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Articles

MM and CC online

Providing A Sense of Normalcy Amidst Uncertainty

Morning Meeting and closing circle are the bookends of the day. These powerful strategies ensure that students start and close their days with a sense of purpose and connectedness. These time-honored routines and rituals can provide a sense of normalcy for both teachers and students. Many educators have been engaging…
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Mar 31 2020
Students Sharing

Student Sharing: A Strategy for Culturally Responsive Teaching

Responsive Classroom strategies, structures, and techniques offer a wide array of practices we can use for culturally responsive teaching. One of these strategies is student sharing. Providing opportunities for students to share about themselves and learn about each other helps build a positive classroom community, which is foundational for building…
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Feb 19 2020
Positive Community Reflection

Building a Positive Community Through Reflection

As the year draws to an end, we find ourselves reflecting on the past 12 months. New Year’s Eve in 2019 also marks the end of the decade! Reflection can be a powerful tool for both teachers and students, not just at the end of the calendar year, but all…
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Dec 19 2019
Asking open-ended questions

Stop and Think: Teaching Students to Reflect

As educators, we all want to help our students develop valuable life-long skills, including the ability to think critically about their own work, truly know themselves and their learning styles, reflect on their individual strengths and challenges, and measure their progress toward goals. We want our students to become autonomous…
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Dec 13 2019
Hopeful teacher and students

What Are Your Hopes?

As we prepare for our upcoming Teachers and Leadership Conferences, we’ve been thinking a lot about hope. Students’ hopes and dreams are, of course, an integral part of the beginning of the school year. In addition to providing students with a model for setting and achieving goals, having students name…
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Jul 26 2018
Photograph by Jeff Woodward.

Adapting Morning Meeting: Speech and Anxiety Needs

Morning Meeting is a powerful way to start the day. It meets students’ needs for belonging, significance, and fun; provides students with an opportunity to practice social and emotional skills; and prepares students for the days’ learning. As a classroom teacher I enjoyed Morning Meeting with my students and looked…
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Sep 09 2015
Photograph by Jeff Woodward.

The Building Blocks of Collaboration: Partner and Small-Group Chats (Grades 5–6)

Children learn a great deal, academically and socially, by collaborating—working together toward common goals. A good way to help students begin developing collaboration skills is by teaching them how to exchange ideas, information, and opinions as they converse with partners or in small groups. Partner and small-group chats require complex…
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Apr 09 2015

Keeping Sharing Fresh

In my conversations with teachers I hear a common concern about Morning Meeting at this time of year—how to move forward with sharing. Teachers have long lists of varied ideas for greeting and activity and are growing more comfortable with embedding academic content into their messages in ways that involve…
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Nov 12 2014
Photograph by Jeff Woodward.

Morning Meeting Lesson Plans . . . Where to Begin?

Do you think a lot about how to create Morning Meetings that positively impact each day and prepare your students for the learning to come? I'll share a little secret that has worked for me: Try planning Morning Meeting after you do your lesson plans for the rest of the…
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Apr 15 2014
Photograph by Jeff Woodward.

Sharing Leads to Learning

An adapted excerpt from The Morning Meeting Book, 3rd edition Sharing is a rich and vital part of a daily Morning Meeting, a key Responsive Classroom practice in which all classroom members—grown-ups and students—gather in a circle for twenty to thirty minutes to greet each other, share news and ideas,…
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Apr 11 2014

Teaching Skillful Communication

A Standards-Based Approach to Morning Meeting Sharing Ryan holds up the book so all his classmates can see the cover and begins: "Reptile Facts is my favorite first grade book. Every first grader should read this book because it shares facts about reptiles." He displays a few pages showing similarities…
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Apr 11 2014
Photograph by Jeff Woodward.

Teaching Children to Disagree

Not long ago I watched an animated group of second graders happily share their opinions about a children's picture book. They were responding to their teacher's open-ended question about what might have motivated one of the characters in the book. As they chatted with partners, I heard students say things…
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Oct 01 2012

Memory Collections and Community Building

Like every teacher, I spend part of each summer imagining the students who will be in my care for the next 180 days and thinking about the best way to begin the new school year. Right away, I want to begin cultivating a classroom community based on trust, and I…
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Aug 01 2012

Sharing Idea: My Favorite Season . . . and Here’s Why!

Here's a Morning Meeting sharing idea from 80 Morning Meeting Ideas for Grades K–2, by Susan Lattanzi Roser: My Favorite Season . . . and Here's Why! Challenges students to articulate a reason for liking something. How to do this around-the-circle sharing: Tell children they will be telling the class…
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Mar 20 2012

Helping One, Helping All

Every year we teachers have some students who present challenges to themselves, to their classmates, and to us. In Sammy and His Behavior Problems, I wrote about one such student, Sammy, a third grader who struggled with impulsiveness, paying attention, completing schoolwork, and learning to be a friend. It's the…
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Jan 24 2012

The Swan

At the beginning of first grade, Erick was a sweet, thoughtful boy who struggled with self-control. From the first days of school, his actions revealed his caring nature: He consoled a classmate after a stubbed toe, he helped others pick up, he used our letter-writing center to write charming notes…
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Aug 01 2010

Handling the Holidays: Morning Meeting Sharing

Tips on using Morning Meeting sharing to set a positive tone during the build-up to winter holidays and vacation. Themed shares. This is a great time of year to have some themed shares. For instance, you might ask students to share their answers to questions like: What is something you…
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Dec 15 2009

Knowing and Being Known Through Sharing

I firmly believe that the better I know students—the more I understand the joys and challenges of their daily lives—the more responsively I can teach them. Similarly, the better they know each other, the more cohesive and empathetic a classroom community we can build. In my classroom, several kinds of…
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Nov 01 2009

Lively & Artful Sharings

Mr. Saunders' class had been doing the sharing component of Morning Meeting since school started in the fall. After several months of daily practice, he knew he could count on sharers to speak clearly on a focused topic, and on their classmates to respond with on-topic questions or comments. Yet…
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Nov 01 2008

The Art of Commenting

Teaching Children to Make Caring Comments during Morning Meeting Sharing On a late spring morning, Mr. Marino’s fourth graders are gathered quietly on their Morning Meeting rug, all eyes on Joe, whose turn it is to share. “I played a basketball game on Saturday,” Joe says. “We lost, but my…
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Aug 01 2007

A Sustaining Routine

Megan’s Great Uncle John was dying of cancer, and she needed to share this distressing experience with her fourth grade classmates. During a Morning Meeting Sharing in October, Megan explained that her great uncle hoped to live until Christmas but was not doing well. She spoke concisely, and the children…
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Feb 01 2006

Themed Sharing during Morning Meeting

  Question: Do you have a theme that you like to use occasionally to guide Sharing during Morning Meeting? What makes it work well with your students? A: Usually, I use open-format sharing so that individual children get plenty of practice speaking to the group and asking for questions and comments.…
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Aug 01 2005

Speaking Up

Question: Every year I have students who seldom or never speak up in a large group. Often, but not always, these are children from non-mainstream cultures. Do you think it’s important for all children to learn to speak up in groups? How do you handle this in your classroom? A:…
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Apr 01 2004

Keeping Connected

It’s sharing time during Morning Meeting in Ms. Roberts’s first grade classroom. Jarrod is enthusiastically telling his classmates about the photos they will see when they look at his “family album.” The book contains a picture of Jarrod’s mom sitting on the front steps of their house. It also has…
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Feb 01 2004

Restless in Morning Meeting

Question: I teach first grade. I find that by the end of Morning Meeting, my students tend to be fidgety and restless, so I’ve been taking them out for recess after meeting and before starting the rest of the day. That seems to help them. They come back in more…
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Jan 31 2002

A Comfortable Routine in Uncomfortable Times

In the days and weeks following the events of September 11th, many teachers and children around the country gathered each morning in the comforting routine of Morning Meeting, a daily ritual that can provide a measure of safety and stability in the midst of troubled times. No matter what children…
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Sep 30 2001

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