Here are 10 books that 15-Minute Focus fans have personally recommended if you like
15-Minute Focus.
Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.
I never wanted to study mass murder or violence of any kind. I was doing my internship for my Ph.D. in counseling psychology at a psychiatric hospital for children and adolescents when the attack at Columbine High School occurred. Within ten days of that attack, a 16-year-old boy was admitted to the hospital because he was viewed as a Columbine-type risk. I was assigned to conduct a psychological evaluation of him. Then another potential school shooter was admitted. And another. Seeking insight into this population and learning how to recognize the warning signs and prevent impending attacks has become my life’s work.
Dr. Dewey Cornell is the foremost research of threat assessment in K-12 schools.
This book provides step-by-step guidelines on creating and running threat assessment teams. Dr. Cornell provides multiple sample documents and allows them to be copied, making this a very user-friendly text.
He also explains his research demonstrating the effectiveness and benefits of utilizing threat assessment teams.
Presenting the only K-12 school threat assessment model supported by controlled studies, this new manual is a sequel to the author's original manual, Guidelines for Responding to Student Threats of Violence. The new manual retains the Virginia Student Threat Assessment Guidelines (VSTAG), but adds new research, improved forms, and more comprehensive coverage of student and non-student threats. Used nationwide. Training available from the author at www.schoolta.com.
I never wanted to study mass murder or violence of any kind. I was doing my internship for my Ph.D. in counseling psychology at a psychiatric hospital for children and adolescents when the attack at Columbine High School occurred. Within ten days of that attack, a 16-year-old boy was admitted to the hospital because he was viewed as a Columbine-type risk. I was assigned to conduct a psychological evaluation of him. Then another potential school shooter was admitted. And another. Seeking insight into this population and learning how to recognize the warning signs and prevent impending attacks has become my life’s work.
John Van Dreal is a school psychologist with decades of experience developing the Salem-Keizer model of violence prevention in schools.
In addition to providing comprehensive threat assessment guidelines, the book also discusses other safety issues including dating violence, workplace violence, domestic violence, and stalking. Whereas some works related to school safety focus solely on students as potential perpetrators, this book also discusses dangers posed by adults.
Assessing Student Threats: Implementing the Salem-Keizer System, 2nd Edition is a manual for the application of a threat assessment system that follows the recommendations of the Safe Schools Initiative and the prescriptive outline provided by the FBI. Written from an educator's perspective with contributing authors from Law Enforcement, Public Mental Health, and the District Attorney's office, it contains an introduction to the basic concepts of threat assessment, a review of the research, and an outlined process for the application of a comprehensive, yet expeditious multi-disciplinary system. The book also includes the forms and protocols needed to assess threats, document concerns…
I never wanted to study mass murder or violence of any kind. I was doing my internship for my Ph.D. in counseling psychology at a psychiatric hospital for children and adolescents when the attack at Columbine High School occurred. Within ten days of that attack, a 16-year-old boy was admitted to the hospital because he was viewed as a Columbine-type risk. I was assigned to conduct a psychological evaluation of him. Then another potential school shooter was admitted. And another. Seeking insight into this population and learning how to recognize the warning signs and prevent impending attacks has become my life’s work.
This book is an excellent guide to threat assessment and violence prevention in higher education.
It includes material on threats posed by students as well as employees. What I particularly appreciate about this work is that it includes numerous case examples of therapeutic work with people who presented a risk of violence.
This clinical focus is rare in works on this topic and makes this book especially important.
"Harm to Others offers students and clinicians an effective way to increase their knowledge of and training in violence risk and threat assessment, while providing a comprehensive examination of current treatment approaches. In an easy-to-understand, jargon-free manner, Dr. Van Brunt shares his observations, extensive clinical expertise, and the latest research on what clinicians should be aware of when performing risk and threat assessments.
Features Numerous examples from recent mass shootings and rampage violence to help explain the motivations and risk factors of those who make threats Two unique, detailed case transcripts to demonstrate how to conduct a threat assessment Treatment…
I never wanted to study mass murder or violence of any kind. I was doing my internship for my Ph.D. in counseling psychology at a psychiatric hospital for children and adolescents when the attack at Columbine High School occurred. Within ten days of that attack, a 16-year-old boy was admitted to the hospital because he was viewed as a Columbine-type risk. I was assigned to conduct a psychological evaluation of him. Then another potential school shooter was admitted. And another. Seeking insight into this population and learning how to recognize the warning signs and prevent impending attacks has become my life’s work.
This book is the remarkable story of a remarkable woman whose compassion for her students preventing a school massacre.
Unlike the other texts I’m recommending, this book will not tell you how to conduct threat assessments. It is an inspirational story that demonstrates the power of love and interpersonal connections to make our schools safer.
The bottom line is that the more that our schools are places where children feel that at least one adult cares about them, the safer they will be. This book portrays the kind of compassion that can save lives.
On September 28, 2016, school counselor Molly Hudgens was in her office at Sycamore Middle School when a fourteen-year-old armed with a semiautomatic handgun and an additional magazine of ammunition came to her in the counseling department. His plan was to kill people on campus. He told Hudgens she was the only person who could talk him out of it. After ninety minutes of talking with the young man, and ultimately praying on her knees with him, he relinquished the gun with no shots fired and no lives lost.
I grew up in the shadows of a father who died before I was born. As a child, I had other negative experiences with grief and loss and lived a transient childhood characterized by poverty and fear. A prolific reader, I couldn’t find stories that reflected the reality I was living, stories that might have helped me cope and given me hope for the future. Now my mission is to write entertaining, thought-provoking, and ultimately hopeful stories for middle-grade readers and to introduce them to new books through Magic in the Middle, a series of free monthly recorded book talks.
This is a fresh take on gun violence—this time the story is a dual point of view, told by academically inclined Cora and soccer player Quinn, who were best friends until Quinn’s brother killed Cora's sister, two other kids, and himself. I love the contrast in voices between the two girls, who are both fully realized and distinctive and yet both suffering the same intense grief. What I really love about this story, though, is that the girls finally reconnect over a plan to find a wormhole in the universe and travel back in time to change the day their lives were forever altered. This magical read about grief and the power of friendship gripped my heart and didn’t let go even after I’d turned the very last page.
An extraordinary new novel from Jasmine Warga, Newbery Honor-winning author of Other Words for Home, about loss and healing-and how friendship can be magical.
Cora hasn't spoken to her best friend, Quinn, in a year.
Despite living next door to each other, they exist in separate worlds of grief. Cora is still grappling with the death of her beloved sister in a school shooting, and Quinn is carrying the guilt of what her brother did.
On the day of Cora's twelfth birthday, Quinn leaves a box on her doorstep with a note. She has decided that the only way to…
Losing my home to Hurricane Katrina taught me the importance of order in a disordered world, an appreciation for the segments of society that maintain order, and an understanding of what all victims of traumatic events experience. When the rug has been pulled out from under you, you need to find a new source of stability and safety. Psychologists call this the “new normal,” but it is anything but normal for those who find themselves enmeshed in it. What to do? Write about it, with an emphasis not on procedure but on people, on the characters who will make a story come alive and stay alive.
A prolific author, Picoult is particularly good at highlighting contemporary issues which defy easy answers. Nineteen Minutesdescribes a school shooting in a small New Hampshire town. The teenager who committed the crime began as a young boy who wanted only to fit in. When that proved impossible, he endeavored not to stand out. Finally he could not accept a life where he was not seen. However, no one – not his classmates, his parents, the police, or the members of the legal system – has a pure motive in the actions which follow.
'Picoult makes us ponder the ambiguous relationships between love and lying, legality and morality; the strange ways repressed memories leak into the present.' Los Angeles Times
Intricately textured and rich with psychological and social insight, Jodi Picoult's novels grab readers by the throat from page one and never let go. As emotionally charged as any she has written, Nineteen Minutes is one of her most powerful works to date.
Set in a small town in the wake of a horrific school shooting, Nineteen Minutes features the return of two beloved Picoult characters - Jordan McAfee, the lawyer from The Pact…
I wear many aprons. I am a writer; a professor of creative writing and literature; a mother to five children – daughters and sons; the wife of a criminal defense attorney; and the daughter of therapists. I read and write at the intersection of these influences: crime, motherhood, and psychology. When I teach children’s literature, I lean toward the Brothers Grimm. Childhood is grittier – more suspenseful – when we darken the stories. The same is true of motherhood. Nobody wants to read about a perfect mother, especially when mothers spend so much of our psychic energy worried about our children in the forms of violence, illness, and death. I prefer to seek out books that complicate the otherwise pristine stories of our lives we pretend to tell.
If you vividly remember the Columbine High School shooting or any of the horrific moments of spectacle violence in the subsequent two decades (Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Parkland, etc.), this book answers questions you might have been afraid to ask, such as, how do parents of these “monsters next door”– in particular their mothers – survive in the wake of such horror, and where do they find grace? As a mother to three boys and two girls, in a 21st-century America that continues to be plagued by gun violence, I read (and re-read) Sue Klebold’s honest story, aware on every page, that the reverberating effects of Columbine, complete with active-shooter training in our kids’ schools, still permeate our everyday lives.
On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Over the course of minutes, they would kill twelve students and a teacher and wound twenty-four others before taking their own lives.
For the last sixteen years, Sue Klebold, Dylan's mother, has lived with the indescribable grief and shame of that day. How could her child, the promising young man she had loved and raised, be responsible for such horror? And how, as his mother, had she not known something was wrong? Were there subtle signs she had missed? What, if anything, could…
My new thriller centers around a small, mysterious cult and their shocking demise. For years, I’ve read true crime books on the subject, and I wanted to infuse the reality and truth of real-life events into my fictional novel. In a similar vein, these books represent a range of thrillers inspired by true events, ranging from cults to serial killers to teenage criminals. I hope you find these books as gripping and haunting as I do.
I find this book to be an unsettling but impactful read, both thought-provoking and complex. We Need to Talk about Kevin follows the mother of a troubled teenager responsible for a school shooting.
It’s about nature versus nurture, the relationship between mother and child, and deeply seated guilt. It draws inspiration from real events, including the 1999 shooting at Columbine, which wasn’t the U.S.’s first mass shooting at a school, but it would become one of the most infamous.
Shriver’s novel raises unsettling questions about a mother’s guilt and self-justification and a community’s heartache and blame. I consider it to be a captivating and moving book.
Eva never really wanted to be a mother; certainly not the mother of a boy named Kevin who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker and a teacher who had tried to befriend him. Now, two years after her son's horrific rampage, Eva comes to terms with her role as Kevin's mother in a series of startlingly direct correspondences with her absent husband Franklyn about their son's upbringing. Fearing that her own shortcomings may have shaped what her son has become, she confesses to…
I got interested in American guns and gun culture through the backdoor. I’d never owned a gun, participated in gun control politics, or thought too much about guns at all. Guns might not have interested me—but ghosts did. I was beguiled by the haunting legend of the Winchester rifle heiress Sarah Winchester, who believed in the late 1800s that she was being tormented by the ghosts of all those killed by Winchester rifles. As I scoured the archives for rare glimpses of Sarah, however, it dawned on me that I was surrounded by boxes and boxes of largely unexplored sources about a much larger story, and secretive mystery: that of the gun industry itself.
Columbineis a masterful piece of reportage from a journalist who covered from the start what is now perceived almost as a tragic prototype of mass school shootings in the US. Through meticulous, painstaking research—and with a compassionate and keenly observant voice that I especially admired—Cullen unspools the consequential misperceptions about the Columbine shooters that have distorted popular understandings of the “school shooter” ever since through repetition and media simplification.
What’s new and surprising here, and that remains relevant years after the book’s first publication, is that Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylon Klebold weren’t victims of bullying, socially alienated by marauding gangs of “cool” kids and jocks, or radicalized by Goth culture. They had friends, jobs, and, perhaps most frightening of all, seemed largely to be average high school students, not appreciably different from our own children, who in fact did more bullying than they were bullied. “So we’re…
'Excellent . . . amazing how much still comes as a surprise' New York Times Book Review
'Like Capote's In Cold Blood, this tour de force gets below the who and the what of a horrifying incident to lay bare the devastating why' People
'A staggering work of journalism' Washington Post
'The tragedies keep coming. As we reel from the latest horror...' So begins the epilogue, illustrating how Columbine has become the template for nearly two decades of "spectacle murders." It makes the imperative to understand the crime that sparked this flame more urgent than…
I love to teach and to do research on teaching and learning. Little compares to seeing how students’ faces light up when they get it. I want more students to experience the experience of getting it. After teaching for 25 years, and taking a deep dive into the scientific literature on learning, I have accumulated some important insights that I share in my work as Executive Director of a teaching and learning center, with my students, and with faculty across the nation. Teaching is not an impromptu act. It is an art and a science and I revel in it. These books will light a fire in you.
I love books with specific, pragmatic ways to change what I do in the classroom.
Every chapter of this book was packed with something I wanted to try. There are a lot of general suggestions floating around (e.g., more active learning), but what exactly does a teacher do?
This book is a great compliment to my book. The former gives students pragmatic tips, and this one is packed with examples for teachers.
Unleash powerful teaching and the science of learning in your classroom
Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning empowers educators to harness rigorous research on how students learn and unleash it in their classrooms. In this book, cognitive scientist Pooja K. Agarwal, Ph.D., and veteran K-12 teacher Patrice M. Bain, Ed.S., decipher cognitive science research and illustrate ways to successfully apply the science of learning in classrooms settings. This practical resource is filled with evidence-based strategies that are easily implemented in less than a minute-without additional prepping, grading, or funding!
Research demonstrates that these powerful strategies raise student achievement by…
