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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the numerous educators throughout the country who shared their stories and strategies that made this book possible. I have been blessed with the good fortune of having had many opportunities to share my knowledge with you and to learn so much from you that I can pass along to others. I have found that there is always a wealth of untapped great ideas among faculty in every school, yet these ideas too often go unshared due to various constraints. Much of my work involves helping educators share their best ideas with each other. My hope is that MORE What Do I Do When … ? Powerful Strategies to Promote Positive Behavior will help make life a bit easier for educators by enhancing the success and improving the behavior of our students.

A special thanks to my son Brian Mendler, a youthful yet wise special-education teacher and outstanding Discipline With Dignity presenter whose dedication to making life better for his challenging students has had a dramatic impact on many of their lives. I thank Brian for his editorial comments and for contributing his “legacy” strategy. In addition to Brian, I thank my wife, Barbara, who recently retired from a lengthy career in education. At her retirement dinner, one speaker after another referred to her as always being “all about the kids.” Wonderfully, she has also always found the time and energy to be there for our family and for me. Our lengthy talks about kids and schools have shaped much of my thinking over the years.

I want to give special thanks to my editors at Solution Tree for their fine work. I also wish to acknowledge Carolyn Pool, acquisitions editor at ASCD, for enthusiastically embracing this book in its earliest form. I also wish to acknowledge Lori Erickson and all the folks at the Otter Creek Institute for their support of my work and their flexibility in allowing me to schedule seminars that fit my life. My program manager at Discipline Associates, Tammy Rowland, deserves special mention due to her excellence at keeping Discipline Associates well-organized. Our primary associates—Willeta Corbett, Jerry Evanski, Brian Mendler, Dave Zawadzki, and Colleen Zawadzki—deserve special mention for the fine work they do in teaching discipline seminars to educators throughout the country. Finally, and as always, a particularly special acknowledgment of my partner, frequent coauthor, and best friend, Rick Curwin, for his constant optimism, great sense of humor, and love.