discipline: Discipline and consequences are often ineffective. Yes, every school or agency needs both, but alone, they don't work. Alone? Yes, if you have a discipline and consequence structure set up, but have not first taught your students the skills, motivation and attitudes that they need to perform the desired behaviors, you will almost certainly find your discipline is ineffective.

This is a rough time for many families. That is why this issue will focus on ideas for helping children who are sad and depressed. Since depression often worsens around holiday time, it is always a good idea to be especially vigilant during November and December. Be sure to carefully watch over any children and teens who show signs of sadness, isolation, withdrawal, distress, or other marked changes in behavior. If you are not a counselor, be sure to seek help if you have any safety concerns about a child or teen; these strategies are not a substitute for that. On a happier note, be sure to grab one of the 5 FREE workshop guest passes worth $169 each, that we are giving out for our approaching 20th birthday. We gave out five slots in the last issue and have five more to give away now. It's fast and easy to get a completely free workshop slot so click here for details.

We are about to begin our 20th year. To celebrate our birthday, and thank you for your support, we are packing this issue with freebies, funding ideas, and other goodies to help you get through the year even if you don't have a very good budget. If you have all the usual student behavior problems but half the budget, this issue has help for both.

Remember when your biggest problem was your students' bad behavior? Now, you and your site may also have bad budget problems as well. Those budget constraints can really limit your access to solutions that could minimize or even stop the behavior problems that can dominate your site. In good times and not-so-good times, Youth Change is here to help.

In between trekking from school to school, conference to conference, and agency to agency all summer, teaching our popular Breakthrough Strategies to Teach and Counsel Troubled Youth Workshop, we've been busy producing knock-your-socks-off, new handouts and posters. Some of these brand new handouts and posters are so new that they aren't even for sale yet on our website, but as a subscriber to this internet magazine, you can have some of these attention-grabbing worksheets now, for free.

If teachers face greater challenges than ever before, at a time when they are equipped with less resources than ever before, then it becomes crucial to fully use and mine every second of instruction time. However, the typical teacher loses about 22 minutes of every 50 minutes of instruction time to on-demand behavior management. That is time no contemporary teacher can afford to lose. Here are five of our innovative, one-of-a-kind methods to help you create your most productive school year ever even though you may face bigger hurdles than ever before.

Our Spring '08 workshops were really packed with participants so we read a lot of evaluations. Many of the evaluations from the Spring inservice tour included requests for us to post favorite interventions. We noticed that many workshop participants requested the same handful of interventions. By popular request, we are posting your favorite interventions right here.

Breaking News! All Jobs Now Require a Diploma! This intervention is so surprising that even your co-workers may react with shock. It is such a potent device that it won't just jar your students. It may grab the attention of anyone who sees it, even adults. As you can see from the picture at left, the poster proclaims that "All jobs now require a diploma." The small text at the bottom says "Think this poster is scary? Try life without a diploma." The text at the bottom may be small but it may also be haunting. This intervention works as both a handout or wall poster, plus you could use this device verbally.

Some of our best ideas aren't really our ideas. The first couple of interventions in this issue were inspired by Dr. Matthew Meyers from LAUSD. By the way, if you are planning on catching our L.A. workshop on April 17-18, it is so full, we had to change venues. The workshop is now being held at the Radisson LAX. Click here for details. If you still haven't signed up, you should contact us as soon as you can. Shaquille on Line 1 This is such a great idea. This strategy is one of the terrific ideas suggested by Matthew from LAUSD. Staff at his site are working to create celebrity wake-up calls for students. It fits L.A. perfectly and you can easily make it fit your part of the world. Get local or national celebrities to record wake-up calls for your students and start their day with a bang. No one sleeps through a call from a big name star. Their eyes will be wide open.

Have you ever noticed that most interventions are geared for boys, or are generic, one-gender-fits-all interventions. This intervention worksheet is intended just for girls, although you can use it with boys if you wish. This provocative handout is the perfect conversation-starter for girls' counseling groups, health classes, contemporary issues classes, and living skills courses. It also works well with individual students. It tackles a tough problem area: body image. It also raises issues of weight, self-image, beauty, culture and societal expectations of girls. This handout will start important conversations and provoke insights when mere words and generic methods can't.

Here is the surprising truth about discipline: Discipline and consequences are often ineffective. Yes, every school or agency needs both, but alone, they don't work. Alone? Yes, if you have a discipline and consequence structure set up, but have not first taught your students the skills, motivation and attitudes that they need to perform the desired behaviors, you will almost certainly find your discipline is ineffective.

If your students believe that your site exists just for dating purposes, we have some delightfully different, unusually effective interventions that you may want to use right away. You can even get a couple of free innovative handouts from us that you can print and use with students. If you are tired of the constant public displays of affection that don't belong in a school or agency setting, our new interventions can help. Because these new methods rely heavily on humor, they may work much better than conventional interventions.

Many of you continue to emphasize that your classroom and school have become seriously out-of-control. To start off the new year, it only makes sense to give our top tips to repair serious problems at your school or agency. Here are our initial suggestions for what to do to salvage a school year that has been unusually difficult or dangerous.

Before you read some of our best aggression control strategies, workshop registration click here to enter your name to get one of the 5 completely free Breakthrough Strategies to Teach and Counsel Troubled Youth Workshop registrations that we are giving away to subscribers. You can choose to attend free this fall in St. Louis, Austin, or Phoenix. It's our way of thanking you for being so loyal to Youth Change. We had a full house at our Portland workshop this past week. Thank-you. It takes just a few clicks to enter. The winners will be randomly selected. Your odds of winning are actually pretty high because our subscribers are located all over the world, not necessarily near any of our upcoming workshop cities. If you live near a workshop stop, or can travel to one, you have a good chance of winning a free $169 workshop slot if you enter; start here. If you prefer to just register now, but are on a budget, we have at least one Half-Price Work-Study slot open for $84 still available in each city. Email (click here), or call 1-800-545-5736 to grab a Half-Price slot before they are taken.

Peer interaction problems can make any school or agency site chaotic, loud, unpleasant or unsafe. You've got an array of peer problems, from bullying to verbal abuse, from scapegoating to cliques and harassment. There are no quick fixes to instantly turnaround all your peer problems, but in this issue, you will find a very fun, ready-to-use, complete intervention to begin the process. The more you can use creative, unexpected and humorous methods, the more success you may achieve repairing poor peer skills. Rely on methods that catch your bullying, aggressive, resistant, oppositional, depressed, withdrawn, and defiant youth off-guard, then powerfully engage them in learning despite themselves. The intervention below offers these benefits. This dynamic strategy is taken from the hundreds we give in our live and recorded workshops. (Click here for details on upcoming live seminars). Did you notice that we are giving our subscribers 5 free slots for the workshops coming soon to St. Louis, Austin and Phoenix? Click here for details on how you can quickly snag a free workshop slot.

In our workshops, in our email, and on the phone, we have been hearing the same complaint over and over and over. I can't scream loud enough and long enough to control my class. In the nearly 20 years that Youth Change has been a national resource for teachers and counselors with troubled students, we have never been so inundated with inquiries about how to scream louder and longer to get back in control. What would you think if your son or daughter's teacher managed by screaming? You would be appalled and demand the screaming stop. If you are one of the professionals who is screaming at kids, you need to remember that you are screaming at someone's son, someone's daughter. If you wouldn't want your offspring to be yelled at, then you shouldn't be yelling at someone else's children.

We've been hard at work devising attention-grabbing, unexpected strategies for all the kid problems you deal with. Most of these decidedly different, potent, new methods have been turned into posters. We've actually added a whopping 100 new posters. If you are planning on coming to one of our Fall 2007 workshops in Portland, St. Louis, Austin, or Phoenix, you can count on these lively, unorthodox ideas being included in the 200 strategies we give in each inservice. By the way, we even still have some of our half-price work study slots open for these workshops, so call 1-800-545-5736 now if you want to grab one. But, you don't have to wait for our workshop dates to arrive. Some of our provocative, new interventions are right here in this newsletter, and ready for our subscribers to use today.

Got Kid Problems? Our web site can help. And, it can help better than ever before because it is now twice as big. Even better, most of these state-of-the-art, attention-grabbing, more effective resources are still free to use. Chances are that your solution is just a few clicks away-- if only you knew where to look. That's what this issue is all about. This is your resource guide to some of the newest and best resources to turnaround problems like poor motivation, classroom management concerns, violence, bad behavior, work refusal, and much more. Teaching and counseling troubled youth and children is hard, but our new web site resources can make it easier. We're standing right next to you in your classroom or office, and we're ready to help.

How bad has it gotten for teachers? Students are now referring their beleaguered teachers to our web site for help. Here is just one of the recent referrals that arrived at the end of the 2007 school year, and definitely grabbed our attention. Mr. Alan, I am sending you this because of all those troubled kids in the class. I hope it will help you, at least next year. --Katie M. This new school year just doesn't have to be as tough as it was this past year. Remember when you used to love teaching, when you felt so privileged to shape the lives of students? That feeling may have been lost many semesters ago. If you are facing the start of the new school year with dread, we can help. Most teacher training is dominated by content, testing and theory. Most teacher training doesn't actually show teachers how to manage the huge coping, social, and behavior problems that come in each day with students. Contemporary teachers need to know how to actually train kids to be prepared students who have all the school, coping, and social skills needed to function in a school setting.

We were on a collision course with disaster. That phrase has started showing up a lot on our workshop evaluations lately. That phrase is also being used a lot by participants during workshop sessions. The recent school shooting seems to have crystallized many school staff's concern that their site could face a tragedy. Educators are offered so little basic mental health training to help them understand deeply troubled students. When a school shooter does not fit the profile of a consistently aggressive, acting-out student, it can seem confusing. In the recent incident, the shooter did not fit that classic profile of someone who was routinely assaultive, bullying, or verbally abusive. Nor was this student someone who was being constantly bullied or tormented, another stereotype of shooters often offered in the media. Human beings are more complex than either of these two options. Educators are often more accustomed to preventing and addressing violence from acting-out youth, and may feel far less prepared to prevent or address violence from other types of youth. We have gotten quite a few calls and emails asking for help.

You probably won't be surprised to learn that one of the hottest topics in our Problem-Student Problem-Solver Workshop staff development sessions is serious concern about the damage caused by high stakes, high stress testing generated by No Child Left Behind. In many states, as part of the assessment, students write essays. One student in our area wrote his essay about his return to middle school. He'd dropped out due to heartbreaking problems he'd been experiencing at home with his family. The essay was judged unsatisfactory when evaluated for grammar and punctuation. High stakes test essays on subject matter such as family problems, abuse, and sadness have become so common that they now have their own name. They are called Cry for Help essays.