Community Building in Action

If you have ever had the opportunity to talk to Meeker 3rd grade Mentor Teacher Ondrea Dellman about teaching, chances are you also talked about Responsive Classroom (RC). For those of you who haven’t gotten the chance to talk with her yet, Responsive Classroom is the classroom management approach used at the elementary level. It is the elementary counterpart to Developmental Designs, which is being used at Ames Middle School.

Ondrea’s passion for RC is clear in everything she does in her classroom. She spends a significant time at the beginning of the year training her classroom expectations, teaching students how to take appropriate breaks, building community through morning meetings, setting hopes and dreams, making classroom rules and learning about building a CARES community (cooperation, assertion, responsibility, empathy, self-control). I asked Ondrea how RC impacts her as a Mentor: “I could not teach without RC strategies. Behavior concerns have come up in all of my mentoring sessions. Now that I have been practicing RC and taken all three levels as well as a few of the 2 day trainings, I feel like I can offer meaningful support and suggestions to them address their concerns.”

One aspect of RC that is used far less often is organized recess, which Ondrea believes is critical to building community with her students even when they are outside of her classroom walls. As the year gets going, elementary teachers are well aware that for some kids recess is the least successful time of the day. Many times those students who need to run around the most tend to find the wrong ways to spend their recess time. Students don’t naturally generalize the rules and expectations from the classroom to the playground. That’s where organized recess comes in. At the beginning of the year, and then continuing intermittently throughout the rest of the school year, Ondrea goes to recess with her students and teaches them group games and appropriate expectations for the playground just like she does for her classroom. Ondrea describes the benefits of organized recess: “The students get to know all their classmates better instead of always gravitating to the same few peers. They don't always know what to do when they are at recess and for some students that leads to problems. They learn rules to games and other options of what to do at recess.  When I am with them I have opportunities to instruct them on using self-control on the playground.”

Some might be skeptical of organized recess, but even students from other classes join Ondrea when she is out there. “I had my kids out and we had the big beach ball to use for our game.  My kids ran out excitedly and several other kids asked if they could play too. The surprising thing was they were all boys and most of them I recognized as kids who have a tendency to find trouble. I even ended up having a fourth grader join us when he came out.”

As a Teacher Leader, Ondrea hopes to inspire new teachers to implement RC strategies in their own classrooms to build a strong positive community and support student learning. She also has an open invitation to all teachers at Meeker who want to learn more about organized recess. If you get the opportunity to spend some time with Ondrea’s class, you will undoubtedly see these strategies in practice whether in the classroom or on the playground.