R&L Education
Pages: 144
Trim: 6½ x 8½
978-1-57886-175-0 • Paperback • December 2004 • $47.00 • (£36.00)
Nicole M. Gnezda teaches Visual Art at Worthington Kilbourne High School, a nationally recognized Blue Ribbon School in the Worthington (Ohio) City school district.
Part 1 List of Illustrations
Part 2 Acknowledgments
Part 3 Introduction: Blue Jays
Chapter 4 1. How the Universe Works
Chapter 5 2. Vision
Chapter 6 3. Why Students Behave the Way They Do and What We Can Do about It
Chapter 7 4. It Matters How We Treat Difficult Kids
Chapter 8 5. It's All about the Soil: A Parable
Chapter 9 6. Reconsidering Assumptions: Cleaning out Our Brains
Chapter 10 7. The Poor Get Poorer: Why Rewards and Punishments Do Not Work
Chapter 11 8. We Won't Be Wimps!
Chapter 12 9. More about Courage
Chapter 13 10. Keeping It Simple
Chapter 14 11. Why Bother?
Chapter 15 12. The Ultimate View
Part 16 References
Part 17 Index
Part 18 About the Author
(Gnezda has) discovered that troubled students often benefit from compassion and freedom to create than from punishment. ... But is Gnezda's altruistic approach successful? Her blue jays' stories speak for themselves. One is of an emotionally troubled boy who drew violent images. Later, he explained that drawing the pictures kept him from acting out.
— NEA Today
Nicole Gnezda does an excellent job of exploring the nature of our hard-to-reach students, the blue jays in our classrooms. ... Teaching Difficult Students would be good reading for teachers and principals, especially as they look for ways to communicate with those students whose in-school behavior is so deeply connected to the difficulties in their personal lives.
— School Administrator