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CAN
Lauren Porosoff
Lauren Porosoff
Lauren Porosoff is the founder of EMPOWER Forwards, a collaborative consultancy practice. An educator since 2000, Lauren taught middle school English at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in the Bronx, New York, where she also served as a grade-level team leader and a diversity coordinator and led curriculum mapping and professional development initiatives. Previously, Lauren taught middle school history at the Maret School in Washington, D.C., and elementary general studies at the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville, Maryland.
Lauren’s commitment to transforming the psychological experience of school has been a constant in her teaching practice. Informed by research and practices from fields such as acceptance and commitment therapy, compassion-focused therapy, relational frame theory, and motivational interviewing—as well as by her 18 years as a classroom teacher—Lauren develops tools and protocols that empower students and teachers to bring their values to their actions. Her work includes Teach Meaningful: Tools to Design the Curriculum at Your Core; The PD Curator: How to Design Peer-to-Peer Professional Learning That Elevates Teachers and Teaching; EMPOWER Your Students: Tools to Inspire a Meaningful School Experience; and Two-for-One Teaching: Connecting Instruction to Student Values.
Lauren has written for AMLE Magazine, Educational Leadership, Edutopia, Independent School, Learning for Justice (formerly Teaching Tolerance), Phi Delta Kappan, the PBS NewsHour blog, and Rethinking Schools about how students and teachers can make school a source of meaning, vitality, and community in their lives. She’s presented on these topics at the regional and national conferences of various professional organizations, including the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, Learning and the Brain, the National Council of Teachers of English, the Progressive Education Network, and various state and regional associations of independent schools.
Lauren received a bachelor’s degree in English from Wesleyan University and a law degree from the George Washington University.
Presentations by Lauren Porosoff
- Emotional Equity: Empowering All Students to Honor and Learn From Their Emotions
- Beyond the Check-In: Integrating SEL into Remote Learning
- Playful SEL: Game-like Ways to Explore Values with Students
- Embedding Student Values into Academic Learning
- Building a Pedagogy of Belonging
- Embodying Our Anti-Racist Values at School
- Values-Based Responding to Bias Incidents
- Teaching As Selfing: Empowering Our Students by Becoming Who We Are
