Responsive Classroom — Direct Instruction

A few years ago, a colleague shared a book with me that changed my teaching career. The book is called Teaching Children to Care: Classroom Management for Ethical and Academic Growth, K-8 and I’ve written about it before here.

There are so many classroom management gems in this book that I couldn’t even begin to cover them all in this post, but one of the big messages I took away from this book is the idea of “direct instruction.”

The basic idea is that we have plenty of unspoken expectations of our students, and frequently students find themselves “in trouble” for things we never taught them to do (or not to do) properly.

The book goes through an explanation of how to teach things in a clear, direct manner, so all of those little unspoken expectations are articulated and practiced. It truly changed the way I worked with my students!

The Responsive Classroom people (who publish the book) recently posted  on their blog about the direct instruction approach. It goes through an example of teaching children to wait their turn to speak. As the teacher of a large class, I feel that this skill is so important for students to learn! I highly recommend this blog and the entire Responsive Classroom approach to classroom management.