Stop Blaming the Kids. Start Supporting the Teachers.
Too many educator trainings fail the very people they claim to empower. They may look good on paper, check all the boxes, and deliver endless PowerPoints, acronyms, and theory. But teachers need more than that — they need real tools for the real challenges of a classroom.
So we flipped the script.
For two full days, we led a DBT in Schools training for teachers — skills for staying grounded, connected, and effective, especially in the hardest moments.
At the Center of It All: Validation
🧠 Validation
❤️ Validation
💡 Validation
We spent 8 of our 14 training hours teaching and practicing validation.
If I had five days, I would have spent three of them on validation alone. Why? Because validation is the most effective prevention strategy we have — for student behavior issues, and for teacher burnout.
What Teachers Said
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“This training was the best I’ve had in my 25 years of teaching.”
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“I think this was the best training we have ever had in PUSD!!!”
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“I literally had an aha moment that made me want to cry.”
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“Validation will change how I lead IEPs, and how I connect with families and colleagues.”
More Than Just Validation
While validation was at the core, we also taught:
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🔦 Mindfulness – Letting go of judgment and getting curious
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💪 Emotion Regulation – Understanding the function of emotions (including secondary emotions)
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🔥 Distress Tolerance – Regulating your own emotions first in a crisis
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⚖️ Dialectics – Fruzzetti’s transactional model of dysregulation
Still, everything we taught was ultimately in service of one thing:
🧠 ❤️ 💡 Validation.
A Family Effort
I was fortunate to co-teach this training with my wife, Julia, and to have my sister Monica — a lifelong educator — jump in throughout the sessions, sparking discussion and connecting the dots.
This truly is my life worth living.
