Ensights Magazine

Grade 4 morning meeting

Grade 4 Morning Meeting

Tiffany Townsend, Director of Marketing & Communications
Before young students can fully grasp the concept of civil discourse, they must learn the Core Skills that lay the foundation upon which civil discourse can be built. For many Lower School students, this begins with Morning Meeting.
In fourth grade, the Morning Meeting is an established routine, and the students can count on beginning their school day in the same way every day. Under the Responsive Classroom (RC) model, there are four primary components of the Morning Meeting, each of which are aimed at increasing a student’s sense of belonging, significance, and fun: a Greeting, Sharing, an Activity, and a Morning Message. 
 
Grade 4 teacher Whitney Earhart shares, “Throughout Morning Meeting, children are practicing active listening, waiting their turn, and respecting others. Although it takes a lot of time to plan a different meeting for each day, the sense of community this practice creates is invaluable. If students feel heard and valued, they are more likely to engage in academic activities, to take risks, and to collaborate with their classmates.”
 
Every child being acknowledged and spoken to at the outset of the day is a tenet of Responsive Classroom, an approach that many Lower and Middle School teachers employ in their classrooms. RC encourages frequent reminders about the expectations of the Morning Meeting process, such as how to practice being a considerate audience and how to project and share so that everyone can benefit from one another’s contributions. “When contributing to one’s community experience is a consistent expectation,” says Grade 4 teacher Sarah Bryant, “there’s an inherent sense of security. Within this framework, students feel as though they belong to a learning community and that they are valued by its members. Thus, the need to prove oneself gives way to more open communication and connection.”
 
To begin, students are welcomed each day with a message about the day ahead. Sometimes, there is an interactive element to the message, possibly incorporating academic content or fun trivia about the students’ own lives. Then, during the greeting, every child is greeted by name. They are encouraged to make eye contact with one another and speak audibly. Sample greetings include: shoe greeting (single shoes in a pile and each person picks a shoe then greets its owner), middle name greeting (pick a name from a hat and guess whose middle name it is, then greet that person), world language greetings, ankle shakes, “micro” waves, and using silly voices.
 
During sharing, students may be given a topic about which to share with a partner or the whole class. The topics vary from favorite restaurants and hobbies to family traditions and study methods, or questions such as “Would you rather” and “If you were to open a store, what would you sell?” Sharing provides an invaluable opportunity for faculty to learn about their students and for students to learn about each other. As Grade 4 teacher Karin Prentice notes, “We practice the skills of making eye contact, listening to others, and learning that it’s okay to put yourself out there and share something personal about yourself. They learn about accepting and even admiring the similarities and differences of our peers relative to people’s personal experience and/or views of the world.” 
 
The activity closes out the morning meeting and transitions to the business of the day. Activities, such as Four Corners and Follow the Leader, are geared toward building common experiences. As trust within the classroom communities grows throughout the year, teachers are able to select activities that may not have been as successful early in the fall, and the faculty often participate alongside the students. 
 
When the pandemic forced classes to go remote last spring, the Morning Meeting played an essential role in keeping students and faculty connected. Bryant shares, “When COVID upended our spring plans, we felt our weekly class time on Zoom was best spent in a Morning Meeting. During a time when children were not seeing their friends, our Zoom meetings were a retreat from all the uncertainty. The greetings and activities, however silly, were a reminder of ‘normal.’ Students couldn’t wait to share their latest updates with the group. With connection being so elusive, having these procedures and expectations in place was a saving grace during spring remote learning. Several parents reported that it was their children’s favorite part of the week. While there was plenty of instruction happening beyond those meetings, they were our weekly reminders that we were all in it together. Still a team, even if we were apart.”
 
New COVID precautions on campus have required a shift in some of the standard Morning Meeting procedures, but teachers have improvised quite a bit, modifying old favorites to fit the new needs. “At the beginning of the year, I was very concerned about not having the space in my classroom I was used to for my meetings,” says Earhart. “We used to sit in a circle on a rug. With the new arrangement of the desks, we no longer have the space for that. Most days, our meetings are conducted standing in a large circle around the perimeter of the room. We were also very concerned about the amount of touching involved in our traditional greetings and activities and substituted verbal greetings for many of the physical ones. Now, we are slowly bringing some of our old favorites back in with lots of hand sanitizer before and after!”
 
What might appear to be simple fun and games to a casual outside observer is actually a very intentional approach to building social skills and teaching the most basic tenets of interpersonal relationships. The Morning Meeting helps create bonds between students based on shared experiences and fosters communication, understanding, and respect. “Morning Meeting is a daily foundational practice, and the skills taught are reinforced throughout every class, every day. ‘When it’s not your turn to talk, it is your turn to listen’ is very commonly heard in my classes,” says Bryant. “We discuss what respect looks like and sounds like in various scenarios, knowing that even our youngest students must practice open dialogue and civil discourse if we expect them to engage in such practices as adults.”
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Red Gables Campus (K–8)

Nashville, TN 37205
(615) 383-0661

Frist Campus (9–12)

Nashville, TN 37221
(615) 301-5400
Ensworth is a coeducational, kindergarten through twelfth grade, independent day school.