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It's also critical that schools provide opportunities for teachers to enhance their skills in teaching in a developmentally and culturally responsive way. For example, Youth Communication provides professional development based on stories like those by the teens featured in this book. The stories include students’ out-of-school experiences that show their strengths and provide context for many student behaviors. In addition, when teachers talk among themselves about the stories and their reactions to them, they learn more about their colleagues and about themselves. Youth Communication's curricula also help them to recognize and strengthen SEL competencies in themselves and in their students.

Another often overlooked teacher-to-teacher professional support is intervisitation (when teachers visit a colleague's classroom and observe their teaching). Every school I support has created wonderful examples of impactful teaching practices that often go unnoticed. While formal professional development opportunities can be deeply effective, the opportunity for teachers to observe colleagues and sometimes even teach students they have in common can be far more effective. Drawing on the same guiding questions document, school administrators can focus the intervisitations so that teachers are addressing a specific aspect of developmentally and culturally responsive instruction such as observing how their colleagues provide students with opportunities for movement or the “real-world” connections that they make throughout the lesson.