Cultivating Mental Health Mindsets in The Empathetic Classroom w/ Maria Munro-Schuster

Back in December 2024, I got an email from Tom Rademacher raving about an upcoming book from a teacher who is now a licensed counselor that read, “The thing that hooked me when I read it the first time was a whole part on teachers recognizing their own triggers to their anger and stress and learning to understand and adapt to them... but the whole thing is gorgeous.” The author was of course my guest today, Maria Munro-Schuster, and the book, which is now in print, is The Empathetic Classroom: How A Mental Health Mindset Supports Your Students – And You, which the HRP team was more than thrilled to contribute the forward:

“The Empathetic Classroom provides therapeutic self-reflection activities and prompts for educators and colleagues, the psychological theories underpinning them, guidance for applying them with students, and scalable activities for classroom implementation. Maria Munro-Schuster’s call to consider the mundane over measurement is essential in improving the current state of education. This proactive approach acknowledges that we are all learners and that all of humanity has something to gain from this mission. We can create school climates that are no longer so arid that a single spark or gust of wind sets everything ablaze. If we can do this we may find that the fires are more manageable and less frequent.”

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Maria Munro-Schuster, M.A., M.S., LCPC, is the author of The Empathetic Classroom: How a Mental Health Mindset Supports Your Students—and You and a Montana therapist and educator who has always been interested in the connection between the two fields. She wrote her first master’s thesis on how student grief plays out in the college writing classroom. She previously taught middle-school English with a mental health focus, and she was selected as a Hatch North America honoree for teaching. She now works as a community therapist in Bozeman, Montana.