9 of the Best Ways to Teach Responsibility in the Elementary Classroom
Is it possible to teach responsibility in the elementary classroom? Absolutely! Responsibility is a trait that can be learned and developed at any age. Here are a few ideas to help get you started.
Teaching character is an important aspect of our classrooms. Responsibility is a key character trait that we focus on every year. How do we teach responsibility? Here are several key ways to focus on student responsibility.
Responsibility was one of our monthly character traits assigned by the school. Sometimes just making a character trait explicit and focusing on it helps students to pay attention to their behavior.
This concept also works with goal setting. Making the small aspects of behavior and academic skills explicit helps students to focus on the trait and make it a part of their daily habits.
How do you teach your students how to be responsible? Here are a few suggestions:
Teach Responsibility by Modeling It
Build your own practice of responsibility within your classroom.
Straighten things up, put things in order, pick things up, etc. As they say, more is caught than is taught. Students will pick up on your practices and start to integrate these practices into their own behavior.
Let students help you out with small jobs to teach responsibility
There are a ton of little things in my classroom that need to be done on a daily basis. I give students the responsibility of some of these small tasks, like filing papers, sharpening pencils, and straightening up our library. It gets the tasks off my plate and puts them on theirs.
Build a classroom job system
This is similar to letting students help out, but creates a system for it. I have had various systems for class jobs over the years. While I like the idea of classroom jobs, no system lasted. I prefer asking students to do small jobs.
Show students how you want things to look via photographs
My smartphone has made it so easy for me to take photographs of how I want something to look. This means students have no excuse for making their supplies look the same.
Take photos of different areas of the classroom just the way you want them to look. Print out the photos with sets or words describing how the area should look. Make it a checklist and laminate it.
If you have students do classroom jobs or you have groups of students who straighten up an area, they can use the checklist to make sure it matches your expectations.
Praise student for being responsible
Hand out compliments willingly. If you praise students for being responsible all day long, you will have students rising to meet your expectations.
Provide structure so that students know what to do
Give clear directions and make sure students know your expectations. If they know what to do, like taking photos above, they will know exactly how to show responsibility. Clear directions and plenty of scaffolding go a long way.
Have clear consequences that match the lack of responsibility
Do they have a messy desk? Clean it. Do students not pick up what they drop on the floor? Clean it. Do students leave their books out? Pick them up and a few more. You get the idea. If you have clear directions and students know the expectation, hold them to those expectations with clear consequences that align.
Talk about it
Revisit this concept throughout the year. The more you make it upfront and central in students’ minds, the more they will realize the importance of it. Since we are so busy in the classroom, consider creating a weekly or monthly routine of revisiting some of these core character traits.
Focus on one way to be responsible and show students you’re looking for it
Make it a challenge. Who can win a neat desk award? Who can pick up the most pieces of trash? Even over a period of time, who is bringing their books to the teacher’s table without reminders? Small challenges encompass several of the above tips and provide the ability to focus on one behavior over and over.
As a class, we created this responsibility anchor chart to help students know what responsibility means. We listed common characteristics of responsibility, as well as good examples of responsibility.
Do you have other ways that you teach students to be responsible in your classroom? I’d love to hear more about how to work on this important skill.
Are you interested in helping students manage their behavior in small chunks throughout the day?
I love Sean Covey’s 7 Habits of Happy Kids. Two of the habits relate to responsibility – Be Proactive & Put First Things First. The kids love to review the habits at the beginning of each day as a chant with hand motions. Here’s a Pinterest board with some of the resources I’ve used and collected: https://www.pinterest.com/kellialaina/7-habits-of-happy-kids/
Make extrinsic learning intrinsic. Too much time wasted on cute and colorful models YOU doing all of the work.
Yeah, learning by doing but kids learn using models and aided by visual support. Teachers need to do what they have to do in order to cover the different learning styles, and that doesn’t mean the teacher is doing all the work.
The tip of modeling responsible behavior really speaks to me. Children are super-observant and are picking up on more than we’d like sometimes! And one alternative to the easy (and sometimes default) “good-job” praise is to thank the student for demonstrating responsible behavior. Modeling gratefulness teaches gratefulness.
Great tips for teaching responsibility. I like the anchor chart.
I like your ideas! I would just add that I have the kids fill in the anchor chart with their ideas. It may mean I remake the chart to simplify it, but I can usually synthesize all ideas into just a few big ideas (good modeling if synthesizing, too). Lastly, I am cared with praise. I tend to acknowledge the behavior rather than the child “You turned your work in on time. You showed responsibility.” This allows the student to own his actions.
Great tips we don’t have responsibility carts but thanks for the idea and a great reminder to help kids
Wonderful idea to share and care!
Thank you for caring about the being before the knowing!
Great ideas and resources to use with a classroom.
As a PE teacher, I teach a different character word each week. What I found was that once we changed words, the students didn’t focus on the previous words, so I had to teach them that it is one thing to learn the meaning of the words and another to practice them. So, I found some character badges on Pinterest and I use those to award students who show the different character traits that are taught. It has helped a lot as the students work hard to display good character to receive their badge. The badges are displayed on a wall that says “Rocking Good Character.” I do love the anchor chart, so I will definitely add that next year.
For older students, I love the Character Club series. The first one teaches about compassion and the second integrity…Responsibility is on the list
One day after school my 5th Grader was explaining his new daily job in his classroom.I asked him about it. He explained that his teacher has a job for every member of the class. This is their responsibility for an entire month. She gives them about 5 to 7 minutes at the end of the day, plays fun music and will intermittently reward students for their efforts to keep the motivation strong.. I marched myself down to fifth grade and asked questions and gathered ideas . Realizing that this was exactly what my second grade classroom needed, the next Monday I set my class down for a morning meeting. We brainstormed and one by one each member of our class selected a job of their choosing. I clarified and modeled what the expectations were for each job. This was life changing for my classroom! It was no longer only my responsibility, but OUR responsibility to keep our classroom tidy and neat. I found that students were invested in the jobs and even volunteered to do jobs for their friends when they were absent. My classroom has never been so tidy consistently. In fact, I was ready to check out for the school year by 2:30 on the last day of school which has never happened in the 20 years I have been a teacher!