Stance of Curiosity

Joelle and Gillian wade into the murky waters of creating a plan for inclusion for students that are not responding to our best and most creative efforts.  Belonging, a sense of connection, and authentic engagement in experiences that are growth promoting in ways that are relevant to each person seems to be the goal.  There are some situations where “being with the group” does not get us to that g...

Gillian and Joelle sit alongside parents and educators to consider how to support a student who is chronically refusing school.  What happens when the student realizes we cannot force them to go?  What happens when we’ve done everything we can think of and they are still not going?  The common pitfalls of feeling panic, incompetent, and deflecting blame are counterproductive.  CPS is an alternativ...

Is it possible that in our effort to mitigate overwhelm, we sometimes remove growth promoting opportunities and reduce healthy stress tolerance?  Joelle and Gillian talk through their decades-long journey of understanding the experience of neurodivergent youth and the complexity of how to support their capacity to cope with a world built by and for neurotypical people, while offering authentic and...

Hello, listeners!  So far in season four Joelle and Gillian have experienced some illness and even some getting stuck in the tropics and as such we don't have a new episode for you this week, but we hope you will enjoy the re-release of one of the most popular ones from Season 2 and we will catch you next week. First released in June 2025, Gillian shares her strategy of processing adult inter...

Dedicated, creative, and hardworking school teams make all kinds of plans to support students.  Those plans are created in hopes of inspiring regulation, engagement, and the development of new skills.  Confusion can arise when the intention of the plan has not been emphasized.  Joelle and Gillian discuss the many types of plans that school teams may create, the psychology that informs varied appro...

Joelle and Gillian explore together the connection between the outward expression of emotion, internal awareness of varied emotional states, and social interactions.  How might the capacity to recognize and express emotions vary among those who are neurodivergent, depressed, anxious, and coping with the impact of trauma exposure?  Are there ways that educational staff and other supportive adults c...

Gillian and Joelle take a walk down memory lane to recall all of the helpful strategies and insights that we learned during the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic to consider how those approaches may help us now.  Overwhelming, disheartening, and even at times terrifying events are happening in our country and world.  We bear witness to those events while keeping our lives and work movin...

In today's episode, Joelle reflects on re-watching Good Will Hunting, the 1997 movie classic, on a recent flight.  She and Gillian consider the themes highlighted in this film of the real psychological and energetic toll of supporting someone in a resistant stage of change, and how we can apply this to supporting the nervous systems of school professionals and helpers in general. Find us on I...

Joelle and Gillian explore a concept from the world of psychotherapy and how it could play out between a child, their parent, and a school professional.  When a child expresses their anxiety related to school demands to their parent, their parent may in turn express that distress to the school professional.  We are all seeking reassurance and regulation from each other.  We can trip over each othe...

Gillian and Joelle do a deep dive into justice seeking behavior, which can present as someone treating others the way they were treated or seeking to make others feel like they are feeling.  It turns out there are a lot of reasons why we might be inspired to do so.  Our most helpful response in such situations is empathy, validation, and reassurance that their needs are as important as everyone el...

Our lovely and talented guest week, Lauren Hough Williams, offers her expertise as an educator and expert in creating inclusive educational experiences for neurodivergent students.  Lauren helps us see inclusion as a mindset that can manifest in a variety of ways.  We discuss how to encourage sharing responsibility with the classroom teacher in this effort, as well as creating an environment in wh...

Gillian and Joelle talk about the tension that can emerge in professional teams that are in the midst of intense work and limited time for debrief and connection.  There are some realistic and practical approaches that can help us effectively process our experiences without risking passing our stress on to our colleagues.  For example, there is intentionality in how we use the brief pauses in our...

Joelle and Gillian discuss what they have learned about depression through their clinical practice.   How can we be curious about our own responses to gain insights into how a depressed person is feeling without taking those on as our own?  What strategies and approaches are most effective?  Why is it almost as hard to support a depressed person as it is to be depressed?  Is depression the enemy o...

In today's episode Joelle and Gillian discuss the nature of childhood anxiety in general and how powerful it can be in creating physical symptoms and derailing learning.  Below is Joelle's amazing one-pager including all we discuss in this episode, and more! Strategies for students who get stuck when feeling anxious. Joelle van Lent, Psy. D. 1.) Externalize the anxiety and align with the...

This week Joelle and Gillian took a look at a pattern where students might learn how to use breaks out of the room to self regulate (great!) but then might become over-reliant on this one coping strategy, contributing to extra time out of the class and also perhaps getting in the way of opportunities for belonging and co-regulation in their classroom community (not so great!)  Often our over relia...

In this week's episode, Joelle and Gillian discuss how we tend to conceptualize, and what we tend to recommend for "breathtakingly inappropriate" behaviors and words that can come up in any classroom, but particularly on the middle school and high school level.  We discuss the role of social media as having the capacity to bring folks down darker "rabbit holes" when they a...

Gillian and Joelle discuss concepts related to healthy identity formation, belonging, and motivating behavior change.  There are many nuances in this discussion, such as the difference between feeling ashamed and feeling shame, the role of guilt as a "rumble strip" keeping us on track with our values, and how our language can either motivate positive growth or cement a negative/hopeless...

Gilian shares her strategy of processing adult interactions that don’t go as expected, including at times conflict and defensiveness.  Stepping back to consider how fear may be inspiring our responses and re-approaching the interactions with some perspective and curiosity can be very helpful.  Joelle and Gillian share some of their key strategies that may help when stress and fear are taking over-...

The podcast welcomes our second guest, Aaron Lanou!  Aaron is one of Gillian's longtime favorite colleagues and thought partners, and you can read all about his work here : In brief, Aaron worked as a special education teacher in New York City public schools for 10 years, working with students with autism and learning disabilities in inclusion and specialized settings, from kindergarten throu...

Gillian and Joelle discuss their ever-evolving professional opinions on technology, social media, and video gaming use among elementary, middle, and high school students.  While it may seem clear what schools should do in elementary and middle school, high school turns out to still be an area of debate.  Joelle proposes that setting clear boundaries is easier than it may seem.  Gillian offers nuan...

Joelle and Gillian welcome their first guest to the Podcast!  Meet Roger, a teacher in the Maryland/DC area.  Roger shares his approaches to supporting students in the context of heightened stress and certainty.  He shares a strategy that utilizes routine, writing, and connection to support students to access learning even when they are contending with powerful emotions.  Some themes that emerge i...

Gillian and Joelle talk about the framework of PDA and how it can both reinforce approaches we have long-used very wisely, as well as inspire some new ways of understanding student responses and needs.  As with any new concept, we can temporarily lose our sense of confidence and competence.  The ideas offered by the PDA framework can also increase our depth of understanding of the capacity for our...

Gillian and Joelle chat about frequent suggestions that they make to school teams to support students who are strugging to cope effectively.  They talk about the specific ways that we can approach a stressed person to help assure their needs will be met, validate their emotions, and move forward together successfully.  The strategy of replacing “You need…” with “I need…” along with other ideas hel...

Gillian offers a version of the stance of curiosity that will guide our approaches with students who are non-speaking.  Our culture is so reliant on spoken communication that we can have implicit bias that influences our social behavior to under-estimate the capacity of those who communicate via different channels.  How can we change our mindset to presume the competence of non-speaking learners,...

In this episode Joelle and Gillian talk about a strategy to support students who are seeking a connection from a teacher in which they have some kind of status or privilege that is atypical.  This pattern often comes up among students who do not have the basic human need met of feeling special in some part of their lives.  Sometimes this pattern comes up when students have family lives outside of...