Todd Bartholomay is a Resource Teacher at Wilson Middle School in St. Paul. The following are his comments as he has introduced CPR, the Circle of Power and Respect, as the central structure of his daily Advisory with 6-7-8th grade students.

April 13, 1998 (First Year of Implementing CPR, the Circle of Power and Respect)

Perhaps more valuable to me as a teacher than any particular bit of knowledge I’ve picked up through The Responsive Classroom so far, is the ability to envision my classroom differently. As I look (and I always do at this time of year) towards the beginning of next year, I see a classroom that looks markedly different from the one I began working in last September.

The diverse students at Wilson Middle School have taught me much in my first year of teaching in the city. In fact, there is much that I’ve been thinking about for years that seems to be coming together for me, with the help of the Responsive Classroom framework—especially the beginning of the day and the building of community in my classroom.

It makes perfect sense to me, and has for most of my teaching career, that my job is to assist students in realizing their dreams. The Responsive Classroom has helped me clarify how. I am extremely goal oriented myself, but not terribly systematic. Responsive Classroom has given me a structure to work with that allows me to pursue my goals for my classes. It enables me to consistently hold my students on a course that leads to their goals.

The component that I have used consistently is the Circle of Power and Respect, our Advisory meeting. I am using logical consequences and time-outs as well, but it is CPR that has changed the way the day begins for us and has begun to create links between students that were not there before.

Context for growth
The meeting sends strong reinforcing messages to students (and the teacher, too) about the purpose of coming together. It provides positive structures in which students are reminded of the context and the continuity in which the day’s learning will take place, about the value of each class member, and about how the group will function. It has provided opportunities for my students and me to grow as a learning community and to develop a foundation for interaction that we simply did not have before.

In past years I have done many things to start the day, but none as consistently as I would like. I have always had some form of announcements at the beginning of the day—school bulletins, items in the news, etc. Some years I spent two or three periods at the beginning of the year developing class contracts to be signed and posted, but focused mostly on delivering the academic goods. At the same time I had hundreds of conversations with colleagues about the need to help students learn in ways that enabled them to absorb and apply ideas with a real understanding of their own agency in the world. We spoke at length about "buy-in," about responsibility, about the cynicism we observed, and about our own feeling of impotence.

I realize now, having begun working in the city I am confronted very clearly with the challenge of how to establish common understandings amongst my students, from the simplest classroom rules to a nuanced appreciation of cultural differences. It is crystal clear to me that the "social curriculum" cannot be divorced from the "academic curriculum" in my classroom. So I have embraced the components of the Responsive Classroom as a way to weave a sound social curriculum—skills and values—into our days at Wilson.

I have begun having students read the chart to begin the day. Earlier we were reading the chart after CPR. But when I had students begin to keep a daily class record of all the previous day’s work, I decided to make it a prerequisite for CPR. I have consistently used a friendly letter format and have tried to add humor and positive comments to each letter. The charts have been more or less interactive. I always pose a prompt that requires some form of written response. This is usually done in students’ journals and has been occasionally a subject for sharing in the Circle. For instance, in light of discussions that have been taking place around the building about both year-round school and uniforms, I asked my students to write down their thoughts and we followed up by sharing them.

Some attempts at interaction have been more successful than others. For instance, I’ve had students list, in their journals, all the adjectives they find on the chart, and then have invited a particular student to circle them on the chart. Lately, I have been including news items on the chart (e.g. the Hajj in Mecca and the vernal equinox) which present opportunities to discuss current events, cultural differences, and other aspects of the larger world. Students seem to respond well to a limited look at meaningful news. Most days I ask students to respond to something on the chart in writing in their journals. I know that when my class members have acquired stronger self-monitoring skills, and when some of the racial boundaries have been further dismantled by the effects of CPR, I will structure the first ten minutes so that students interact with the chart--especially in ways that require them to seek out others in the class beyond their own ethnic group.

Students have not questioned the use of the chart for one moment. They have not challenged my use of the letter format or the silly, contrived greetings I make up. On the contrary, they seem to look forward to reading it. The chart takes the focus off me, the teacher, and allows us to focus on its information together—not so much as teacher and students, but as class members together. The chart is predictable but always changing at the same time. Students respond to that combination of reliability and interest. In the future I would like to make physical interaction with the chart a part of that routine as well. A few of my students desperately want to read the chart every day. The rest are not interested and some are clearly mortified at the thought of having to read it aloud alone. I would like to find a way to get all students taking a turn at reading the chart to the class.

When students have finished recording their daily class records, and when we have read the chart, I send the attendance down and we take 60 seconds to gather in the Circle of Power and Respect. Our greetings are finally going quite well, but it took many weeks to get used to doing it "just so". Greetings are still very simple, but they are respectful, and students have become able to use each other’s names and to greet those whose race or age does not match their own.

Sharing has been improving. I will continue to structure sharing times such that all students must share a little bit, so that eventually a level of comfort will develop among all the members. Students are becoming better known to each other and to me. Those who have shared have, I believe, felt that what they shared was acknowledged and inquired about in a spirit of respect and genuine interest. Establishing the climate of respect in which sharing must take place has taken some time, but I think we are there. This progress alone, though we are still working on it, has been an invaluable lesson to students and has given me a real feeling of satisfaction and hope.

December 30, 1999 (Third year of implementing Responsive Classroom approaches)

In my third year I am able to reflect on my classes’ advisory experiences over a period of time. And I conclude that, like so much of teaching (and life really), the important victories are won in the process day-to-day. It’s not as if I’ve been able to achieve a smoothly running advisory with close, respectful relationships and then sit back and watch it roll (though having returning students in my advisory has made implementing R.C. structures easier). No. I realize that revisiting the principles guiding our practice together, returning to our hopes and dreams regularly, continually working to set our activities in a context of team-building, and always stretching students to share a little more with each other than they have before—these are acts of leadership that I need to bring consistently to my students. When I don’t, divisive habits creep in, students tend to group up in exclusive ways, and the rich experience of participating in a group of individuals who each give and take respectfully with the others—beyond race, age, and other differences—can be lost. It’s here that the R.C. components are so helpful in refocusing my students and myself on our goals together.

As one teacher striving to develop social skills in my students and a sense of community in my room and in my school, I have realized increasingly the need to have school-wide consistency in goals and methods if we want to be truly effective. With this awareness, I’ve spent more effort working toward school-wide implementation of R.C. components. Over the last two years our staff has been involved in figuring out what it means to implement R.C. strategies school-wide—particularly advisory, signals, and procedures. We are very much in the midst of this process. By sharing ideas, adopting monthly themes, and planning monthly school-wide community-building activities, we are attempting to link advisory groups across the building and reduce the planning load on individual teachers.

As is true in my classroom, the results in our school come where the energy is focused. Making the time and energy available to teach students how to be with each other is an ongoing struggle, what with graduation standards and other mandated projects. But I continue to be bolstered by the results in my own classroom. And I believe that my school is exactly where it should be—engaged in dialog and action toward teaching students to respect and care about themselves and others; on the path toward real integration of the social and academic curriculum.

This article first appeared in Origins: A Newsletter for Educators, Winter 2000