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 [...]

Parents, How Can You Best Reinforce Your Child’s Strengths?

In my entries about children’s positive attributes, you can find details about the kinds of strengths children seem to display at different ages and stages of their development. No two children are the same, of course, and each will gravitate to different interests at the same ages because different things excite different children, energize them, [...]

Heading Back to School — Strength and Assets Build Hopes and Dreams

One of the more important “back to school” activities teachers facilitate for their students is their setting of personal and class goals for the year ahead. In theResponsive Classroom approach, the goal-setting strategy is known as “Hopes and Dreams. By the second week of school, kindergarten through six grade classrooms display colorful pictures of children [...]

Positive Attributes — The Twixt Twelves

Closer to teenagers than middle childhood, the twelves, too, are still tweeners. Twelves have enormous positive energy for both independent and group endeavors, whether at school, in sports, or in after-school activities such as dance, gymnastics, martial arts, chess, cooking, or crafts. This is a great age for camp, whether day or residential. More mature [...]

Positive Attributes — The Electric Elevens

Elevens are powerful advocates, strong believers, and budding lawyers. They are passionate about their ideas and their opinions, their allegiances and their sense of justice. They are devoted to their classmates and peer groups,and the social negotiations surrounding cliques, which tend to peak at eleven and twelve, elevens are in a clear growth spurt both [...]

Positive Attributes — The Terrific Tens

Double-digit kids, these tens can take on anything and love every minute of it (well, almost). If you sense my unbridled enthusiasm for this age, you’re not off the mark. It didn’t take me long as a teacher to latch onto the understanding that if you want to teach in “middle childhood,” there is no [...]