Articles

When I look around my classroom, I see students making choices. The first graders I teach make choices all through the day, from the time they arrive until Closing Circle. The choices are simple, but meaningful: they each decide the order in which they'll do their Morning Jobs, and in…

Welcome to Room 327! Here, on a warm day in May, you'll find thirty third graders reading independently. The room is silent, save for the occasional chuckle or sound of disbelief you might expect from children fully immersed in their reading. Meanwhile, I'm conferencing with individual students, running guided reading…

I’ve noticed that teachers who are learning about the Responsive Classroom approach to discipline often worry a lot about choosing the “right” response to student misbehavior. “Is there a list of logical consequences that match up with specific misbehaviors?” is an often-asked question, and I see how disappointed they are…

By mid-July, my two children had finally settled into summer. I knew when I got downstairs one morning and saw my nine-year-old son, Ethan, coming through the back door in his bathrobe with raspberries and blueberries he'd picked from the backyard. We went back out and spent some time in…

Alison, a young five-year-old I taught recently, struggled with separation anxiety at the beginning of the year. She had a hard time saying goodbye to her dad when he dropped her off in the mornings. On one particularly difficult day, she went through all the usual routines—blowing a kiss, waving…