Cliques (Teasing, Tattling, Defiance and More Book 5)

Being left out hurts. The strategies in this brief, practical Responsive Classroom guide will help you reduce cliques by building up a sense of teamwork and community and teaching students how to be inclusive.

In under 40 pages, veteran educator Margaret Berry Wilson shows you how to handle the classroom cliques that can harm children's emotional well-being as well as their academic performance. You'll learn:

• Why children form or join cliques (two of the reasons: they may need to feel significant, or they may lack social skills such as perspective taking)
• Proactive steps to promote inclusion (being clear that classroom rules prohibit exclusion is key; so is proactively building a strong classroom community)
• What to do in the moment when children exclude others (one crucial strategy: respond to every incident you see, even if it seems minor)
• How to respond if a child continues struggling with inclusion (two of the options: hold a problem-solving conference or set up several private practice sessions)
• Ways to talk with parents about cliques (these discussions require careful words, whether a child is excluding others or being excluded; a sample teacher language chart will help you along)

Noticing other common misbehaviors? Check out all the books in this series. Each one zeroes in on a behavior-listening and attention challenges, disengagement, teasing, cliques, tattling, silliness and showing off, too much physical contact, dishonesty, or frustrations and meltdowns-with practical strategies from the Responsive Classroom approach, a research-based way of teaching associated with greater teacher effectiveness, higher student achievement, and improved school climate.