Find Your Fit
What We Offer
Ahead of Elevate 2026, Dr. Deb Bergeron and Rhonda Conn Parent explain why every safe, connected classroom starts with a regulated adult.
The traditional model of student behavior management is often built around charts, stickers, or timeouts. Conscious Discipline holds that these extrinsic tools don’t create lasting change.
That’s because they skip a few key ingredients: self-regulation practiced by the adult in the room, an investment in connection, and trust. Those three pillars are the foundation of transformational change — in early childhood centers, elementary and secondary schools, and whole districts.
Dr. Deb Bergeron and Rhonda Conn Parent, co-authors of Trust First: Turn Behaviors That Challenge Into Opportunities to Learn, have spent their careers exploring what that foundation looks like in practice. It’s also the centerpiece of their session at Elevate 2026.
We sat down with both of them ahead of the conference to talk about where their thinking came from, what it looks like day to day, and why it might be the most overlooked keystone for addressing burnout, attrition, and culture.
Dr. Bergeron’s path wound through decades in Head Start, the National Head Start Association, and the Office of Head Start and Early Childhood Development. But her real education started earlier, in a training Conn Parent recommended to her.
I was hooked right away. Once I took the skills I learned back to my classroom — and home to my own children — I got to experience how strong trust relationships nurture environments that are joyful, productive and fulfilling. — Dr. Deb Bergeron
Conn Parent’s turning point looked different but landed in the same place. Three years into teaching art, with a beautifully designed classroom and a curriculum she’d built from scratch, she hit a wall.
The children didn’t follow what I was saying, behaviors were all over the place, and if I flicked the lights on and off telling kids to get quiet one more time, well — I was just ‘done.’ — Rhonda Conn Parent
A workshop on connection and trust changed everything.
Every decision I made as an educator, a business owner, a parent, a wife — and all the hats I wear in life — sifted through my core values, and those strategies aligned with how trust really lives in our lives. — Rhonda Conn Parent
Conscious Discipline empowers adults to create safe, connected, and self-regulated systems, from classrooms to districts, so children can develop the emotional, behavioral, and executive skills they need to thrive.
At the center of that work is the S.A.F.E. Framework — Sustained Leadership, Adult Self-Regulation, Foster Community, and Engaged Classrooms. These are the four conditions Conscious Discipline has found determine whether change actually sticks, whether that’s in a single classroom or across an entire district.
Bergeron and Conn Parent’s work lives in the second domain: Adult Self-Regulation. It’s the question we were eager to pose to them — why focus on adult behavior first, when it’s the kids who are struggling?
Their answer is consistent: children learn far more from what adults do than from what adults say.
Adults are the teachers, the role-models, whether they choose to be or not. It is just the way humans are designed. So what kind of teacher/role-model the adult chooses to be is the question here. — Rhonda Conn Parent
Bergeron puts it just as plainly:
Teaching a child what you expect in the classroom without practicing those skills yourself, generally, doesn’t land with the children who need the most support. The best way to implement skills that balance children is to ensure you, the adult, is balanced first. — Dr. Deb Bergeron
Regulate the adult, she argues, and the ability to teach children to regulate themselves follows.
The S.A.F.E. Diagnostic is a free, 2-minute self-assessment that shows you which of the four domains — Sustained Leadership, Adult Self-Regulation, Foster Community, or Engaged Classrooms — is your highest-leverage starting point.
Take the S.A.F.E. Diagnostic →
Reward-and-punishment systems are everywhere in education, and Dr. Bergeron understands exactly why:
It’s clean. It’s measurable. It’s tangible. It feels ‘fair.’ It’s easy. If you do this, that will happen. — Dr. Deb Bergeron
But she and Conn Parent argue that’s precisely the problem — it optimizes for compliance, not for the thinking and responsibility that kids actually need.
We reject the notion that the classroom is ‘the real world.’ We think the classroom is the practice field. It’s where you mess up. It’s where you learn. It’s where you are safe enough to really make a bad choice and learn from that so that when you are in the ‘real world’ you’ll be able to think and be responsible. — Dr. Deb Bergeron
Conn Parent lives this out with her own students through a predictable pattern she calls K.I.D.S., Pit Stop, and “Step 3” (stating your needs) — backed by a mantra her class can recite by September:
If you know it, you can show it. If you don’t, you can take the time to learn it. — Rhonda Conn Parent
With staffing shortages hitting early childhood education hard, Bergeron and Conn Parent see traditional professional development as part of the problem, not the fix.
I feel the timing, the amount of content, the actual content, and the format in which PD is taught in early learning is unaligned with best practices. Educators are educating educators inaccurately. — Rhonda Conn Parent
The alternative, Bergeron argues, isn’t more content — it’s a different foundation, one that lightens what feels heavy about the work.
When a teacher knows joy awaits in their environment, leaving becomes less desirable. They choose to stay because they know that a trust-centered culture is one that is more manageable, more joyful — regardless of what stressors might come along. — Dr. Deb Bergeron
Bergeron has seen the effect of trust, connection, and belonging play out in real time, more than once. As a former high school administrator, she watched “kids who caused absolute chaos in one classroom sit in another, comply, work hard, and show pride in their abilities. The difference: trust. Period.”
Later, as a principal in DC Public Schools, she watched an entire building’s culture shift after letting go of reward-and-punishment systems:
Teachers were hesitant at first, but by the time all classrooms were free of manipulation tactics — and teachers were free to simply teach behavior and build the ability to think and be responsible — everything about the building shifted. — Dr. Deb Bergeron
Conn Parent points to a strategy she calls the C.A.N. Method as one she’s seen work even with a class she doesn’t know: “It immediately and in real time brings kids together, ready to embrace success and challenge.”
They can know the answer, not know the answer, be daydreaming during part of the whole-group activity, and still come out successful — supported by their peers and unified toward learning content because of the trust-based, systemic design of this strategy. — Rhonda Conn Parent
For programs wondering how this fits into an existing framework, Bergeron sees Head Start as uniquely ready for it.
Head Start is steeped in trust — trust for families who have been marginalized, ignored, undervalued; trust for staff, who often come from the most unusual recruiting efforts; trust for children who show up with challenges school systems are often unwilling or unable to handle. — Dr. Deb Bergeron
Conscious Discipline, she says, builds directly onto that foundation: asking teachers to let go of control, focus on their own self-regulation before demanding it of children, and lean into the humanity of growing brains and building strong kids.
Bergeron and Conn Parent will co-present at Elevate 2026, the same way they co-wrote Trust First — together, but never identically.
We have very different DNA. How those concepts play out in a classroom looks different for each of us. So, coming together to teach together is magical — it’s synergetic, because it takes our unique personalities and styles and highlights those through a constant: Trust First. — Dr. Deb Bergeron
Conn Parent agrees:
Bouncing those ideas back and forth — super fun and powerful! — Rhonda Conn Parent
Hear It Straight from Deb and Rhonda at Elevate 2026
Join Dr. Deb Bergeron and Rhonda Conn Parent live at Elevate 2026 for a deeper look at S.A.F.E. environments and what adult-first culture change actually looks like in a classroom.
Elevate 2026 takes place October 15–17 in Orlando, Florida. Full event details, including pre-conference sessions, are on the Elevate 2026 event page.
Elevate is designed for administrators, teachers, mental health professionals, and school specialists working with children from early childhood through secondary education, at any stage of familiarity with Conscious Discipline.
Trust First: Turn Behaviors That Challenge Us into Opportunities to Learn is available now.
Conscious Discipline empowers adults to create safe, connected, and self-regulated systems from classrooms to districts so children develop the emotional, behavioral, and executive skills they need to thrive. Our work transforms schools, early childhood programs, and families through adult-first, brain-based practices aligned to real-world implementation. Learn more about Conscious Discipline.
Traditional systems like sticker charts and timeouts focus on managing a child’s behavior directly. Conscious Discipline starts with the adult: building the self-regulation skills, classroom structures, and relationships that make lasting systemic cultural change possible. See the supporting research.
Yes. Conscious Discipline is designed to align with Head Start’s existing goals and standards, including the Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework and CLASS, so programs can adopt it without layering on a separate initiative. Explore Conscious Discipline for Head Start.
Support includes English- and Spanish-language resources, leadership training for high-stress environments, and tools focused on staff retention, family engagement, and program outcomes. Take the S.A.F.E. Diagnostic to see where your center’s needs are.
