The team and I have a goal of creating resources to maximize the chance of Responsive Classroom Morning Meeting a success. Getting your entire school to buy into a new program feels like a magic trick.

It reminds me of an article by the magician Teller. He says,

You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest. 

Teller

So how do we make this magic trick (getting everyone to commit to an RC focused morning meeting) work? We decided to

1. Creation: Have slideshows that could be used school-wide. The idea was letting teachers focus on interacting with the students, not taking the time to create 180 morning meeting slideshows.
2. Organization: Email them to teachers the week BEFORE they needed them. So they would just arrive in their inboxes, with no need to search around for them. Also to make them available in a google drive for people who wanted to look ahead.
3. Morning News: We decided that the morning news videos would be embedded into the slideshows, so it was one stop shopping.
4. A Reason to have it on from the very beginning: And we decided that the first slide would just be music. So teachers could open up the slideshow before students came in, click play, and have some gentle background music playing in the background.

Working on the morning meeting slideshow, I realized we needed another practice to make the trick work. Teachers will need more support around the morning meeting activity. Each morning meeting activity in the book takes anywhere from a paragraph to a page. Many of the activities both teachers and students will not have seen before, so they need a way to quickly introduce the activity on the fly. We can’t assume they would know the activity.

This is my draft of how to approach that problem. I created this in WeVideo. My favorite part is the movement patterns, as that took some time to do in Canva.

Ideally there would be two versions of each video. One would be the basic one shown above. The second would be students walking through the activity. I might be able to add those during summer school. (These are also turning out to be very time intensive.)

And, we will also need a way for teachers to search for morning meeting activities. Teachers may want to do a game during the day and take time to review before playing. So, maybe we need a google site to house everything, so teachers do not spend their time looking through old morning meeting slideshow.

It is a lot. And if it works, no-one will realize the amount of effort it took to making the trick work.