Learning to Trust: Transforming Difficult Elementary Classrooms Through Developmental Discipline

by Marilyn Watson, Alfie Kohn

Faced with increasing numbers of children who are difficult to manage and the pervasive presence of high stakes testing, many teachers feel frustrated and compelled to reduce their attention to building relationships with and among their students and their focus on social and ethical development. In Learning to Trust, an educational psychologist and a classroom teacher collaborate to demonstrate through an in-depth case study of an inner-city classroom the power and importance of caring, trusting relationships for fostering children's academic growth as well as their social and ethical development.
Marilyn Watson explains and describes the ups and downs of Laura Ecken's classroom through the lens of attachment theory, while Laura describes in vivid detail the ongoing life of her classroom, revealing throughout her challenges, thoughts, fears, failures and successes. Together they explore a fundamentally new approach to classroom management and present many practical strategies for helping all children develop the social and emotional skills needed to live harmonious and productive lives, the self confidence and curiosity to invest wholeheartedly in learning, and the empathy and moral understanding to be caring and responsible young people.

Genres: Education, Teaching, Chapter Books, Nonfiction

318 pages, Hardcover

First published May 2, 2003

Reviews

[Jaime Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book will fully inform my teaching and my approach to not only discipline problems, but to *all* my students...

[Kelsey Scherer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an inspirational and informative book to read. Although it was rather long, it is an essential resource for a teacher candidate, such as myself. All about a educational psychologists point of view of Laura's classroom, testing, and relationships, and a teacher (Laura) throughout her school year. About facing challenges and attempting to learn how to build a trusting relationship with her students. It includes many different personal accounts and experiences that she personally experienced. I will keep this book for many years to come and look back to it for advice. I am very pleased that I read this book and have it as a resource!

[Katie Morris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is about a teacher's struggles and successes throughout a year. It shows many ways teachers can build a trustful and caring classroom community.
I would use this book for my own personal benefit in my classroom to consider ways to handle different situations.

[Sydney McClure · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book dives into how to make a loving, caring community in the classroom. It follows a teacher through a year of school and how she handles situations, especially difficult ones. It has a lot of good ideas to refer back to when I have my own classroom.

[Nick Cherry · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great book to teach future educators the importance of building a caring, trusting community with their students.

[Tamas O'Doughda · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an important text and I'm grateful to've been able to read it. As Ms. Ecken indicates in her epilogue, it's an extremely vulnerable thing to allow your teaching to be judged and documented, then shared publicly on top of that. Fortunately she was brave enough and knew that there would be a greater good for other teachers to learn from her experiences.

If you've heard students say, "You don't do nothing," "Why can't you control them?" about their peers, or "You're too nice," this book is here to solidify that your caring, thoughtful, and conversation 1st approach to teaching will be the more chaotic, more draining and demanding, more emotionally taxing, and more confusing to your students, but ultimately more beneficial and internally life changing for your students.

As one of my professors once pointed out, sword and words are anagrams, and while our society likes to lord the sword of punishment over heads to keep things in line, we wouldn't be able to negotiate and lead fulfilling lives without the space that words provide. So, I am going to be more thoughtful with my language, and I greatly appreciate the author and main participant of this text. Beautiful work. I felt like I knew these kids and even substituted some of my students in their place as I envisioned the vignettes. It hit close to home.

[Maggie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really essential stuff!

[erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book. easy to read and full of interesting stories to get me thinking about these complex dynamics.

[Rosalia Castro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un estudio de años sigiendo el.gran efecto de confiar cuando educamos.

[Julie Derby · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was hopeful that I would love this book and the suggestions in it for helping struggling kids to be more successful in school and struggling classrooms to have more of a sense of community. But the classroom it focused on had only 20 students which seems an unrealistic comparison to our district where most elementary classrooms number in the 30s. I love many of the ideas in this book, but find it hard to believe it could be lived in our district of large classes where 4-5 students in each class are ADHD/OCD/etc and 4-5 additional students are borderline with other types of needs. How do you do this type of teaching with that many students who need help processing directions, or who can't sit still, or are getting pulled out of class regularly for help? At the end of the book they talk about how smaller classrooms are more successful at this type of teaching but that's unrealistic in our current climate where education is not funded and classes are huge. :(

[Patrice · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of my reviews in the next several months will be for texts related to teaching, so skip if you're not into that topic right now.

Author Marily Watson advised and collaborated with second grade teacher Laura Ecken for 2 years as Laura worked in a challenging, low-income, high diversity placement in Kentucky. Laura's attachment (vs punishment/reward) approach was highly effective in that situation, but I put down the book with so many questions yet to be answered. Like....where were the other teachers in her quest for answers? It would have been interesting to see if teachers in the same school with the same children were successful using different approaches.

And how in the world do you implement such a loving but time-intensive approach into a regular classroom?

[Ramanda Flannery · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is about a teacher's struggles with her classroom. She learns to deal with undesirealble behavior and how to love all of her students, even the really bad one's! It gives many of her personal accounts in the classroom and how she dealt with them.
I would use this book, not for a lesson, but as a tool to help myself be a better teacher and to get ideas on what to do on certain situations.

[Rose Goodwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has many great ideas on how to manage the classroom and work with children to build a trust between teacher and classmates. She discusses examples of how she uses certain strategies in her classroom, and how well they worked. She also discusses different types of developmental disciplines that have an authoritative stance that helps children to behave appropriately with care and guidance. A new teacher or someone seeking to be a teacher would benefit from this book.

[Sally · Rating 2 out of 5]

No mention whatsoever anything about culturally relevant pedagogy. Very disappointing.

[Cayla Lile · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great teaching resource for building relationships with your students!