to an article or book, please consider the mentioned individual as having contributed to this project. Any anonymous comments shared from personal conversations or correspondences, surveys, or interviews are offered with a generic reference, such as “one educator” or “one student.”
Adam Adache
Andrea Adamko
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Brad Allison
Rudenia S. Anderson-Howard
Duayne Askew
Hamidah Bahashwan
John Barnes
Claude Beamish
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Beverly Davies
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James R. Delisle
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Gordon Dryden
Gail Dusa
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Mary Faber
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Rob Krueger
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Mary Sue Williams
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Barbara Yerby
Bobbie Yoakum
Solution Tree Press would like to thank the following reviewers:
Doug Crowley Assistant Principal DeForest Area High School DeForest, Wisconsin
Johanna Josaphat Teacher Leader Urban Assembly Unison School Brooklyn, New York
Louis Lim Principal
Bur Oak Secondary School Markham, Ontario, Canada
Brad Neuendorf Principal
Lander Valley High School
Lander, Wyoming
Dianne Yee Assistant Professor, Faculty of Education Western University London, Ontario, Canada
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/schoolimprovement to download the free reproducibles in this book.
constructive connections with young people, especially children at risk. After more than five decades in the profession, Jane continues to strive to change families and schools—one heart at a time.
Jane is an award-winning author. Her books include The Win-Win Classroom; The Beginning Teacher’s Survival Guide ; Managing 21st Century Classrooms ; High School’s Not Forever ; and Mentors, Masters and Mrs. MacGregor: Stories of Teachers Making a Difference. She has also written several books for parents and caregivers, as well as a gratitude journal and a self-help book on perfectionism. Her work has been translated into a dozen languages.
Jane heads Instructional Support Services, a consulting and resource firm in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Visit her website (https://janebluestein.com) for hundreds of helpful articles, handouts, tip sheets, excerpts, resources, and audio discussions. Her words will touch your heart; her ideas will change your life.
Tom Hierck has been an educator since 1983 in a career that has spanned all grade levels and many roles in public education. His experiences as a teacher, an administrator, a district leader, a department of education project leader, and an executive director have provided a unique context for his education philosophy.
Tom is a compelling presenter, infusing his message of hope with strategies culled from the real world. He understands that educators face unprecedented challenges and knows which strategies will best serve learning communities. Tom has presented to schools and districts across North America with a message of celebration for educators seeking to make a difference in the lives of students. His dynamic presentations explore the importance of positive learning environments and the role of assessment to improve student learning. His belief that every student is a success story waiting to be told has led him to work with teachers and administrators to create positive school cultures and build effective relationships that facilitate learning for all students.
His most recent books include Trauma-Sensitive Instruction: Creating a Safe and Predictable Classroom Environment, Trauma-Sensitive Leadership: Creating a Safe and Predictable School Environment (both coauthored with John F. Eller) and You’re a Teacher Now! What’s Next? (coauthored with Alex Kajitani).
To learn more about Tom’s work, visit his website (www.tomhierck.com), or follow @thierck on X or Tom Hierck on Facebook.
To book Tom Hierck for professional development, contact pd@SolutionTree.com.
INTRODUCTION
By Jane Bluestein
The person who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.
—Unknown
In the late 1990s, I was invited to write a book for educators about improving the emotional climate in schools. Initially, I thought about it in terms of my previous work on discipline and motivation, places in which emotional safety is often compromised. But the more I explored the concept, the clearer it became that my original vision was limited at best.
I needed to get a better sense of how big this issue of emotional safety truly is. I began with what seemed like a fairly simple question: What affects emotional safety in schools? The answers overwhelmed me. Once I started digging, I realized that just about anything can impact school climate and can affect how safe schools feel to the people who spend their days there, students and adults alike.
Every door I opened led to other doors or down hallways I never expected to investigate. After a few months, I had an outline with more than 140 topics, many of which could have become a book or two on their own. The more I learned, the more I realized that, if nothing else, this book would have to reflect the enormity of the topic I intended to explore.
Complicating matters, shortly after I started collecting data, the Columbine High School massacre occurred. Despite what seemed to be a pivotal moment in U.S. culture and history, I resisted the temptation to emphasize guns and violence over practices, policies, and interactions that we encounter daily in schools. Yes, this book addresses guns and violence, both in its original version and in this revision. But its primary focus is the overall culture we create in schools, one that deliberately strives to offer an educational experience that prevents (or reduces) the desire to hurt others from ever arising in the first place.
Regardless of what we intend our schools to accomplish, the emotional climate is an issue. The need to acknowledge this was particularly clear in the number of programs and reactions that targeted isolated parts of the problem with the emotional climate in schools with little or no regard for the context in which the problem occurred—not unlike trying to solve a puzzle with only a few of the pieces (and no picture on the box).
Yes, safety is about guns and violence, but the concept of school safety covers much more than the violence that has gotten our attention. It’s also about learning styles, social interactions, discipline policies, and bathroom breaks. It’s about the roles schools assume in society and the demands of an economy our students will ultimately serve.
It’s about the brain, body, and heart. It’s about content and assessment, and it’s about desirable but unmeasurable commodities like curiosity, persistence, and creativity. It’s about the discrepancy between the goals we express and hold in our hearts and the priorities we serve through the behaviors we practice and the choices we make. It’s about people and communities, values and politics, and the interesting dynamics that can happen when we overlay these factors on diverse academic imperatives.
Now, certain limitations are inherent in taking on a topic this big and multidimensional. For one thing, representing what is essentially holographic in its complexity within the linear constraints of a book led to certain decisions and necessary compromises. Nonetheless, the original book ran over five hundred pages with over one thousand footnotes and comments. (I had to include the original book’s bibliography on my website, as it simply wouldn’t fit in the printed book.)
When I received the opportunity to update this book for a second edition, I was challenged to significantly condense the content while still addressing the five main dimensions of school safety that ultimately emerged from the research: (1) academic safety, (2) emotional safety, (3) social safety, (4) behavioral safety, and (5) physical (or neurological) safety. Enter Tom Hierck, a great match as a coauthor, who was able to maintain the vision for this book even while helping to pare the content to a manageable product.
online but felt the need to use the content was strong, we referenced the original book as the source.
While this book focuses on American schools and their history, traditions, and programs, we have discovered that, for better or worse, the problems and concerns we see in the United States are reflected to varying degrees wherever we have worked. Further, the basic need for emotional safety and the various considerations involved are similar, if not identical, throughout humanity. Students in Malaysia have no less need for a safe learning environment than students in Missouri, and the observations and experiences from overseas are highly relevant to U.S. schools. We have deliberately omitted references to the locations or affiliations of the individuals we quote for this reason.
Summary
In the end, we hope what comes through in this book is a sense of optimism rooted in a firm belief that educators have the ability to create the kinds of schools, environments, and relationships that will support learning, achievement, and cognitive growth, as well as compassion, creativity, resilience, commitment, productivity, self-understanding, and self-actualization. As bleak as the big picture can sometimes appear, we believe that there has never been a better time to be involved in education.
Educators have never known as much as they now know about how people learn, think, and interact, and various factors that can affect the previously mentioned behaviors. This knowledge comes with a certain accountability to reckon with the outcomes of the traditions their predecessors imposed or followed because we have come to know the cost of ignoring their potential impact. The world has changed, and in many cases, business as usual no longer serves. It is our hope that this book will help you get a better sense of not only where we are and how we got here but also the many promising paths that lie ahead.
Bluestein and Tom Hierck.
PART I DIMENSIONS OF A VERY BIG PICTURE
Jane Bluestein and Tom Hierck. All
Stand close to an impressionist painting, and you’ll focus on a bunch of dots or short strokes of color. On their own, they don’t mean much. But step back. The bits of color blend, and a picture emerges. Leave out a particular color or eliminate sections of dots and you end up with an incomplete image.
So it goes with safety in schools. When somebody brings up the topic, the conversation tends to focus on one little piece of this reality—usually a headline-grabbing instance of violence or vandalism. However, if we apply a bigpicture perspective to this issue, we realize that the more extreme breaches of school safety are only a very small part of a much larger issue.
Unfortunately, despite our efforts to place these events in a larger context, we may easily fixate on the intensity of a particular color or set of dots, especially in the case of a sensational incident, and lose our sense of the multidimensional reality in which the event occurred. When our focus narrows to one little corner of the picture, we may neglect the millions of other details that are also part of the scenery, losing track of how all these threads are woven together or how they impact one another. When our vision fails to go beyond the immediacy of the moment, our lack of perspective can have serious consequences, particularly with regard to how we respond to an event and the solutions we propose.
Certainly, safety is an issue whenever violence occurs. But it’s also an issue for the student who is terrified of being called on to give an oral presentation to the class, the student who anticipates being harassed or attacked on the playground, or the student who knows that the end of the school day leads them back to an unstable or violent home. It’s an issue for students who don’t test well, students who learn best by touching and moving, and students whose strengths lie in areas that schools neither assess nor value.
It’s an issue for the student nobody notices, the student nobody will play with, and the student who camouflages inadequacy with a string of achievements. It’s an issue for students who think nonlinearly and students who look different. It’s also an issue for parents and caregivers, particularly when their children are having—or causing—problems. And it’s an issue for teachers who face increasing demands and have inadequate resources, who are held accountable for many things over which they have very little control, and whose work often fails to generate the respect and compensation it deserves.
Even when we acknowledge its importance, safety can easily become a casualty of traditions that make assessment more important than learning or that value subject matter over students. We sacrifice safety when we fail to notice a student in distress, we ignore the hurtful behavior of one student toward another, we use tests or grades to punish, or we ignore academic needs in favor of curricular mandates. Emotional safety is likewise undermined by sarcasm, impatience, and contempt; by gotcha discipline policies; by pop quizzes; or by yelling and humiliation.
An approach to creating an emotionally safe classroom or school environment will necessarily take the whole into account. It’s one thing to expect our schools to produce positive outcomes—from high academic performance to good citizenship—and quite another to create an environment in which these reasonable expectations can actually emerge. In the absence of a safe learning environment, students may expend a great deal of energy to create safety, self-protecting by any means necessary, and not always in the most constructive or desirable ways.
Learning is compromised, and teaching is far more difficult than it needs to be, so we deal with the symptoms and react to the events. But until we quit dancing around the core issues and the dynamics that keep feeding the beast, we will continue to be disappointed when quick fixes and surface solutions fail—or make the problems even worse.
So, let’s look at the big picture and the range of factors that make school climate what it is. And let’s look at some of the ways students and adults need to feel safe before we zero in on one little corner of our room and imagine that if that’s clean, the rest of the building is just fine. Yes, it’s big, but it’s doable. Maybe all we need to do is step back and take in the immensity and complexity of it all, for therein lies potential and magnificence. And in the end, what could be more worthwhile?
by Jane Bluestein and Tom Hierck.
Chapter 1
WHAT SAFETY IS: IT’S
NOT JUST
ABOUT GUNS
I don’t remember much of what [our teacher] taught us, but I always felt safe and respected in her class. She was tough, but we all knew she had our back.
—Mira, former student
Defining school safety is never an easy task, and the default oftentimes involves descriptors of unsafe environments. For the purposes of this book, we’ll describe safe schools as ones where students are safe from violence, exposure to weapons and threats, theft, bullying and harassment, the sale or use of illegal substances, and other emergencies. While this definition covers the most obvious and alarming threats, it’s actually just a piece of a much bigger picture of what contributes to a safe school environment.
Other components demand consideration, as they can lead to the preceding destructive outcomes when not addressed. The Colorado Department of Education identifies four types of safety that schools should consider:
• Physical safety: The protection from violence, theft, and exposure to weapons and threats, and substance use in order to establish a secure learning environment
• Social and emotional safety: An experience in which one feels safe to express emotions, is free from harassment and bullying, and whose voice is valued and respected
• Identity safety: [Is available when individuals] are made to feel that their social identity is an asset rather than a barrier to success and where schools are intentional in refuting negative stereotypes, countering stereotype threat, and ensuring that all backgrounds are welcomed, supported, and valued
• Academic safety: Refers to the feelings of security and confidence to take risks academically knowing that failure is part of the learning process (Hansen et al., n.d.)
We would like to add two important components here— structure and autonomy which help us address behavioral safety (which is not included in the preceding list). Structure contributes to safety by helping people understand limits and requirements, while a sense of autonomy offers a degree of power or control within those limits. An absence of structure invites misunderstanding, even chaos. A struggle for autonomy can show up as defiance, passive-aggressiveness, or other hurtful ways of getting power needs met.
Meeting the demands of these different aspects of school safety can lead to a better sense of community and a more positive classroom climate, along with greater student success, responsibility, and cooperation and minimal conflict, frustration, and power struggles—outcomes we believe all schools are striving for. However, the focus of school safety has narrowed to that incredibly important concern of how we can eliminate gun violence in U.S. schools.
The original vision for this book’s first edition was to emphasize the academic, social, emotional, physical, and behavioral aspects of school safety, but that edition also clearly reflected on the safety issues that were starting to appear in newspaper headlines. Columbine happened just as the original outline was taking shape. As devastating as the reports read that day, reports are even more imperative today as we contemplate what it will take to make our schools ever feel safe.
We need to acknowledge the escalation of violence in the United States since this book’s initial release. A Washington Post headline states, “More Than 390,000 Students Have Experienced Gun Violence at School Since Columbine,” which occurred in 1999 (Cox, Rich, Trevor, Muyskens, & Ulmanu, 2024). This number of students ought to shock us beyond any of the headlines of 1999, as there have been 426 school shootings since then as of this update (Cox et al., 2024). But the latest school shooting news hardly registers anymore, and active shooter drills are the norm in America’s schools.
Another account acknowledges that these numbers “do not begin to capture the true scope of this epidemic in the United States, where hundreds of thousands of children’s lives have been profoundly changed by school shootings” (Cox, 2022). Even children who are unharmed or do not witness the actual attack can carry the trauma for years.
We know we cannot ignore the issue of gun violence in a book on school safety, but we also feel compelled to suggest that safety is much broader than the matter of guns in schools. While other countries we have worked in don’t have school shootings in the numbers seen in the United States, they, too, need a comprehensive dialogue about school safety.
Interestingly, the original version of this book cited a 1998 U.S. Department of Education annual report on school safety, which affirmed that “the vast majority of America’s schools are safe places” (U.S. Department of Education & U.S. Department of Justice, 1998). By its account, schools at that time were safer for children than their homes or communities. Fast-forward twenty-six years, and despite the “rare yet devastating” incidents of gun violence in the past two decades, a 2023 report from Everytown Research & Policy insists that “America’s schools are [still] among the safest places for children to be on a daily basis.” Nonetheless, these resources often work from a definition of safety that is deceptively narrow.
We’re unlikely to see sensational media accounts about a student berated for a wrong answer or a student teased and humiliated by peers, unless, of course, these events end in violence. We’re not presuming to compare the relative traumas of a scolding and a shooting, but make no mistake, these and countless other interactions compromise and erode schools’ emotional climates on a daily basis. And as long as we constrain our notion of safety to guns and violence, the wide range of strategies and policies we can more reliably control will be distorted and often overlooked.
In the course of a school day, hundreds of situations, techniques, and exchanges do not support basic safety needs. These may sometimes be hard to spot, document, or measure, but they deserve our attention, and they deserve to be taken seriously, for they, too, leave scars. It’s easy to get caught up in the extreme events we have witnessed, as well as the finger pointing and hand wringing that occur in their wake. However, headlines point to a host of other serious, if grossly subtler, problems. As far as emotional safety and classroom climate go, we have bigger problems to solve.
In psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, safety is number two, just above basic survival needs, like food and shelter (Maslow, 1968; McLeod, 2024). The need for safety—including emotional and psychological safety, as well as the absence of physical threat—is so basic and so important that unless this need is met, all higher-level needs, like the needs for belonging, achievement, and purpose, become extremely difficult to satisfy or achieve in healthy ways.
Most humans become masters of adaptation, and anyone who spends much time with students who have a history of not feeling safe can probably reel off a long list of behaviors and attitudes those students develop to compensate. But compensation
is hardly the same as learning, inquiring, and relating, much less self-actualizing, which are far more worthwhile and healthier goals.
When a tragedy happens, people react by wanting to know why it did, but educators must start asking different questions. Before another tragic event occurs, we need to start looking at how schools feel . And if students and their teachers are not looking forward to each school day as an exciting and enriching opportunity to meet their higher-level needs, we need to know what we can do to make this happen.
It’s important to know how students and adults are treated in school, and the degree to which all are (and feel) valued. Educators might want to focus on questions like the following.
• What kinds of opportunities exist for all students to not just learn but succeed as well?
• How do we demonstrate we are listening, and how do we let students know they’re worth listening to?
• How are we supporting personal and social development and teaching students ways to deal with problems and hurt feelings without hurting themselves or anyone else?
• Do our students feel welcome in our classrooms, regardless of their previous grades and test scores, their appearances and personalities, their learning preferences, or how much they love our subject area?
The good news appears in the form of new research, new technologies, and new programs—and the fact that schools throughout the world are starting to examine and address issues that go beyond the academic concerns that in years past have grabbed the lion’s share of our attention, often to the exclusion of other, equally important dimensions of human growth and development.
One of these is resilience. This concept was once thought of as grit that exists only in certain heroic role models. Science tells us otherwise. As the American Psychological Association (APA, 2020) states, resilience is “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress.” In other words, this type of psychological strength can be taught to and enhanced in all our students. It takes multiple opportunities to practice and the presence of one significant adult. Educators are often best positioned to be these adults.
The challenges schools currently face should force us to step back and see how much this issue of safety really involves. If this approach makes us more willing to look at all the factors that impact a student’s life and learning (including the factors we don’t want to look at or don’t believe we’re equipped to handle), and if it somehow takes us from blame and regret to prevention and solutions, then this will
help us serve some greater purpose. Our bottom line actually has little to do with violence in schools, aside from how the adults in a school can create a culture in which the perceived need for violence would never occur to any students.
Emotional Safety
A 2022 survey of middle and high school students reveals that only 68 percent of students report feeling safe at school (Safe and Sound Schools, 2022). This is a troubling statistic. Even without knowing what the surveyors or students specifically mean by the word safe, one would certainly wonder about the school climate, not to mention the amount of learning going on in an environment in which a third of the student population does not feel safe. There is also a disconnect with the adults in the same survey, as 87 percent of educators report feeling school is a safe place to be. At a minimum, these data suggest schools can do more to help students feel that school is a safe place. Yet what do these numbers really tell us?
The emotional climate in a school is the complex product of a huge number of factors. How a school feels on any given day can be influenced by, among other things, the condition and design of the physical structure, the community in which the school exists, the mental health of the adults in the building, the functionality of the families whose children attend, the political and economic climate of the area (and the world), the calendar, the weather, and perhaps the position of the planets as well.
Local events can have a big impact; a community crisis, a mean-spirited editorial, or even a winning football season can add a layer of energy to a school environment that hits you the second you walk in the door. Add to that the various social hierarchies, power dynamics, agendas, and unresolved personal issues that are present anytime you have a group of people living or working together, and you have a pretty volatile mix of factors that influence how people work, learn, and interact in this environment.
Since early 2020, school climate has also been impacted by a pandemic that rocked schools and communities, and its true impact is becoming clearer in retrospect. All these factors together compel educators, schools, districts, and communities to be more intentional about cultivating the critical components of a safe learning environment.
Social-emotional learning (SEL) is an important part of school safety and an important tool in helping students manage emotions, set goals, show empathy, and build and maintain supportive relationships. CASEL (n.d.) defines SEL as:
the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to develop healthy
• Encouragement and success; recognition; and instruction, guidance, and resources according to need (developmental, cognitive, affective, or modality) and regardless of need
• Recognition and acknowledgment of one’s unique talents, skills, and qualities
• Understanding and clarity of requirements and expectations; predictability (consistency of follow-through); and freedom from arbitrary, indiscriminate, and unexpected punishment and reactivity
• Freedom from harassment, intimidation (including labeling, name calling, ridicule, teasing, criticism, or contempt), and threat of physical harm from adults or peers
• Freedom to make choices and influence one’s own learning, pursue personal interests, and control various factors in the process of learning (such as content, presentation, media, and location; social context; direction; and specific assignments or approaches) based on personal needs and preferences
• Freedom from prejudice, judgment, and discrimination based on physical characteristics and general appearance; religious, racial, or cultural background; or sexual orientation
• Freedom from prejudice, judgment, and discrimination based on academic, athletic, creative, or social capabilities; modality or learning-style preferences; temperament; hemispheric dominance; or similar profiles
• Freedom to have (and express) one’s own feelings and opinions without fear of recrimination
Clearly, the opportunity to create safe schools has to move beyond knee-jerk responses to conflicts and crises. The issue of school safety is far more complex than topical. In the absence of the full complement of safety factors in the bulleted list, two important saving graces exist. The first is having someplace to connect— that is, having a person or a group who values and respects you, or having some in-school relationship in which you can truly be yourself. The second is having someplace to succeed.
We have heard from many individuals who experienced a sense of safety in school simply by doing well there. Others have claimed that they would never have made it through school if they hadn’t had one class or subject area (often beyond the core academics) that aligned with a competency they possessed and offered them a refuge from difficulties in other classes, mistreatment or rejection by their peers, or a miserable home life. Certainly, other valuable supportive influences exist, in and
out of the educational environment, and differences in personality and temperament will make some children far less vulnerable than others to unsafe conditions and interactions.
Safety for Adults in Schools
If we, the adults, don’t model what we expect, we can’t expect students to meet our expectations. Our students are always watching us, looking for clues and cues of expected or desired behaviors. Leaders should not have to break up cliques among their faculty—but must if such groups exist. Everyone should feel that they belong in our school community and that they are welcome in “our house.”
For schools to be safe for students, they have to be safe for adults as well. Teachers, counselors, administrators, custodians, front office workers, and education assistants—in fact, anyone who intersects the lives of students—whose energy is distracted by some need to self-protect just don’t have as much to offer students as adults who feel secure, supported, and valued in their positions.
Interestingly, the previously listed factors for children’s emotional safety are quite similar to the safety factors required by all adults, with the important addition of the ability to experience the following.
• Respect for one’s professional judgment and opinions
• Respect for one’s teaching or management style, special skills, and preferences, especially when these can be matched and accommodated with appropriate grade-level, subject-area, or administrative assignments; partner and schedule configurations; room and environmental configurations; resources; and materials
• Requests and respect for one’s input and a feeling of being included in decisions that have a direct impact on one’s well-being and ability to perform effectively
• A sense of being valued and respected by the administration, policymakers, and community
• A sense of being supported (backed up) by the administration, policymakers, and community
Just imagine the climate in a school where all these safety factors are present! Indeed, many, many people are currently committed to ensuring that these conditions are in place in their own classrooms, schools, and districts.
The point is once we agree that creating schools that are emotionally, socially, intellectually, and psychologically safe—in addition to physically safe—is a goal worth pursuing from a comprehensive and inclusive standpoint, we can start working
to achieve the specific safety factors in the bulleted list. The more of these factors we uphold in school settings, the more we increase the odds that schools are safe and also feel safe all the time for all students and adults. As we will see, establishing such a climate has enormous implications for student learning, success, and behavior.
It’s reassuring to know that students are safer in school than anywhere else, but we must stack the odds in favor of a greater sense of physical safety while equally ensuring the emotional, psychological, and academic safety of the school climate. This will be well worth whatever commitment it takes.
Chapter 1 Summary
School safety is a challenge to define, but the absence of a safe environment is easy to detect. While we live in a time when acts of gun violence in schools are on the rise, schools are still safe places for students if we strive to make them so. Considering all types of safety (physical, social, emotional, behavioral, and academic) and the myriad factors that impact safety, every member of the school community must commit to ensuring that our schools are safe and that students and adults alike feel that sense of safety. Making schools safe is essential, and the good news is that it’s doable! The appendix (page 229) contains two reproducibles “Survey: Is Your School an Emotionally Safe Place?” and “Worksheet: Building Emotional Safety” to help you.
“ In Creating Emotionally Safe Schools, Jane Bluestein and Tom Hierck present an optimistic view of what the future can be. By focusing on proactive strategies, we can all work and learn in safe, accepting, and respectful schools. ”
—Peter Marshall Educational Consultant and Author
“ Jane Bluestein and Tom Hierck examine what helps students thrive instead of merely survive and offer concrete proposals to help educators build safe classrooms and schools. ”
—John Moncure Board Member, Montessori Educational Programs International and Author
“ Creating Emotionally Safe Schools entrusts educators to recognize what is occurring in our environments and refrains from making a simple list of steps for safety. ”
—Cynthia Risner Educational Consultant
Students learn best when they feel safe and supported.
Creating Emotionally Safe Schools, Second Edition by Jane Bluestein and Tom Hierck is your essential guide for building a thriving emotional environment that boosts student success and well‑being. Discover how to shape students’ emotional responses by modeling healthy expression, building community, and nurturing self‑awareness and self‑management.
K–12 administrators and teachers will:
• Foster emotional safety and belonging in schools
• Mitigate the impact of stress and anxiety on learning
