Steve Reifman's "Teach the Whole Child" Podcast

In this episode Steve explains why movement is such a powerful learning catalyst and describes how movement-based activities engage children on an emotional level, transform the classroom environment, improve student learning, and offer unparalleled novelty, interest, stimulation, excitement, and joy. Steve also introduces a specific type of active learning approach that he calls “concept-embedded” movement and shares five of his favorite concept-embedded activities that help children learn important language arts standards.

Every day every member of a classroom community has a golden opportunity to powerfully and positively impact others—with kindness, positive energy, gestures of friendship, and other good deeds. When educators encourage strong student-to-student connections, our classrooms become happier places, the need for belonging that all of us have is met, the sense of “connectedness” that children feel to one another and to the class as a whole increases, and greater learning gains result. In this episode Steve shares specific strategies that elementary teachers can use to build strong student-to-student connections.

In his ebook The First Month of School, Steve discusses how important it is for elementary teachers to emphasize four priorities at the beginning of each school year. In this fourth episode of the “Teach the Whole Child” podcast, he narrows his focus to the first hour of school and describes how he begins to address two of these priorities during this critical time. Specifically, Steve shares what the first hour of each new school year looks like in his elementary classroom and explains what he and his students do and why they do it.

Character development has always been one of Steve’s most important teaching priorities. He believes that while our students may not all go on to become world-class scholars, they can all become world-class people. They can learn to work hard, treat one another with uncommon kindness and respect, demonstrate grit, and generally conduct themselves in ways that make themselves and others proud. In this third episode of the “Teach the Whole Child” podcast, Steve describes what he has found to be the three most effective ways of helping children develop lasting habits of character—modeling, using examples, and storytelling.

In this second episode of the “Teach the Whole Child” podcast, Steve describes the most powerful move elementary school teachers can make at the beginning of each year to establish a sense of purpose with students, develop teamwork, build lasting character traits, and set a high expectation level—writing a class mission statement with the kids and referring to it throughout the year for guidance. Steve explains, step-by-step, how to complete the process of creating this document and then shares how teachers can lead short discussions each week to ensure that the mission statement has maximum impact.

In this first episode of the “Teach the Whole Child” podcast, Steve introduces his teaching approach and describes how it began and how it developed. (10:47) He also shares four of his favorite ways in which teachers can build a strong personal connection with students. These strategies put smiles on children’s faces, offer positive, individual attention to everyone in the class, produce powerful bonding moments, and improve the overall classroom environment.