Making Good Choices

Developing Responsibility, Respect, and Self-Discipline in Grades 4-9

Students between the ages of 9-15 often seem to exist in a Twilight Zone between childhood and functioning adulthood. These critical years are an essential time to teach those adolescents to accept responsibility for the consequences of their own behaviour, to recognize that mistakes can be an opportunity for learning, and to formulate and live with classroom rules and community rules that promote responsibility, respect, and self-discipline. Richard L Curwin offers teachers eight classroom-ready strategies that will help their students make good choices for good behaviour in the classroom and then transfer those behaviours to the real world outside school.