This article describes a social and emotional learning intervention, the "Responsive Classroom"[R] (RC) approach, which is designed to produce classroom environments conducive to learning. It summarizes a new body of research describing the efficacy of the RC approach. One component of the RC approach is the Morning Meeting. This article…

The American public school curriculum has narrowed as a result of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Music is being eliminated in public schools so more time and resources can be spent on "tested" subjects like reading and math. However, research has shown that both the intrinsic and extrinsic values of music may improve reading…

Many students at the Edward Coles Model for Excellence World Language Academy or the Rachel Carson Elementary School in Chicago--schools that takes part in the Striving Readers program--say they came to enjoy reading for the first time or became better readers through the program, now in its fourth year. The federal program supports the…

The ability to read fluently is a skill that is critical to reading and that is receiving increased attention in the special-education and literacy literature. The authors describe how one elementary school initiated an effective low-cost reading fluency intervention program with parent volunteers who served as reading tutors. Parent, teacher, and…

The validity of three subtests of the Dynamic Indicators for Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) was investigated for kindergarten children in a large urban school district. A stratified, random sample of 330 participants was drawn from an entire cohort of kindergarten children. Letter Naming Fluency, Phoneme Segmentation Fluency, and Nonsense…

A teacher of Limited English Proficient elementary students in California describes how she put her students through daily timed read-aloud drills to boost their scores on a benchmark assessment of reading rate that her school district required. Corn briefly reviews the rationale behind measuring reading rate as an indicator of fluency. The reason…

Using a new method to measure identity, we attempt to capture salient identities of young children developing into "good students." Using a nationally representative sample of American kindergarteners who advance to the first grade, derived from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, we examine identities based on socio-economic status,…