The Book That Changed Everything: A Journey to Ross Greene’s Lost at School

I first met the person who was to later introduce me to Ross Greene’s seminal work, in 1994. He was the counsellor at my first teaching gig; I was a beginning teacher, teaching maths and science at a boys’ high school. I’d spent the previous two years working in a pretty out-there pub (turns out that experience with crowd control stood me in good stead in a boys' high school!). To say I was shell-shocked is an understatement. Dave was a lifeline—a somewhat quirky, anti-establishment lifeline—but a saviour all the same. He helped me make sense of the daily assault on my senses, the hypocrisies and frustrations.

At the end of that year, I disappeared north for a blissful stint as a long-term reliever in an idyllic backwater. It was a beautiful experience, but one that also, again, assaulted my senses—watching students being misunderstood and labelled.

Fast forward to 2005 and I found myself walking into the RTLB office of a local school, freshly enthusiastic about finally being able to have some influence on where I felt education needed to be: treating every child as a taonga to be nurtured and treasured. If we could truly embrace that, well... world peace. 🕊️

Looking up— I spot Dave. He’d spent the intervening years becoming even more disillusioned and had arrived at the same place—RTLB-land. He’d lived a lot by then and was pretty disheartened by what he was seeing.

So when he arrived in the office one day in 2008, literally bouncing with excitement and a glint in his eye, we all sat up and paid attention. In his hand, he held a book—or I should say, he waved a book wildly. Ross W. Greene’s Lost at School: Why Our Kids with Behavioral Challenges are Falling Through the Cracks and How We Can Help Them. Dave continued to wave that book through pretty much every meeting I ever attended with him until his retirement in 2014. And he wasn’t wrong to do so.

Reading Lost at School, in my opinion, is as life-changing for educators as Bruce Perry’s The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog—a shift that stays with you. Once you see through this lens, you can’t unsee it.

You begin to question everything—how we respond to behaviour, what we call “choices”, and the systems we’ve built around compliance. Greene’s Collaborative & Proactive Solutions (CPS) approach reframes behaviour as communication and invites us into a space of curiosity, collaboration, and compassion.

A revised and updated edition of the book was released in 2014, reflecting the ongoing development of the CPS model. But even in its original form, it offered something many of us were desperate for: a way to work with young people, not against them.

Looking back, I realise that Dave wasn’t just waving a book. He was waving a flag—a call to rethink, to reimagine, and to hold fast to hope that there is a better way.

And all these years later, I’m still listening.