“Behavior is never random. It is always communication. The question is whether we are willing to listen.”

Hello, I'm Nick Symonette - Educator, Husband, Father, Visionary & Founder of  MinorMINDSET

This is My Story

I didn't start out wanting to change the way the world sees children's behavior. I started out standing in front of a classroom in Baltimore City, watching kids get written off, labeled, punished, and pushed out for behaviors that nobody ever stopped to understand.

I was a fifth-grade teacher then. Young, energetic, and full of the kind of idealism that either gets beaten out of you or forged into something stronger. For me, it got forged.

What I've seen over the years hasn't add up. These aren't bad kids. They are kids whose brains are still under construction, who'd never been taught the skills they needed to manage their emotions, their impulses, their time, their attention. And instead of skill-building, they are issued consequences. Instead of support, they are getting suspensions. Instead of someone asking what happened to you, they were being asked what's wrong with you.

That disconnect became my life's work.

Over the next two decades I moved through classrooms, hallways, and boardrooms as a teacher, a behavioral interventionist, an academic and behavioral coach, and now as an assistant principal in Detroit. I've worked in Baltimore City, Baltimore County, Grosse Pointe, and Detroit. I've sat across from parents who were exhausted and afraid. I've sat across from students who'd been told in a hundred different ways that they were the problem. And I've sat across from educators who genuinely wanted to do better but didn't have a framework that made sense of what they were seeing.

That framework is what I've spent my career building.

It's called Minor Mindset and it rests on a single thesis that changes everything once you understand it:

Behavior is a skill gap, not a character flaw.

When a child can't sit still, it's not defiance, it's an underdeveloped ability to regulate their body and attention. When a teenager misses every appointment on their probation schedule, it's not indifference it's a working memory and organizational system that was never built. When a young person explodes in anger at the worst possible moment, it's not a bad attitude, it's an emotional regulation skill under stress, in a brain that is literally still developing the architecture to manage it.

This isn't soft. It isn't making excuses. It's science. And once you see behavior through this lens, you cannot unsee it.

I am the son of a special education teacher from Cleveland who showed me early that the children who need the most are rarely the ones who ask for it loudest. I am a graduate of the University of Akron, Goucher College and Eastern Michigan University. I am a proud member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, and a father whose parenting philosophy looks a lot like his professional one, pair every consequence with a skill-building conversation, and never stop believing in the person in front of you.

I serve as an appointee to the Michigan Governor's School Safety and Mental Health Commission. I hold Early Childhood, Special Education, K-12 Administration and Superintendent Certifications. I have spent years in the research, in the data, and on the ground with families and youth in the juvenile justice system, in schools, and in communities that have been told their children are too much to handle.

My book, When Behavior Speaks, is the culmination of that work. It is for every educator who has ever stood in front of a child they couldn't reach and wondered why. It is for every parent who has ever sat at a kitchen table exhausted and afraid, searching for an explanation that finally makes sense. And it is for every young person who has ever been made to feel like the problem when all along, they were just waiting for someone to learn their language.

Behavior speaks. And when you learn the language, everything changes.

Welcome to Minor Mindset. I'm glad you're here.

— Nick Symonette Jr., Ed.S.