Elementary School School Leaders and Administration Whole School
Location: Collegeville, PA
Type of school: Public elementary school
Grade levels: K–5
Number of students: 473
A Responsive Classroom school since: 2024
In the 2024–2025 school year, Schwenksville Elementary had two ambitious goals:
Rather than viewing these as two separate challenges, Schwenksville principal Krista Venza saw them as an opportunity to create a full-day kindergarten experience grounded in connection, consistency, and developmentally appropriate practices. The Responsive Classroom approach offered the tools and framework to help make that vision a reality. “There’s so much change involved with full-day kindergarten,” explains Venza, “but Responsive Classroom melded right into what we envisioned and what we wanted kindergarten to be.”
Here’s how Schwenksville Elementary brought their vision to life.
To prepare for implementation, all four of Schwenksville’s kindergarten teachers, along with Venza, attended the Responsive Classroom Elementary Core Course over the 2024 summer. The training made an immediate impact. “It was a great experience,” recalls Venza, who credits their presenter (and Responsive Classroom author) Kirsten Lee Howard for helping her team believe not just in the approach but in their ability to bring it to life in their classrooms: “She was so invested in how she presented the material … she really started us off with positive momentum.”
During the year, both school and district administrators created regular opportunities for kindergarten teachers to revisit the Responsive Classroom strategies they had learned, introduce them to colleagues in upper grades, and collaborate with one another:
In addition to providing her staff with time and space for collaboration, Venza also led by example. Every morning, she modeled the final component of Morning Meeting by sharing a morning message she had written just for her staff. “I wanted to show that it’s possible to do,” she explains, “and give people different options and ideas for how to do Morning Meeting in a manageable way.” Just like the ones teachers write for their students, her messages combined logistical updates with thoughtful reflections, quotes, and encouragement designed to inspire connection and community. “There were so many times people would come up to me during the day and say, ‘That one really spoke to me,’” Venza shares. “It became something people looked forward to.”
By the end of the year, Responsive Classroom practices that were a regular part of Schwenksville’s kindergarten classrooms included:
Morning Meeting helped students transition smoothly into the classroom at the start of each day. As Venza describes, “Our kindergarten teachers feel that Morning Meeting is the perfect landing spot for students in the morning.”
By providing a calm, consistent way for students to end the day and transition out of the classroom, closing circle served (together with Morning Meeting) as an important bookend that brought closure to each school day.
Along with helping students reset and re-engage throughout the day, the kindergarten team found that these movement-based activities helped make their learning communities feel more cohesive.
Venza has long emphasized the importance of how educators speak to students. With the Responsive Classroom approach: “Now I have the resources to point to: this is how we get the results we’re really looking for.”
Schwenksville also introduced the logical consequence of “you break it, you fix it” to help students take responsibility for their actions. “It’s so important to teach students that this is just how we as humans should react when we make mistakes,” Venza notes.
The Responsive Classroom approach helped make Schwenksville’s first year of full-day kindergarten a resounding success. Kindergarteners made incredible academic progress, especially with reading. According to Venza, “We have to shift what first grade is going to look like because of what our kindergarteners can do now.” She also observed a significant difference in students’ emotional development: “They are much more prepared and mature,” which was evident to educators in how they handled problems, how they interacted with each other, and how ready they were to learn.
Teachers also shared enthusiastic feedback in a survey Venza conducted. She received responses such as:
This summer, Schwenksville hosted a three-day Responsive Classroom training, welcoming educators from across the region and deepening its own commitment to the approach. As implementation expands into first grade and beyond, the school remains focused on the vision that guided its first year: a schoolwide commitment to building strong relationships and supportive classrooms, one student and one grade at a time.