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.

Do you know a Nix-Master? Sure you do. It's the child who says no to nearly anything. Some of these children are loud and defiant, others are quietly and politely non-compliant. Whether they are loud or quiet, they are not doing what they are asked to do. No adult ever won a power struggle with a child, and no adult ever will. The minute you get into power struggle with a child, you've already lost. Instead, choose interventions that work around the resistance. Here are techniques to use with youth or children who evidence normal non-compliance, and those who use behaviors that go well beyond typical into seriously defiant. We hope you enjoy this sampling of our innovative methods to fix the nix-master to say yes faster.

At our past few Problem-Kid Problem-Solver Workshops, there has been a lot of interest in methods to help work refusers. You may or may not recognize that term, but all teachers and youth professionals have at least several children who refuse assigned tasks. Teachers may have students who routinely refuse all school work. Some students may also refuse to talk or make eye contact. In our workshop, we spend hour after hour on work refusers. During that time, we place a major focus on anxious children and youth. Anxiety can cause or help maintain work refusal in many youngsters, although it would be an oversimplification to imply that all work refusal stems from anxiety. Even though not all work refusal stems from anxiety, in this issue we will only focus on anxious work refusers.

You may have seen it in the headlines this week: Many new teachers quit during their first three years. In Oregon, where we are based, a whopping one-quarter of beginning teachers don't stay in the field beyond their third year. Many novice teachers cite serious classroom management problems as a reason for leaving the profession. Here is some help for that concern. You probably have at least one student who is your top classroom management nightmare, and nothing you do seems to help. When you were in college, you got lots of theoretical training, but you probably weren't offered a wide array of practical, targeted tools to manage unmanageable youngsters. The consequence of that is that you may not have been sufficiently trained to manage unmanageable students. The practical tools and information certainly do exist, and have been around for a long time, but are still not routinely offered to educators in college.

The sounds that come from your class clowns can make or break nearly any class or group activity. Because of this, it is absolutely critical that students be able to manage their verbiage and conduct. Although most schools and agencies want students to consistently manage their verbiage and conduct, very few sites have a formal, written-down plan to teach their youngsters the specific nuts-and-bolts skills that they need to comply. So, self-control skills are expected in most schools and agencies, but not explicitly taught in most schools and agencies. Not surprisingly, students who aren't taught self-control skills, quite often lack those self-control skills. Here are the initial four skills that your aspiring comedians and wannabe talk show hosts need to transform show time into school or work time.

To thank all 10,000 plus of you teachers, counselors, psychologists, social workers and juvenile justice workers for being part of our 18 years of helping youth professionals help troubled youth, every subscriber to this internet magazine, can receive a free $15 ebook or free $169 workshop registration. Yes, every one of all 10,000 plus of you will get either The Quickest Kid Fixer-Uppers Volume 1 ebook, or a completely free registration to any Spring 2007 Breakthrough Strategies to Teach and Counsel Troubled Youth Workshop coming soon to Atlanta GA, Cincinnati OH, Los Angeles CA, Dallas TX, St. Louis MO and Seattle WA.

Here are some brand new interventions for the brand new year. These methods are delightful, new ideas that can turnaround dropouts, boost motivation, combat problem behavior, and launch apathetic students into a better new year. These lively classroom management and group management devices are perfect for any teacher, special educator, group home worker, juvenile court counselor, social worker, school counselor, or foster parent. Build a better year for your troubled and problem students with Youth Change's best, new behavior intervention techniques for your classroom, group room or office in 2007.

What do I do about students who get depressed around the holidays? That's the top question we've begun hearing from the participants in our Breakthrough Strategies to Teach and Counsel Troubled Youth Workshops. We only have a few more presentations of the class this year, but we expect to hear this query a lot at those remaining general sessions. In case you won't be able to join us in Seattle, Phoenix or Austin for those final stops of 2006 (see the full schedule below), here is a peek at some of the interventions that we will be providing at those events to help with that problem.

It's a question we get all the time. People are constantly asking if our behavior methods fit the age group they work with. We always give the same answer, that most of our interventions can be easily tailored to fit any age group. We do tend to put what we call a "hook" or "edge" on some interventions. Adding that element can often make the intervention work better with an older student. To use that intervention with younger students, you simply drop out that aspect of the strategy.

Presenting our Breakthrough Strategies to Teach and Counsel Troubled Youth Workshop at schools in Katrina-ravaged New Orleans and Waveland, Mississippi in the past few weeks was a real eye-opener. While most of our readers will hopefully never have to cope with the level of trauma that the Gulf Coast area still faces, you still will encounter your share of youngsters coping with death, divorce, loss, abuse, and other tragedy. It is critical that you know as much as you can about working with these students as even little mistakes can be quite damaging to youngsters who are struggling.

In our workshops and classroom management books, we devote hours to covering how to control even uncontrollable classrooms and groups. We can't magically squeeze all those hours of must-know classroom management information into this small space, but we can give you at least a few of the most important elements to get you on the path to ending your classroom management nightmare. Here are the top steps to at least start you down the road to managing unmanageable classrooms:

We know exactly which problem teachers consider to be the top kid problem in their classroom. We spent the entire summer crisscrossing the U.S. bringing our Breakthrough Strategies to Teach and Counsel Troubled Youth Workshop to school and agency staff inservice and professional development days. From as far south as New Orleans to as far north as Ashland, Ohio, teachers asked for compelling, new methods to turn on turned-off students. Here are some of our newest motivational methods for your most apathetic, bored, disinterested and unmotivated students:

It's a new school year, but for many youngsters back to school means back to problems. It can seem like such a mystery why so many of today's kids struggle so much each school year, but perhaps we've overlooked a common sense explanation and solution. Have you ever noticed that we don't actually teach kids to be students? It's true. While every school district has a formal, written-down plan to teach kids academics, few districts have a formal, written-down plan to teach kids how to be students and take advantage of all the great academics they are offered. Perhaps we need to teach kids to be students exactly the same way we teach them how to read, learn math, and master social studies.

As we looked back on 7 years and all 100 issues of the Problem Student Problem-Solver magazine, we thought we'd bring you the top intervention from each year. Our selections are based on the comments we receive from participants at our live workshops. Chances are you have not read every word of each of the 100 issues, or been a subscriber for the full 7 years, so here are some of our most adored and talked-about interventions that you just may have missed. Some of these methods may transform your classroom and enhance your classroom management results.

If schools took 10% of the time and energy that they are compelled to dedicate to high stakes testing and shifted their efforts to School Skills Training, the worsening dropout rate might be reversed. What should School Skills Training include? Any skill, attitude or motivation that students need to succeed. For students at risk of dropping out, motivation might head the list, followed by attendance and punctuality. All students need specific skill training in areas like teacher interaction skills, homework management skills, class discussion skills, hallway behavior, peer interaction skills, requesting help, and so on. If your school expects these skills from students, but does not teach them, that is unfair. It is not fair to expect skills you have not taught. Here is a sampling of interventions for motivation to impact your potential 30% dropouts.

Need some new ideas for your children and youth who have ADHD? Here are some of our favorites that you may find to be refreshingly different from what you are using now. All of these interventions are not only appropriate for your youth and children who have ADHD, but these interventions may also be essential training for any youngster. Remember: It is normal for many children and youth to be high energy and in motion. Because of that, these interventions should be offered as basic training for all students.

Character ed is becoming more and more popular in schools all over the U.S. But in our workshops around the country, more and more educators and counselors are complaining that character ed is not the solution for every youngster. They want to know what is wrong with character ed approaches. This article tells you what is wrong and exactly what you can do to easily fix it.

Since drug dealing is not a small, inconsequential problem area, but is quite serious, note that many of our strategies in this area are deliberately hard-hitting, dramatic, unusual or forceful. Use good judgement to evaluate whether a method is a good fit for you to use with your students in your setting. Also, make sure you are really knowledgeable about conduct disorders, a topic that we have frequently covered in this magazine. You will need to have razor-sharp skills with conduct disorders because many students who are successful dealers, may also be conduct disordered.

Oppositional Defiant Disorder is a mental health diagnostic term that can be applied by a mental health professional to describe some severely misbehaved youth and children. Although this youngster may be a real handful to manage, this diagnosis is an infinitely more hopeful and workable one than Conduct Disorder, which can appear similar... Here is a pop quiz to test your knowledge. Don't worry, the answers are below. These questions capture some of the most common misconceptions and questions we constantly hear in our workshops about these two types of hard-to-manage youth.

It's no fun to work with kids who know it all already. Some of these youngsters can be quite arrogant and disdainful. Others will convey a sense of superiority that serves to effectively isolate them from their peers. Many adolescents routinely believe they know more than adults, so if you work with teens, you may need every one of the approaches listed below. These methods can moderate the amount of time you have to spend each day convincing students that they don't know it all already. These interventions may actually help some of your know-it-all students realize that they might still have something to learn from you and your site.

Can you name the #1 intervention that your students can't resist? Here is a hint: It's an intervention that everyone has, but many of us forget to use. It's a method that is practically guaranteed to capture your students' interest and attention, and to make them more likely to receive and remember your message. What is it?

It may be a new year, but you are probably still dealing with the same old "kid problems." The bad attitudes, disrespect, peer conflict, lying, school failure or family problems didn't change when you flipped the page on the calendar. Don't let last year's problems create another difficult year. Resolve to stop using last year's failed solutions, and instead substitute updated, more effective methods like those contained in our books, instant ebooks, workshops and web site. This may be the right moment to stop using methods that didn't work well in 2005, and will fare no better in 2006. If you don't decide now to switch to more updated, more effective methods, you may continue to find your job discouraging and frustrating, and your students may continue to struggle and be very hard to manage. What better time to make the switch than as you flip the page on the calendar? You might actually discover that working with difficult kids doesn't have to be so difficult.

Nearly every one of Youth Change's most creative, surprising and forceful intervention handouts are in our brand new "Behavior Change Handouts" ebooks. You can own them in a lightening-fast 60 seconds. They are that easy to download, and you can try out some handouts free. "Controlling Myself and My Feelings" gives you all of our most effective self-control devices in one place. The handouts are fully reproducible and include "If You're Rude, You're Our Dude" and "Find Work with a Temper Like That." "Becoming a Motivated and Prepared Student and Worker" has nearly all of our inventive ideas for work refusers, apathetic students, truants and bored youngsters. It includes many popular handouts including "If Life Were This Easy, You Wouldn't Need Us" and "Get Paid Great to Arrive Late." Get and print several worksheets free to see them for yourself. The worksheets are designed to work when conventional methods fail. Loaded with cartoons, games, quizzes, contests, stories, and every imaginable intervention, you are bound to find methods that work with even the most hard-to-reach youngsters.

Here are some of our all-time favorite interventions from Youth Change's Breakthrough Strategies Workshops and Books. Take a peek at a sampling of our lesson methods and activities, designed to work for children with an array of problem areas, including children with attachment problems, angry youth, children with autism, unmotivated youth, defiant adolescents, Asperger's children, children with bad behavior, neglected children, abused children, and more. These activities are perfect for adolescents, make wonderful lessons for groups, and provide the anger-reducers and bad behavior-busters you need. Want a great activity for adolescents? Need a lesson about anger? Not sure how to help children manage the problems they face from child abuse or neglect? Here is a tiny peek at our massive wealth of activities, lessons and interventions.

Working with unmotivated children and youth doesn't have to be so difficult with these surprisingly unusual, compelling interventions that you just can't find anywhere else. Motivation is one of the many essential school kills that schools do not formally and systematically teach students. But, without motivation, kids don't look, act or sound like students. Entrenched negative attitudes can make it seem impossible to teach unmotivated youth. Here are some of the most common reasons kids believe that they won't need school, and some of our most dramatic and powerful ways to convincingly demonstrate otherwise.

"They're like little match sticks waiting to be lit" A judge in Springfield, Oregon, site of a school shooting in May, 1998 This article for youth professionals explains how to tell which youth may pose the highest risk for potential serious harm, and what you must do now to understand and work with them. To best ensure your safety, and the safety of your other students, and to effectively teach and counsel all youth in our violent times, be sure to fully upgrade your skills to become expert on all your "little match sticks waiting to be lit." By Ruth Herman Wells, M.S., Youth Change