Meet Your Trainer

Mr. D’s philosophy about teaching is simple. He agrees with Madeline Hunter when she said, “Kids don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care!” Many think she was being too “warm and fuzzy” but what she meant was you are not going to reach some kids academically until you first reach them on the “human to human” level. Sometimes the subject matter in our classrooms can’t compete with the “drama” in their lives. The main ingredient missing in a lot of our classrooms today is a “connection with kids.” Mr. D believes that research is clear, when students know you value them as a human being, not just another student; they will work harder for you and challenge you less. He also believes teachers don’t need any more theory and new, trendy programs with catchy names.

Mr. D is a veteran educator with 20 years of experience in classroom and other school-based roles. In those 20 years, he has taught all grades from 4th – 12th, plus spending two years as a school librarian. These experiences make for an interesting symmetry in John’s career as he has spent 9 years as a fourth-grade teacher, 2 years as a school librarian, and the last 9 years in various roles at the secondary level.

In January 2021, John earned his Master of Education degree through Eastern Mennonite University, specializing in Restorative Justice in Education (RJ/RJE). RJ has been a significant part of John’s work over the past eight years. A period that saw John start a first-of-its-kind restorative practices program in his NE Kansas school district. That program, which earned John a Peacebuilder in Education award from the local peace and justice organization, reduced the number of office referrals by 60%, fights by 50%, and suspensions by a full 66%.

As part of that work, John joined the consulting trainer team with the Restorative Schools Initiative (RSI) at the Kansas Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution (KIPCOR). KIPCOR is an affiliate program of Bethel College, a Mennonite university in Central Kansas. John continues to serve as a consulting trainer, assisting with virtual restorative practices workshops as need and availability allow. While still living in Kansas, John would travel with his KIPCOR colleagues to school districts across the state of Kansas, co-facilitating both one-day and multi-day restorative practices workshops to teachers, principals, and school district personnel that wanted to start RJ projects in their own schools and spaces.

Additionally, John has presented at multiple education conferences, Bridging to Resilience Conference and the Kansas NEA Social and Racial Justice Conference. At these conferences, John (both solo and with colleagues) presented/co-presented sessions on the following topics:  An Introduction to Restorative Justice, How Restorative Justice Builds Strong School Communities, and Explaining the School-to-Prison Pipeline. More recently, John was the featured keynote for a teacher convocation day for a rural Illinois school district and he led a breakout session on the science of behavior escalation during the East Tennessee Federal Programs Conference in Gatlinburg, TN.

Finally, John attended the Jim Knight Five-day Intensive Instructional Coaching Institute. This may have been his most important training, as it gave him the tools and the vocabulary to support teachers. This is now John’s calling, to support teachers, to provide teachers with both an ear and a shoulder, and let teachers know just how valuable, and valued, teachers are to our society.