Classroom Management and Discipline

CDP’s approach to classroom management, Developmental Discipline, stressed building trusting relationships with students by organizing the class to meet each student’s need for autonomy, belonging, and competence and encouraged teachers to take a teaching or scaffolding approach to managing students’ behavior. Developmental Discipline is described and illustrated in Learning to Trust: Transforming Difficult Elementary Classrooms Through Developmental Discipline by Marilyn Watson and Laura Ecken (Jossey-Bass, 2003), available on Amazon. The videos below illustrate CDP’s scaffolding approach to managing student behavior.

Note: The Child Development Project (CDP) is now named the Caring School Community, a program of Collaborative Classroom.

Ideas For Use

Click this link for tips from educators who have used these videos in their classrooms.

Scaffolding kindergarten students to successfully solve a conflict. A kindergarten teacher supports two boys who both claim the same chair and refuse to move. Using skillful questioning and ideas from other students, she allows them to solve the problem.

Encouraging and Supporting Students in the Face of Mistakes or Failure. In this video students are asked to write about their ambitions for the future and one student becomes frustrated when he approaches the assignment incorrectly and has to start over.

In this video, students discuss ways to facilitate communication in the classroom so that everyone may speak and be heard.