It Doesn't Start With Behavior
Most classroom management approaches start with the behavior. Something is happening and the goal is to stop it or reinforce it.
COS Classroom looks at behavior differently. Instead of trying to reward the behavior we like or extinguish problematic behaviors, we learn to see behavior as communication of a need - a need of the child in the relationship with their teacher. Said another way, most of what looks like challenging behavior in the classroom is actually a child communicating something about what they need.
The Circle of Security gives educators a simple, visual framework for reading those communications. Not to excuse behavior. Not to abandon structure. But to learn to ask a different first question: What is this child's behavior telling me about what they need from me right now?
That shift — from what do I do about this? to what is this child trying to tell me? — is small in description and significant in practice.
What the COS Classroom Foundations Course Actually Contains
The COS Classroom Foundations Course is an on-demand, online professional development course built specifically for early childhood educators. It's self-paced, with individual logins — meaning you work through it on your own schedule and completions are tracked individually. There’s flexibility in attendance, whether that's done independently, in a small group with colleagues, or as part of a whole-staff professional development day.
Here's what's inside:
- 6 hours of video content filmed specifically in early care settings and classrooms like yours
- A comprehensive workbook with reflection tools designed for the classroom context
- Around 9–12 hours of total learning, including reflection time and workbook activities
- 1.2 IACET CEUs (12 clock hours) upon completion
- 6 months of access to return to content as your practice develops
The cost is $250 per individual learner — and for organizations exploring whole-staff implementation, there are pathways for that too.
What It Asks of You
COS Classroom isn't a passive course. It will ask you to engage in the learning through reflection — on the children in your classroom, on the relationships that feel easy, and the ones that don't and, at times, on your own history and what you bring into the room.
There’s also time to learn by doing. With six months of access you will have opportunities to practice what you are learning, and then come back to the course to reflect on how it’s going. That's not always a comfortable process. But it's also where the real learning happens.
COS Classroom recognises that educators aren't interchangeable delivery mechanisms for curriculum. You are a person in a relationship with that child. Children experience you as their person — your warmth, your limits, your presence when things get hard. COS Classroom is designed to help you understand and work with that reality, not work around it.
And it uses the language of the Circle to do it: what it means to be Strong, Kind, and Committed as a teacher. How to offer children a Secure Base for exploration and a Safe Haven when they need to come back. How to notice the moments when a child's behavior is a cue — a real signal about a real need — even when it doesn't look like one.
What Comes After the Course
Completing the Foundations Course is a beginning, not an endpoint.
Educators who complete the course can connect with endorsed COS Classroom Coaches — professionals trained in Practice-based Coaching who provide ongoing, relationship-based support for implementing what you've learned. The coaching isn't evaluative. It's collaborative. It's designed to support you the same way the approach asks you to support the children in your care.
That's the Parallel Process at work in a relational approach. There is a need for the same curiosity and care moving through the whole system, from agency to coach to educator to child.
If You're Wondering Whether This Is for You
COS Classroom is for educators who already suspect that the relationship matters most, and who want a framework, a language, and a community to help them work from that conviction more consistently.
It's not a quick fix. It's a way of seeing that, once learned, is hard to unsee.
