PUBLICATIONS
Books
2021 Learning from Loss: A Trauma-Informed Approach to Supporting Grieving Students, Heinemann Press, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Published in print, audiobook, and e-book formats.
2025 Leveraging AI for Culturally Responsive Teaching and Social-Emotional Learning, a text for teacher practitioners in 6-12 social studies and ELA, forthcoming with Routledge. Co-authored with Dr. Marlee Bunch.
How We Bear It: Women with Chronic Illness on Learning to Live Within Limitation, a text for a general audience exploring how women-identifying individuals adapt to acquired invisible disabilities, specifically Long-COVID, chronic fatigue syndrome, and dysautonomia. Prospectus under active query.
Print and Peer Reviewed Publications
2024 “Some Diseases are Incurable — But We Can Still Provide Healing,” The Boston Sunday Globe.
2024 “‘Metabolizing Grief’: Leveraging Freewriting to Cultivate Self-Awareness and Theory of Mind (ToM) in Professional Learning,” Social and Emotional Learning: Research, Practice, and Policy special issue, under review.
2024 “Afterword: Towards Action,” included in The Magnitude of Us: An Educator’s Guide to Creating Collaborative & Culturally Responsive Classrooms by Dr. Marlee Bunch, Teachers College Press, Columbia University.
2023 “Cultivating Awe and Action: A Nature-Based Approach to Grief-Responsive, Trauma-Informed ELA Teaching,” National Council of Teachers of English Special Issues Volume, Trauma-Informed Teaching: Toward Responsive, Humanizing Classrooms.
2021 Testimony: An Anthology of Teen Writing on Race & Identity, Race Project KC & Johnson County Library.
2020 “The Pandemic is Raging. Here’s How to Support Your Grieving Students,” Education Week Print Edition.
2020 Writers On Earth: New Visions for Our Planet, Happenstance Publishing, co-editeded by Liza Cochran, Brittany Collins & Clare McFadden. *Profiled in The New Yorker and on NPR/BBC’s “The World.”
2019 Featured in the New York Times article, “Going to College? Take Their Advice.”
2018 Authored the Foreword for author and educator Ann Vanderburgh’s memoir, In the Presence of Grace: Stories of Life, Death, and the Infinite, Off The Common Books.
2018 “Transcending the Lull: Silence as Opportunity in the ELA Classroom,” featured in Melanie J. Shoffner’s “From Campus to Classroom” column, English Journal, 108.1, 88. National Council of Teachers of English.
2017 “Associative Mourning: Learning to Lose through Literature,” English Journal, 107.2, 47-52. National Council of Teachers of English.
Select Electronic Publications
The Boston Globe
2024 “Some Diseases are Incurable — But We Can Still Provide Healing.”
The Hechinger Report
2023 “Teachers and Students Are Not Okay Right Now. More Mental Health Training Would Help.”
The Isolation Journals
2023 “Adaptations,” with NYT bestselling author Suleika Jaouad
Teach Thought
2023 “Four Ways to Support Grieving Students Through Writing.”
School Crisis Recovery & Renewal Blog / National Child Traumatic Stress Network
2023 “Three Texts to Help You Reflect on Your Grief-Responsive, Trauma-Informed Teaching.”
2022 "Learning through Loss: Utilizing the Power of Freewriting as a Crisis Recovery Tool for Educators.”
Edutopia
2024 “How Principals Can Foster a Positive School Culture.”
2024 “What It’s Like Leading a Dual Language School.”
2023 “How Principals Can Support Student and Teacher Leadership Across Grade Levels.”
2023 “An Administrator’s Approach to Supporting Reading Instruction.”
2023 “Principal Kafele on Building Community in and Beyond School.”
2023 “Redefining What High School Is Supposed to Look Like.”
2023 “Using an Academy Model to Reimagine Career and Technical Education”
2023 “Developing an Experiential Learning Program”
2023 “The Principal’s Role in Leading a Pre-College Program”
2023 “A School-Wide Approach to Fostering Growth Mindset”
2023 “A School Leader’s Approach to Career Education”
2023 “How One Principal Builds Strong Relationships” (A top-performing article).
2020 “4 Ways to Use Mentor Texts in the Pandemic”
2019 “Responding to Students’ Personal Narratives”
2018 “Teaching Students to Disagree Productively”
2018 “Talking to Students About Grief”
Education Week
2022 “Grief Has Engulfed the Learning Environment. Here’s What Can Help.”
2020 “The Pandemic is Raging. Here’s How to Support Your Grieving Students.” Featured in the New York Times Coronavirus Schools Briefing and shared via KQED/Mindshift social channels.
2020 “Yes, You Can Do Trauma-Informed Teaching Remotely (And You Really, Really Should).”
Greater Good Magazine, UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center
2022 Five Ways to Help Students Get Through Grief
Harvard Graduate School of Education, “Usable Knowledge” Blog
2022 Fighting the “Hidden Pandemic”: Five Ways School Leaders Can Create Grief-Responsive Teaching Environments
Learning in Afterschool & Summer Blog, How Kids Learn Foundation
2022 How Afterschool Can Support Grieving Youth: Part 2
2022 How Afterschool Can Support Grieving Youth: Part 1
Heinemann Publishing Blog
2022 Learning from Loss: Brain-Building Activity.
2022 What Should I Do? How Can I Help? When Trauma or Loss Impact a Student or School Community.
2022 Cultivating a Growth Mindset When Working with Grieving Students.
2021 How to Support Grieving Students During the Holidays, blog post and downloadable PDF.
2021 Learning from Loss: An Introduction.
2021 Strategies to Support Grieving Students, blog post and downloadable support PDF.
The Washington Post
2020 “My mom is limited by a disability, but she still shows up in all the ways that matter.”
We Need Diverse Books
2020 “The Importance of Globalizing the Youth Climate Movement through Writing.”
Care About Climate blog
2020 “Writing to Fight a Warming World: Teen Authors Advocate for Climate Action”
Teachers & Writers Magazine
2019 “When a Poem is a Poem First: Celebrating Affect in Writing Education”
Arianna Huffington’s Thrive Global
2019 “In Praise of Picking Up the Phone”
2019 “The Jonas Brothers are Back, and It’s Time to Talk about the Benefits of Nostalgia”
2019 “How to Marie Kondo Your Schedule”
*Promoted by Arianna Huffington; a top trending article on Thrive Global
2019 “Combating Contingent Self-Worth on College Campuses”
Inside Higher Ed
2018 “Online Education is a Disability Rights Issue; Let’s Treat it That Way”
Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction blog
2018 “Peonies and Picnic Ants: Returning to Concrete Nouns”
Susan G. Komen Foundation
2018 “Brittany Collins: A Co-Survivor Story.”
Literacy & NCTE, of the National Council of Teachers of English
2017 “Promoting Civic Engagement through Inquiry-Based Personal Narrative”
2017 “The Summer Reading Collage: A New Approach to Relevancy”
Insight, from Dana Farber Cancer Institute
2017 “What It’s Like When Your Dad Has Breast Cancer”
Curricula
2019, “Watershed Wisdom,” a robust, standards-aligned, inquiry- and place-based elementary unit plan covering watershed science with a regional lean for PBS Learning Media, UNC-TV.
Education Communications & Marketing
2020 Writer, CRANE Marketing, Strategic Storytelling & Positioning Partners for Non-Profits.
As a contributing writer at CRANE, Brittany worked collaboratively with positioning partners to share the stories of non-profit educational organizations, developing marketing materials such as: admissions and curriculum viewbooks, messaging platform materials, website copy, and social media marketing materials.
2019, “Aerial Display,” The Bulletin, the Williston Northampton School.
The Lab School: A Journal of Insight and Inquiry from Campus School of Smith College
In 2017, Brittany co-founded The Lab School, an online educational journal featuring stories of life and learning from Campus School of Smith College, an independent K-6 lab school on the Smith College campus in Northampton, MA. In addition to designing the journal’s website, she worked with school administrators, faculty members, and professors in Smith’s department of Education & Child Study to co-construct an overarching vision for the journal, and to bring that vision to life by authoring and editing feature articles written with an eye towards ethnography and educational portraiture.