This time of year, we hear from schools that are struggling with challenging behaviors: children won’t stay with the group in morning meetings, have difficulty paying attention during story time, or ignore personal boundaries during music and movement. What do all these activities typically have in common? Whole group instruction.
At the beginning of the year, we would never expect children to recognize letters, count objects, or write their names without instruction and practice. Why, then, do we sometimes expect children to join a group, wait, take turns, communicate their needs, and regulate their bodies as though those skills are automatic?
Participation is learned. But participation, engagement, and compliance are not the same thing.
Participation is what a child does: joining the group, making a choice, taking a turn, responding, using materials, requesting help, or taking a break. Engagement is the quality of the child’s involvement—their interaction, thinking, communication, and connection with the experience. Compliance may simply mean meeting an adult’s expectations, such as sitting in a designated place.
A child can comply with expectations without being engaged. A child can also be meaningfully engaged without participating in the same way as everyone else.
The Council for Exceptional Children’s (CEC) High-Leverage Practices domain of Instruction in Behavior and Academics provides a framework for effective instruction: establishing responsive learning environments, explicit instruction, scaffolding learning, and promoting active engagement. The Division for Early Childhood (DEC) Recommended Practices help us apply these ideas in ways that allow access, participation, and support for young children to meaningfully engage in lessons and activities.
Together, these frameworks lead us to consider both the children we are teaching and the experiences we are asking the child to join.
Make Participation Possible
Before asking how to get a child to participate, consider whether the activity has been designed so the child can participate. The DEC Recommended Practices emphasize arranging environments and routines to promote children’s participation and engagement based on individual needs. In morning circle, that might mean using a visual sequence, offering objects children can hold and manipulate, providing picture choices, changing where or how a child participates, shortening the activity, or using two smaller groups.
Meaningful participation does not require every child to sit in the same place, look toward the teacher, and respond in the same way.
Teach Participation Skills
Even in a well-designed and accessible circle, some children will need explicit instruction in how to participate. Joining a group, using materials, taking a turn, requesting help, asking for a break, following a visual sequence, and returning to the group are all teachable skills.
DEC Recommended Practices emphasize embedding instruction within everyday activities and routines. Therefore, morning circle does not have to be the place where a child first learns a circle skill. A child might learn to request a break during play, practice making a choice at snack, or follow a simple visual sequence during a familiar routine. Adults can then help the child use that same skill during morning circle and other activities.
Participation skills are useful beyond circle. We want children to use them during play, meals, shared reading, transitions, playground activities, and other everyday routines.
Design for Engagement
Teaching participation skills is only half of the equation. The DEC Recommended Practices highlight that young children need frequent opportunities to actively engage with people, materials, activities, and their environment. When planning circle, ask yourself: How often does each child have something meaningful to do?
Children might hold materials, make choices, respond using words, gestures, pictures, sign language, AAC, or their home language, imitate an action, vote, lead a movement, complete a classroom job, or interact with a peer.
This shifts our thinking from “How do I get children to sit through circle?” to “How do I create a group experience worth participating in?”
When Participation Is Difficult
When a child struggles during circle, behavior gives us information. What happens before the child disengages or leaves? What might the child be communicating? What skill could we teach, and what might we change about the activity, environment, or adult support?
This reflects the DEC Recommended Practices of adults understanding the function of behavior and using that information to prevent and address challenging behavior. Sometimes the child needs a new skill. Sometimes the activity needs to change. Often, we need to consider both.
If a child leaves circle, for example, the goal may not be simply getting the child to remain seated next time. We might teach the child to request a break using an effective communication form and then support the child in learning how to rejoin.
Morning circle is an instructional context, not a test children pass or fail. When planning whole-group instruction, remember to make participation possible, teach participation skills, design for engagement, and respond to what children show you.
Remember, the goal is not identical participation. It is meaningful access, engagement, learning, communication, and membership for every child.
Download our Early Childhood Whole-Group Instruction TACtic: a tool for reflective planning when teaching participation and promoting engagement for all students
References
Aceves, T. C., & Kennedy, M. J. (Eds.). (2024). High-leverage practices for students with disabilities (2nd ed.). Council for Exceptional Children and CEEDAR Center. https://highleveragepractices.org/
DiCarlo, C., Pierce, S., Baumgartner, J., Harris, M., & Ota, C. (2012). Whole-group instruction practices and children’s attention: A preliminary report. Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 26(2), 154–168.
Division for Early Childhood. (2014). DEC recommended practices in early intervention/early childhood special education 2014. The Division for Early Childhood
Gauvreau, A., Lohmann, M., & Hovey, K. (2023). Circle is for everyone: Using Universal Design for Learning to promote inclusion during circle times. Young Exceptional Children, 26(1), 3–15.
Meran, S., & Scott, T. (2026). How do preschool teachers spend instructional time? Frequency of opportunities to respond and feedback during whole-group instruction. Journal of Behavioral Education, 35, 1094–1126.
Nores, M., Friedman-Krauss, A., & Figueras-Daniel, A. (2022). Activity settings, content, and pedagogical strategies in preschool classrooms: Do these influence the interactions we observe? Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 58, 264–277.