Book excerpt: Talking with Students in Conflict: Life Space Crisis Intervention-Third Edition offers professionals and parents a brain-based, trauma-informed, relationship-building set of skills to turn problem situations into learning opportunities for young people who exhibit challenging behaviors in schools, communities, and in the home. This book offers a six-stage verbal framework to de-escalate youth crisis situations, foster self-awareness and insight in young people, improve their social-emotional skills, and bring about long-term behavioral change. The result is stronger adult-child connections, better emotional regulation, improved peer relationships, lower suspension rates, and fewer juvenile justice system referrals.LSCI skills are important because they enable any caring adult to step into a young person's life space-the heat of a stressful moment-and intervene effectively. The six-stage LSCI process helps adults de-escalate the emotional intensity of a crisis, gain an understanding of the conflict from the young person's point of view, offer new ways to think about the incident, and ultimately promote the youth's personal responsibility for behavior.This book is a must-have for educators, school administrators, counselors, psychologists, mental health workers, social workers, juvenile justice workers, paraprofessionals, and anyone working with children and adolescents who exhibit challenging behaviors.This revised edition features dozens of brand-new examples of the use of LSCI with children and adolescents from diverse backgrounds and in a variety of settings. The authors share suggestions for applying LSCI skills in real life and offer troubleshooting guidelines to make LSCI work in even the most challenging of circumstances. This edition features all new applications of LSCI skills, including as a tool with staff who inadvertently perpetuate conflicts with students, as a group intervention for building social-emotional skills, as a way to change passive aggressive behavior, and as a parenting strategy.