Monday, the Beecher Road School PTO held its first meeting of the new school year. Mothers, fathers, teachers and administrators were all in attendance to hear Second Grade teacher, Peter Halsey talk about the Responsive Classroom.

Mr. Halsey has been a long time responsive classroom consulting teacher. He spoke about the importance of teaching students good social skills to complement their academic skills. To do this, the classroom environment should be child centered with as much intrinsic motivation instead of extrinsic motivation as possible. Students who have choices in how they will learn their academic material will be better motivated.

Key aspects of the responsive classroom is the morning meeting and teachers not only talking about appropriate behavior, but modeling it. The teaching methodology fits nicely with the Reading and Writing Workshop methodologies that the school has adopted based on work at Columbia Teacher's College.

Woodbridge School District Superintendent Dr. Guy Stella also attended the PTO meeting and talked about how the responsive classroom related to the school climate project. This project tracks improvements in student behavior. Just as data from the Connecticut Mastery Tests is being used to continually improve the academic performance of Beecher Road School Students, data from the school climate project can be used to improve the social performance through programs like the responsive classroom.

The meeting ended with a vote to approve the PTO budget and a discussion about various PTO goals for the year. Popular events like the Halloween Hoot are returning and there are many opportunities to help with the PTO. To encourage greater participation, the PTO continues to have babysitting available during PTO meetings and is now having a raffle for attendees. All parents and teachers are encouraged to participate in coming PTO meetings and activities.

Note: This article was originally written for the Woodbridge Citizen. I encourage residents of Woodbridge to read the Citizen, and to consider writing for it.

In addition, I encourage parents in all communities to attend and write online about their boards of education and parent teacher organizations.