Overview:
Watching a support teacher lead her classroom approach helped the author see how new ideas can deepen student thinking and transform routines into rich learning opportunities.
I almost missed it
I had a parent meeting this morning. By the time I sneaked back to class, the morning meeting had already begun—my support teacher was at the front of the room, my students were gathered at the waist, and my routine was going on without me.
I almost kept walking. Instead, I stood in the doorway and watched.
What I saw in the next fifteen minutes changed the way I think about professional development, the classroom routine, and the quiet power of letting someone else take your place for a while.
Morning Message with Errors
Our morning meeting follows the Responsive Classroom framework — an evidence-based approach that research has linked to higher achievement in math and reading, improved school climate, and a stronger classroom community (responsiveclassroom.org/primary-practices/morning-meeting). We read the morning message, review the schedule, count the school days, and go through a set of predictable, purposeful routines that ground children at the start of the day.
A few weeks ago, my fellow teacher and I started doing something intentional with the morning message: we started hiding mistakes. Three errors, intentionally planted – misspelled sight word, reversed letter, missing punctuation. The children’s job is to find them. It’s a literacy activity disguised as a game, and kids love it.
The teacher I worked with had written this message before he got sick. My support teacher was running it for the first time. And he did something I had never done.
He makes children forgive all mistakes.
Express Why
When the message is read go in the morning instead of Hellohe did not allow the child to correct and move on. He asked: why is that wrong? And what resource in this room can help you find out?
The children turned to the word wall. They look at the anchor charts. They pointed at each other and argued with each other. The repair took three times as long as it usually does. It was three times stronger.
When the date on the calendar is read 24 instead of 25solved the sequence problem. What comes after 24? How do you know? Suddenly a simple mistake became a fluency task, a number sense discussion, a moment of integrated math hidden in between what could have been a throwaway fix.
When the message says we will have Art until an hour instead of at two o’clockhe asked the children to prepare to to use — a number noun or pronoun. Grammar discussion in first grade, born from one wrong word.
Will
Then there is Love.
The message included the sentence that began We will… with a capital W in the middle of a sentence. The kids caught on quickly – capital letters are for the beginning, not the middle.
But my support teacher paused. He asked: When can W be capitalized in the middle of a sentence?
The child’s hand shot up. If it is a name.
Another child: my uncle’s name is Thanda.
My support teacher smiled. So Will will be at the meeting. The will will be. The room exploded.
Within thirty seconds, the punctuation lesson had become a conversation about words, identity, grammar, and the ins and outs of the English language. The child had brought their family into the classroom. The practice was open to life.
Checklist
What struck me the most was not a single moment but the building that was underneath it all. My support teacher had a checklist – a quiet, unassuming tool that helped the children keep track of their administrative work through the meeting. How many errors did we find? How many are left? If we got three and we need five, how many more do we want?
Fluency between five, embedded in the morning ritual. Mathematics as a product of attention.
He had thought of this. He had it planned. And he had brought something to my routine that I had never thought to bring myself, in the comfort of my familiarity with it.
What Adaptation Costs Us
Here’s what I’ve been sitting with since this morning: I know my way of working very well.
That’s not a complaint. Cycles are a safe class structure. Prediction is a gift to young children. The morning meeting works because it is reliable, because the children know what comes next, because it is a structure that holds them.
But familiarity has a cost. When we do something every day, we stop noticing it. We’re going through it, hitting beats, getting to the next thing. We get the error and move on.
My support teacher had never run my morning meeting before. He came to it recently. And because he arrived young, he saw things I had stopped seeing—places where a question could linger, moments where a child’s imagination could be stretched, common mistakes that were actually rare teaching opportunities.
He didn’t know my schedule well enough to get through it quickly. So he didn’t.
The Case for Class Exchange
I’ve been thinking about professional development differently since this morning.
We send teachers to conferences. We give them books. We bring in consultants. We run workshops on Saturday mornings. Everything is beneficial. None of them have the power to look at someone else standing in your classroom and doing your work with new eyes.
There is something that happens when you see your own path recreated that cannot happen otherwise. You see your ideas. You see your blind spots. You see places where you were moving too fast, asking too little, making adjustments where you could have had a conversation.
What if we create an exchange of classes in the school day? Not a formal observation with clipboards and analysis rubrics, but a real exchange – you run my morning meeting, I run yours. You teach my math lesson, I teach yours. We come back and tell each other what we noticed.
Professional development was already in the building. All that was needed was a door left open.
What I’ll Do Differently Tomorrow
Tomorrow morning I will ask my support teacher to tell me everything he thought about that meeting. I want his checklist. I want his questions. I want to know how you decide when to push and when to breathe.
Then I will remix my routine.
Not because it’s broken. But because go in the morning it’s better suited than a quick fix. Because The will will be it’s hidden in the morning message if you know to look for it. Because the children in my class can justify every answer they give – and I want to be a teacher who asks for them.
I almost missed it all. I stood at the door very happy.
Njeri Gachathi is a first grade teacher at the Bank Street School for Children in New York City and an aspiring children’s author. She writes about early childhood education, play, and what we teach young children when we pay attention.
