How Does CSC Fit in My Already Busy School Day?

This is one in a series of Teaching Tips for the Caring School Community program. You can read other tips about Teambuilding and Facilitation Techniques.

If you’re like me, you like to start the year with a sense of how all the various aspects of your curriculum will fit together into the day. We know that there are many demands on your instructional time as you start off the year. This is a plug to carve a little time out of each week for CSC and suggestions for how to do it.

The First Eight Weeks

There are 2–3 CSC teambuilders and meetings each week during the first eight weeks of school. Most of these only take 15 minutes and are an effective way to establish community. They include teambuilders, norm setting, and other issues commonly addressed at the beginning of the year. These first weeks help create a class community formed with the norms that will make it run smoothly all year. You probably already did lots of this work before CSC; CSC will help create more consistency across classrooms. And teachers repeatedly tell us they wish they had adhered to those first eight weeks more closely and that they often need to go back and do them if they skipped over them too quickly.

In talking to many other teachers, here are some experiences we have heard:

“Having class meetings helps with management. Whenever we have incidents in the classroom, I can refer to that touchstone meeting where we talked about how we want to work together. By saying, ‘Remember when we decided what we wanted?’ I don’t have to go through the whole process with the child. That means I’m not problem-solving all the time. Also, since we have class meetings every day, my kids know they have a place to bring their issues.” —Nina Morita, grade 2 teacher

“In the first two weeks of school, we talk about ways we want the classroom to be. We listen and talk to each other until everybody agrees on what’s acceptable. Then when someone does something disruptive, the kids can talk to each other instead of bringing the problem to me. So problems get resolved much faster—and behavior isn’t the focus of the classroom.” —Gail Fay, grade 6 teacher

Class Meetings If your weekly meeting takes 15–45 minutes, and you have four check-in meetings of 5–10 minutes, you’re looking at 40–85 minutes weekly. This is a small investment of time if it keeps your students focused on academics the rest of the week.

Cross-Age Buddies These activities usually start about six weeks into school and work best when students have opportunities to meet and develop relationships and a sense of continuity. But this doesn’t have to mean a huge drain on class time. We recommend that buddy classes meet for 30–60 minutes only once or twice a month. It’s a good idea if the classes meet two times close together at the start of the year to jump-start the relationship. You can also fold buddy interaction into the regular life of the school: have them sit together at an assembly or see if they can have lunch or recess together occasionally.

Making It Work

How is CSC fitting into your day? Where do you put class meetings and buddies in your daily/weekly schedule? How else do you build on buddy relationships? We'd love it if you would share some of your experiences and ideas below.

Ginger Cook is the Manager of State and District Partnerships at Developmental Studies Center.