I’m Roz Romatz. For more than twenty years, I worked with middle-school students, including five years as a K–8 principal. My work has always centered on one question:
For years, I assumed the answer was better teaching, stronger relationships, clearer expectations, or more effective consequences. Those ingredients are important in a classroom, but over time I realized that all of them depended on me to enforce them. They worked, as long as I was there to hold the structure together, but when I stepped back, many students would slip back into old patterns. This led me to reframe my old question:
I didn't want to keep trying to become better at directing young people from the outside, I wanted to understand how they could develop the capacity to direct themselves. So I decided to leave my principal position and go back to school to study applied neuroscience and executive function coaching.
Studying neuroscience gave me another way to view the question. It helped me understand why behavior can persist even when a child genuinely wants something different. It showed me how experience, attitudes, emotions, and habits shape behavior and how developing executive-function skills can help create change in real-world interactions. The more I learned, the more I realized that the goal isn’t just about teaching better behavior...
What you can expect from me:
I am curious, direct, patient, and difficult to shock. I do not believe shame is an effective foundation for growth. I will take a young person seriously, help them look honestly at what is and is not working, and support them in building change they can eventually sustain for themselves.