Executive Functioning and Cognitive Growth: The Intersection of Social, Emotional, and Academic Learning

A number of studies in early childhood classrooms have documented that “self-regulation predicts academic performance in first grade, over and above cognitive skills and family background.” (Examples of these studies: Blair, 2002; Farran, 2010; McClelland, M. M.; Piccinin, A., & Stallings, M. C., 2010; Raver & Knitzer, 2002).
Educators are increasingly becoming aware that social and [...]

Standing Up with Self-Control

Standing up with self-control is the final of the five key CARES skills underlying Responsive Classroom practice that help build positive proactive attributes in children both socially and academically. The other four are cooperation, assertion, responsibility and empathy.
The ability to control and regulate feelings, thoughts, and actions are at the core of cognitive growth and [...]

Standing Up with Empathy

As reported by the Boston Globe, on May 4, Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick signed into law one of the most comprehensive antibullying measures ever passed. The family of 11-year-old Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, who killed himself in April 2009 after extensive bullying, attended the signing, as did a group of teenagers who advocated for a statewide [...]

Standing Up with Responsibility

Responsibility is one of the five key CARES skills underlying Responsive Classroom practice that help build positive proactive attributes in children both socially and academically. The other four are cooperation, assertion, empathy, and self-control.
Standing up to the bullying and other mean and hurtful behavior that children see happening in their classrooms, in the cafeteria, on [...]

Standing Up with Assertion

Assertion is one of the five key CARES skills underlying Responsive Classroom practice that help build positive proactive attributes in children both socially and academically. The other four are cooperation, responsibility, empathy, and self-control.
Teaching assertion is the business of raising every voice in the classroom every day with conscious purposefulness.
If we don’t teach children how [...]

Standing Up with the Skills of C.A.R.E.S.

In reflecting on some of the responses to my last blog about bullying (and what we can do to be more proactive in our classrooms and schools to address this serious issue at all grade levels), I spent some time thinking more deeply about the social skills at the core of the Responsive Classroom® approach [...]

Standing Up Instead of Standing By: The Heart of the Classroom

Six high school students have been charged following a long investigation into the tragic suicide of fifteen year-old Phoebe Prince who killed herself on January 14 after being bullied in school, on Facebook, and through text messages in South Hadley, Massachusetts.  As reported by WWLP News:
District Attorney Scheibel said that Phoebe was bullied regularly for [...]

Spring Forward–Just for Parents

Parents, how are your kids doing this week with the time change? If you notice that they’re a little more worn out and fussier than usual, it may not be something going on at school or with friends—or then, again it might be, because all that stuff is harder this week, and they can’t figure [...]

Spring Forward

Some call this week at school “March Madness,” with a nod to the endless basketball parade on television this time of year. The analogy does fit if you think about the college kids who are sometimes playing three and four basketball games in as many days, the ones with the greatest stamina often the ones [...]

How Much There Is to Learn

In the preface to my book Yardsticks: Children in the Classroom, Ages 4-14, I ask readers  to “pay attention to the linits of developmental characteristics and characterizations.” I note that although general expectations about childrens’ behavior have emerged through detailed and repeated observations and have yielded certain patterns of development, “they are not precise predictions [...]