EMPOWER Your Students is about how teachers can help students notice how their assignments and interactions can be contexts for values-consistent behavior, and to choose those values-consistent behaviors even when it’s hard. Informed by Contextual Behavioral Science research and practice, the book contains a set of tools for empowering students to discover, develop, and commit to their own values. EMPOWER is not a program or a curriculum; it’s an approach to education that puts student values at the center of every practice, from teaching to advising to curriculum design to team meetings to parent communication. The book includes 21 experiential exercises, some adapted from ACT classics and others that are original, for fostering Exploration, Motivation, Participation, Openness, Willingness, Empathy, and Resilience at school. Later chapters show teachers how to incorporate student values into the academic curriculum and how to use student values to frame communications with colleagues, parents, and the students themselves.
