Colleen Carter Ster recently earned her Master of Liberal Arts from Harvard University in Psychology out of concern for the self-harm cases among youth in the United States. Ster created The Resilience Game Plan: The Teen Playbook for Developing Cognitive, Communication, and Mindfulness Skills to provide a curriculum for middle and high schools to help adolescents be more resilient by giving them the tools to understand how the brain works and deal with difficult life situations.In 2008, Ster became Founder/CEO/President of a children's publishing business called Reflections Publishing. Prior to starting Reflections Publishing, she served as Executive Vice President for The Electronic Bookshelf (EBS) for five years. During her time at EBS, she created curriculum questions for K-12th grade students and continuing education credit materials for the EBS Reading Power Seminars. Ster taught and conducted training sessions to administrators, librarians and teachers around the country for many years. EBS was later sold to Scholastic, Inc. and Ster became the Marketing Director for Scholastic Reading Counts! in the Learning Ventures Division in New York, New York. During Ster's years traveling around the country conducting training sessions for EBS, she listened to what type of books educators were looking to purchase for their students. Time and again the answer was to find books to help students when they were struggling with difficult life scenarios. Hence the creation of what ALA Booklist tauts "A unique series by children, for children."-about the Reflections Publishing book series, "Kids Helping Kids Through Books". Now, with a newly procured Harvard University degree in hand, with a focus on taking neuroscience, neurobiology, self-harm, and cognitive behavior therapy classes, Ster is determined to try to prevent self-harm cases among youth around the world. Including the Reflections Publishing Communication Study, which has been tested and tweaked with K-12th students since 2008, Ster wants to get The Resilience Game Plan, a beneficial intervention tool, into the hands of every student-providing adolescents their best chance to obtain a strong, long-term developmental outcome.
