Joe provides many services as an educational consultant…
- Consults with school districts across the country including leadership training and workshops for superintendents and principals.
- Develops unique programs that utilize and implement whole brain strategies to improve school culture, social and emotional development, academic achievement, and graduation rates.
- Works with the district’s most challenging students to improve self-esteem, the ability to control their behavior, and academic performance.
- Creates programs to close the achievement gap between minority and white students, including a pilot program that resulted in a 70% four-year graduation rate, for at-risk Hispanic and black college students.
What is His Approach?
The Winning with Youth Program
The Winning with Youth Program is based on over 30 years of Joe’s experience working with at-risk youth. Joe first implemented his program within two successful residential treatment programs, designed to provide assistance and treatment to violent and aggressive juveniles.
Since 1992, Joe has been consulting with public schools throughout the country, primarily in urban districts, including New York, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Boston, Kalamazoo, Providence, and Camden. He has also implemented a successful pilot program at a small liberal arts college in Vermont.
Joe often works with the most challenging students…Those that present a wide range of behavioral, learning and mental health issues. He teaches staff how to develop safe, supportive learning environments, and how to be successful with even the most challenging students.
Joe’s model also includes the creation of high-performance teams within individual schools, and throughout entire school districts…He provides training and leadership development for superintendents and principals. These changes result in increased academic confidence and performance, and significant improvement in graduation rates.
Based on his work with thousands of at-risk students and students exhibiting behavioral and learning issues, Joe compiled a profile of the most common characteristics and challenges:
Characteristics:
- Over 90% are right brain dominant.
- Over 90% are visual or hands-on learners.
- Over 80% are highly extraverted.
- Over 80% have experienced emotional, physical, and/or sexual abuse.
- Many of these students have auditory and/or visual processing problems.
- All of these students have negative beliefs about themselves.
Challenges:
- Most curricula are designed for left-brain dominant thinkers.
- Most teachers use a lecture style approach.
- Extroverts need to move around and talk incessantly, while students are expected to sit still for long periods of time and be quiet.
- Trauma makes it difficult for students to sit still and focus.
- These characteristics compromise the student’s ability to understand the teacher, stay focused, and keep up with the class.
- It’s hard to be motivated to do anything if you believe you are incompetent, dumb or stupid.
What we do know is that despite many service interventions, the at-risk students in the elementary schools become the at-risk students in the middle schools, and, in turn, become the at-risk students in the high schools. Those at-risk high school students…who make it to college…also become at-risk college students.
Joe’s Winning with Youth Program ends that cycle…It provides strategies that address the common challenges facing at-risk students and helps them improve their self-esteem and academic confidence. These changes help students become successful in school and life.
Contact Joe to schedule your free, introductory consultation to learn how he can help the students at your school, school district or college. You can also learn about leadership training and development for administrators and other executive staff.