Location: Kennebunk, ME
Type of school: Public school
Grade levels: Pre-K–2
Number of students: 400
A Responsive Classroom school since: 2025
When educator Kristy Wells moved from first grade to pre-K at Kennebunk Elementary School, she quickly realized she was spending too much of the day reacting to behavior as it happened. “I spent so much time putting out fires, just trying to address conflict,” she recalls. “I knew I needed something different. There was something missing.”
With encouragement from assistant principal Ellen Towne, who has years of experience with the Responsive Classroom approach, Wells signed up for a one-day Responsive Classroom workshop. The training was part of a broader districtwide initiative to strengthen classroom practices and create more consistent, connected learning environments across schools—an effort that would continue into the summer of 2025, when educators from across the district, including seven from Kennebunk Elementary, attended the three-day training.
Wells took the workshop during the school year, unsure how it would fit into everything she was already managing. “Here’s another curriculum, another whole thing I have to learn. It’s going to take so much time,” she remembers thinking.
Instead, the impact was immediate. “It made me slow down,” she recalls. Rather than reacting in the moment, she began approaching classroom management more intentionally, focusing on clear expectations, consistent routines, and small, manageable shifts in her practice. That mindset carried into the summer, when she attended the three-day course with colleagues from across the district. By then, she was ready to build on what she had started, going deeper into the practices and refining how she used them. “Honestly, I am a different teacher than I was last year—100%.”
One of the most impactful changes in Wells’ classroom came from rethinking Morning Meeting. The previous year, it had felt rushed and overly focused on academic tasks, leaving little time for students to connect. “I would always leave the sharing to the end if I had time—and I would never have time,” she explains.
After learning more about the structure and purpose of Morning Meeting, she shifted her focus to building community through greetings, sharing, and group activities. She also became more intentional about how she introduced those activities, starting with lower-risk participation and gradually building from there. The difference has been clear. “I noticed this year that behavior has gone down so much because they feel connected to each other, they feel heard, they feel seen,” Wells notes. As that sense of safety grew, so did students’ willingness to participate. “They also feel comfortable. They feel like they can take risks.”
Wells also introduced a take-a-break space to help students learn how to manage their emotions. From the beginning, she was intentional about showing students how to use it, modeling and providing opportunities to practice so they understood its purpose. “It’s not a punishment,” Wells explains. Instead, the message is: “take a break because your body needs to be regulated.”
At the start of the year, students needed guidance in using the space, but over time, they began to internalize the process. According to Wells, “They now know when they’re ready to come back.” As students grew more aware of their needs, some even began to recognize when they needed a break and ask for it on their own, showing a growing sense of independence and self-regulation.
Another important shift came through Wells’ use of positive teacher language. At first, the range of strategies felt like a lot to take in, so she focused on one change at a time. That approach helped her language feel more natural and allowed her to be more intentional in the moment.
One of the most impactful shifts was becoming more direct when addressing behavior. “I learned that I need to tell them what to do, not point to what other people are doing,” she shares. This clarity helped reduce confusion, made expectations more predictable, and allowed her to respond earlier, before small issues became larger disruptions.
As these practices became part of her daily routine, Wells began to notice a shift—not just in student behavior, but in the overall feel of her classroom. What once felt reactive became more consistent and manageable, with more time for teaching and connection. As she puts it, “the magic of Responsive Classroom is that it creates more time in your day. It actually gave me more time.”
That time has allowed her to focus more on relationships. Through daily routines like Morning Meeting, students have gotten to know one another in deeper ways, building trust and a shared sense of community. “They are a very cohesive group,” Wells observes.
Those relationships also make it easier to navigate challenges. With a strong foundation of trust, students are more responsive to redirection and more invested in the classroom community. As assistant principal Ellen Towne explains, this balance is a key outcome of the Responsive Classroom approach: it allows teachers to be “in charge of the classroom in a way that is loving and nurturing.”
For Wells, that shift has been transformative. “I have the joy back in teaching again,” she says. “I never leave school feeling defeated.”
