Susie Fahrer, Author at Rainbow Community School

The Importance of Relationships in Schools – Warm Demanders

by Susie Fahrer | Mar 2, 2026 | Director's Blog

The Director’s Kaleidoscope: Exploring the many colorful aspects of learning
at Rainbow Community School

Introduction: The Importance of Relationships – Warm Demanders – in Schools

Hi, my name is Susie Fahrer, and I am the Executive Director of Rainbow Community School and Omega Middle School. This morning, I am thinking about the concept of building relationships with students in schools with families.

As you can imagine, a relationship is one of the most critical elements in determining a young person’s success throughout their educational experience. Those are relationships that they develop with their teachers, with their administrators, and the ways in which the school staff is able to partner with families. Seeing those partnerships and understanding, for students, that they have many adults within a community to build trust and connection with, is an inherent part of creating a really powerful, long-term matriculation for a child.

One of the reasons it’s so critical is because we’re finding more and more that the science of building relationships is connected to the capacity of all of us to be our best selves, to achieve at our highest levels. This is in direct correlation to being able to learn, grow, develop, and meet your potential.

Understanding the “Warm Demander”

One of the ways that we talk about this here at Rainbow is a term that is relatively new to me, but one that, when I describe it, I imagine many of us will think of a person that fits this description. And it’s – the term is called a “warm demander.”

What it really describes is a person in your life who is able to build a relationship that creates clarity, structure, resources, and support to meet extremely high expectations. To understand what your potential is, to believe in yourself, to be reflected back that you can do incredibly challenging things, that you are resilient, and you are capable. Then, to be the coach on the sidelines, providing the resources to help you get there, and eventually to help you internalize those strategies.

My Experience with a Warm Demander

When I think back on my school experience, I was privileged to have many wonderful teachers. But the one that stands out for me, as a warm demander, was my sixth-grade teacher.

For me at that time, schooling was kindergarten through sixth grade in an elementary setting. At the same time, sixth grade became a time in our lives when we were really sort of being ushered into preparations for middle school.

My teacher at first surprised me in the ways in which I moved into that classroom and felt a sense of business, felt a sense of purpose, felt a sense of challenge. It was intimidating a little bit at first. But because this teacher was so skilled in building relationships with me and my peers and cultivating experiences where we could try something that felt really difficult, eventually, over time, we built out our endurance to achieve it. It’s something that I attribute highly to my capacity to have moved into middle school with success.

Encouraging Your Child with Warm Demanders

I encourage you to think through experiences that you’ve had where someone has been that really clear, consistent, supportive message to you and helped you succeed.

Then think about what it would be like to put your child in an environment where they are surrounded by warm demanders – folks who see their potential. Folks who reflect that back to them. People who recognize that our young people need to be challenged to do things for themselves.

We are here as a resource and a facilitator, but there’s so much that our children can do. When we give them the space to attempt, have positive risks, sometimes fail, but have the people around them that will be there to provide all of the necessary encouragement and affirmation to try again.

Learn More About Warm Demanders

If you’re interested in learning more about warm demanders, there are resources attached. And of course, always come visit us. Come chat with me if you’re already a member of the community and want to learn more about being a warm demander, but we welcome you to join us here at Rainbow.

Understand the power of relationships as it relates to your child’s education. We are grateful for the opportunity to serve our community. Be well.

Language of a Warm Demander

Learn More

Continue exploring ideas from our Director’s Kaleidoscope series, including topics like executive functioning, student autonomy, and project-based learning.

Play Based Learning: Why Play Is the Foundation of Education

by Susie Fahrer | Feb 16, 2026 | Director's Blog

The Director’s Kaleidoscope: Exploring the many colorful aspects of learning
at Rainbow Community School

Play in Childhood

Hi, my name is Susie Fahrer, and I’m the Executive Director of Rainbow Community School and Omega Middle School.

One of the things that we often associate with childhood is play. As a school, we recognize that play is something that is critical to children’s learning. In our Early Childhood Program, our students spend time outdoors and in their classrooms that are designed for imagination, creativity, and autonomy, to come out and develop through play-based learning.

What does play-based learning look like?

So what does that really look like? Well, on the playground, our children often engage the spaces around them and their peers in storytelling, in creative use of the materials.

A mud kitchen becomes a restaurant. The sandbox becomes a place of building community and castles. The structures for climbing might be mountaintops, or we might even see children transform themselves, imagining that they are animals, exploring the world around them – engaging with the trees, the rocks, and the grass.

Problem Solving Through Play

All of this is showcasing a child’s natural ability to see themselves as problem solvers, to think curiously about the spaces around them. In the classroom, this is the time when Play-Doh becomes an engagement of number, shape, size, and all of those pre-mathematical concepts. Block-building explores scientific knowledge of balance, structure, physics, and movement.

Students see story and language all around them. The creative play area might become a bank or a store. They start to explore these ideas of community, which they’re making meaning out of, every day in their daily lives.

Teachable Moments

Our teachers are trained to take these moments and really use strategies of questioning, dialogue, and play as a way to engage our students in deeper learning, but also as a way for them to be leaders and thinkers on their own.

Think about a time when you were learning something, and someone simply told you how to do it. That can be really efficient and sometimes necessary. But now imagine a time when you struggled through something. You were doing it on your own, you were exploring it, or perhaps it was an activity. Maybe it was your first time skiing or learning how to drive a car.

These were all things that took your ability to engage and “try.”

Play as a foundation of learning

Play-based learning is the beginning of those dispositions. As students matriculate, the imagination continues. But it’s built into project-based learning, their ability to explore literacy through creating projects that showcase the critical elements of a story, or the idea that they can create games that help practice mathematical skills.

It increases their social relationships through learning, but it also continues to build their confidence in recognizing that learning is about taking positive and playful risks.

Teachers and Staff Engage in Play

Equally, we create spaces for our staff here to engage playfully with one another. On Wednesdays, we have professional development, and part of that process is creating spaces for open-ended thinking, collaboration on lesson planning, and, really, at the heart of it, using the disposition of play to bring joy to the work we do with ourselves and with our children.

I hope that part of what you connect to out of this video is an opportunity to think about how you can bring more play not only into your engagement with your child, but also into your own life.

An Invitation

We all have those experiences where play has uplifted something about what we’ve learned, what we do, and how we engage with the world around us. It’s a powerful tool for supporting creativity, joy, and the capacity for each of us to recognize the ownership of our own learning. If you want to learn more, look at the attached file.

You can engage in a tour with us. Come and visit. Or if you’re already here, as always, my door is open. Let’s have a conversation about how you can use play in engaging your child in their learning journey here at Rainbow. Have a wonderful day!

Play is Learning

Learn More

Continue exploring ideas from our Director’s Kaleidoscope series, including topics like executive functioning, student autonomy, and project-based learning.

Brain Breaks: A Technique for Meeting Student Potential

by Susie Fahrer | Feb 2, 2026 | Director's Blog

The Director’s Kaleidoscope: Exploring the many colorful aspects of learning
at Rainbow Community School

What Are Brain Breaks?

Hi, my name is Susie Fahrer, and I am the executive director of Rainbow Community School and Omega Middle School. One of the things you’ve probably heard people talking about when they’re discussing a powerful learning environment is this concept that has been termed “brain breaks,” and what’s interesting about that is brain breaks are often described as moments in time when a learner maybe moves into a physical activation, steps away from a task, moves their body, maybe changes their breathing pattern, perhaps, does something that elevates their heart rate, or maybe just something that creates laughter or a different train of thought.

Brain Breaks as Brain Energizers and Optimizers

While these are essentially called brain breaks, maybe they should really be called brain energizers or optimizers, because the reality is, while the brain is shifting its focus from the task at hand, it is designed to really support learners in synthesizing information and creating deeper neuro pathways.

Supporting Sustained Mental Focus

You know, there are different reasons and different places, as you can imagine, for needing a shift in how our brains are working. So perhaps it’s about the sustaining of a mental task. For students as they matriculate, one of the things we work on is growing their capacity for longer periods of stimulation. So for some, that might be longer rigor around focusing on a writing task, or for some, that might be sustaining the mental energy to really work all the way through a multi-step mathematics problem.

How Brain Breaks Help Students Reintegrate and Learn

What a brain break can do is allow a student a strategy for stepping back from the energy of sustained mental acuity, give their brain a different focus, and then reintegrate, ready and more optimized for learning. Equally, we might think about these strategies using support for creativity. I’m sure many of you have had that experience where you’re working on a creative task, possibly in the brainstorming phase, and maybe just feeling really stuck.

Brain Breaks and Creativity

Well, the reality is, when we uproot ourselves and don’t force that creativity to come through and find a slightly different way of moving our bodies, breathing through a few exercises, talking to a friend, having a social stimulation, and then returning to that creative task, maybe even taking a walk. Those things will help our bodies and brains process and move out of that stuck period.

Optimizing Learning and Full Potential

So now we’re talking about optimization not only of sustained mental energy, but also of our creative energy and our ability to really bloom our full potential. We use brain breaks here at Rainbow – brain energizers, brain optimizers – in all of our classrooms in developmentally appropriate ways. Eventually, our students learn to engage these strategies for themselves as needed within their learning spaces.

Using Brain Breaks at Home

If you’re interested in learning more about strategies you can use at home, please check the attached document. Again, we always welcome you. Come on in. Take a look at our classrooms. If you’re already here, come and have a conversation about how you can use brain breaks at home to support your child, particularly when they’re in a mental task that might be a little bit of a stretch for them. Our door is always open. Look forward to chatting with you. Take care.

Brain Breaks Across the Domains

Learn More

Continue exploring ideas from our Director’s Kaleidoscope series, including topics like executive functioning, student autonomy, and project-based learning.

The Student-Teacher Relationship

by Susie Fahrer | Jan 12, 2026 | Director's Blog

The Director’s Kaleidoscope: Exploring the many colorful aspects of learning
at Rainbow Community School

Exploring the Role of Student–Teacher Relationships

Hi, my name is Susie Fahrer, and I am the Executive Director of Rainbow Community School and Omega Middle School. One of the things that I get asked often when I’m sitting with a family, exploring the options for the educational choice and journey of their child, is about the ways that teacher and student relationships are developed.

The Student–Teacher Relationship

Many of us can recall back from our own educational experience a teacher who took the time to get to know us personally. We probably felt validated. We probably felt highly motivated to perform in that classroom because we understood that the teacher was there not only to encourage us to be learners, but also to help us advocate for ourselves and our full potential. At Rainbow, we have the privilege of a variety of ways that we foster really meaningful relationships between a child, a teacher, and their full classroom community.

Listening Conferences: Building Strong Partnerships with Families

It all begins every year with something called a Listening Conference. This is a time when we invite families in to sit with the educators in the classroom and share about the journey and values of the family. This partnership is so critical for our teachers to be able to then take what they’ve learned about this child’s journey thus far, and push forward their full-potential, support-areas of challenge and sensitivity, and grow them not just as learners, but as humans.

The Rainbow Seven Domains™

As you’ve probably noticed, one of the primary components of a Rainbow education is our Seven Domains model. This model is built to enhance the capacity of every teacher to really learn, witness, and connect to the children that they have in front of them in any given year.

Understanding the Whole Child

When we think about each learner above and beyond who they are and how they show up just in the mental domain, but also as social and emotional beings, the way they engage the natural world, their ability to express creatively and connect creatively, using their physical outlets and growth points, engaging their spirituality and the world of wonder and awe and community and connectivity.

Developing Powerful Student–Teacher Relationships

These are all things that dovetail and enhance their educational experience. Research suggests that the more a teacher can develop a really powerful relationship with the child, the more likely the child is to step into highly motivated experiences. They’re going to face challenges in a slightly different way when they know the adults around them are building the environment for positive risk-taking, that we’re celebrating mistakes as learning opportunities, and that they see that they can inherently grow and learn, fail and rise in ways that are supported by the adults around them.

Motivation, Risk-Taking, and Growth in Early Childhood

At Rainbow in preschool, the teachers are masters at looking around the classroom, watching the students engage in hands-on learning and play, and then designing skill-building with the students, leading in areas of interest. Already, an engaged brain is going to be able to push further in skill development when they have not only areas of excitement and interest, and wonder, but also teachers who are adaptable and able to engage those moments for learning.

The Learning Environment

As we move into our elementary classrooms, you’ll see the students start to become more partners in their learning environment. Now again, the areas of risk-taking grow – the more a child is faced with opportunities of rigor and challenge.

Multi-Sensory Learning and Individual Support

The teachers at Rainbow take the time to understand how they can best support each child through multi-sensory learning and different and various opportunities for engagement. So the child who’s maybe more willing to face a challenging task through a physical engagement is supported in that domain, while a child who’s going to show their best thinking in a quiet space for writing, and that type of expression is also going to be supported. Equally, we’re going to provide the spaces for children to grow in their areas of challenge and opportunity. They see their teachers as partners in their learning journey, as people there to support their best efforts.

Creating an Optimal Learning Environment

That’s critical in really creating not only an optimal learning environment for a full classroom, but for every child to start to see themselves as a really powerful learner. We want that to be embedded in their identity development.

Supporting Agency and Passion in Adolescence

As students matriculate into adolescence, our educators in our middle school program are truly trained to understand the adolescent brain and to optimize those learning experiences for our young people, who at this point are really seeking some opportunities for agency, guided choice, and investment in their own learning. Their passions are starting to develop, and our teachers have the ability to engage those passions with meaningful course content. We’re also there to open up their world to new possibilities as they’re moving into adolescence. There’s a whole world that’s opening up in front of them as they think about moving into high school and beyond.

Preparing Students for the Future

We want our students to feel really prepared and able to engage in their best learning as they move beyond our doors. As you start to explore the best possible fit of educational environments for your child, the relationship and development of really powerful connections with their educators is going to be at the heart of their success. We’re so grateful to have so many wonderful teachers here at Rainbow.

An Invitation to Experience Rainbow Community School

We would love for you to come and join us here and meet the educators. See this in action, and if you’re already a part of the community, we hope that you’ll continue to look ahead and see the next step in your child’s journey. Thanks so much for listening. Enjoy the day.

Download and print our free resource guide to learn more about Questions that Foster Meaningful Relationships.

Questions that Foster Meaningful Relationships

Learn More

Continue exploring ideas from our Director’s Kaleidoscope series, including topics like executive functioning, student autonomy, and project-based learning.

What if We All Led with Compassion?

by Susie Fahrer | Jan 12, 2026 | Director's Blog

The Director’s Kaleidoscope: Exploring the many colorful aspects of learning
at Rainbow Community School

Leading With Compassion

Hi, my name is Susie Fahrer, and I am the Executive Director of Rainbow Community School and Omega Middle School. Several years ago, I ran a workshop in partnership with a friend called “What If We All Just Led with Compassion? That title has stuck with me over the years as an educator, considering all the ways that school has the ability to cultivate compassion within our young people.

Cultivating Compassion at Rainbow

At Rainbow, we have lots of intentional strategies for building the capacity of our children to think, communicate, and learn with compassion. So it all begins in our earliest childhood classrooms and our preschool with a program called the “Zones of Regulation.” This is a program that was adopted at Rainbow because it so beautifully provides a foundation for understanding the emotional experience of a human.

Understanding Emotional Experience in Early Childhood

As you know, we all experience a really wide range of emotions. And for our littlest learners, we really want them to build a relationship to all the ways they express themselves, as well as understanding the nature of each emotion that they experience. So to that end, we make sure that our young students understand that there are no bad emotions.

The Zones of Regulation

There are just emotions that really are not meant to sustain them for long periods of time. So the Zones of Regulation provides a map that’s color-coded and allows our students to see different types of emotions that they experience, and code them to a color. So, for example, sadness might be a blue emotion. While frustration might be a red emotion.

Learning Strategies for Regulation

And really, our goal is to always give them strategies to come back to the more easeful experience of the emotions within a green setting. And so they learn things like breathing. They learn things like pausing and expressing their needs. They learn things like tuning into their body and seeing what their body is telling them that they need.

Building Toward Nonviolent Communication

And all of these pieces begin a really strong foundation that then builds as students matriculate with us and move into a more formal understanding of nonviolent communication. Now, for many of you, you might be familiar with the strategies of nonviolent communication, but this is not just a tool for young people. It’s a tool that all of us adults included at Rainbow Community School practice and utilize regularly.

Emotions, Needs, and Conflict

It allows us to build on the idea of understanding the different types of emotions and matching them to the needs that we have. The reality is that so many times when we experience conflict, it is because our needs are not being met. And one of the nuances of nonviolent communication is this understanding that our needs can never be in conflict with one another.

Practicing Nonviolent Communication on the Playground

It is merely the strategy we’re using to meet those needs. So for our students, when they experience a conflict out on the playground, perhaps they’re playing a game, and someone feels that they are unjustly called out of that game, or “They’re not playing fairly” is often a term we hear across those elementary ages. And maybe they walk away from the game upset, or perhaps they’re told they’re not allowed to play with their friends.

Expressing Feelings and Making Requests

Well, this is all a great experience for our young people to practice nonviolent communication. It asks them to express what they’re feeling. Perhaps they’re feeling disconnection or confusion, or worry because they’re afraid of the impact this conflict has had on their friendships in the classroom. And maybe their need is for a little bit of understanding, or patience, or to be heard, or to have an understanding of the exact rules we’re playing by.

Compassion, Scholarship, and Learning Readiness

And ultimately, they learn to make these requests so that we can build a more inclusive culture for our students. And the capacity for them to move out into the world and build conversations of regulation, support, and clarity. These skills that we’re cultivating in our young people are not just about social-emotional development. They are inherently impacting our students’ ability to be scholars and thinkers.

An Invitation to Visit and Connect

You know, let’s consider for a minute how critical it is for your emotional status to be regulated, for our brains to be grounded in order to truly learn and understand the knowledge that’s being imparted to us in school, in our workplaces, right? And so these skills are enhancing the experience of every child within Rainbow Community School, not only to lead with compassion for themselves and for others, but also to be ready for the powerful learning experiences that come when we are regulated, grounded, and ready for a day of classroom discovery, wonder, and awe.

Thank you so much for listening to a little bit about how we cultivate compassion at Rainbow Community School. We welcome you to visit our school. If you haven’t had a chance to swing by, or if you’re already a member, you know my door is always open to have conversations that further our ability to work in partnership towards cultivating compassion, care, and a culture of belonging.

Download or print our free resource guide on Exploring the Values of Compassionate Communication to learn more.

Exploring the Values of Compassionate Communication

Learn More

Continue exploring ideas from our Director’s Kaleidoscope series, including topics like executive functioning, student autonomy, and project-based learning.

The Importance of Relationships in Schools – Warm Demanders

Introduction: The Importance of Relationships – Warm Demanders – in Schools

Understanding the “Warm Demander”

My Experience with a Warm Demander

Encouraging Your Child with Warm Demanders

Learn More About Warm Demanders

Learn More

Writing in a World of AI

Deep Listening: A Practice of Presence

Executive Functioning Skills

Writing in a World of AI

Deep Listening: A Practice of Presence

Executive Functioning Skills

Brain Breaks: A Technique for Meeting Student Potential

What Are Brain Breaks?

Brain Breaks as Brain Energizers and Optimizers

Supporting Sustained Mental Focus

How Brain Breaks Help Students Reintegrate and Learn

Brain Breaks and Creativity

Optimizing Learning and Full Potential

Using Brain Breaks at Home

Learn More

Writing in a World of AI

Deep Listening: A Practice of Presence

Executive Functioning Skills

Writing in a World of AI

Deep Listening: A Practice of Presence

Executive Functioning Skills

Writing in a World of AI

Deep Listening: A Practice of Presence

Executive Functioning Skills

We are grateful for our 2026-2027 sponsors

Rainbow Community School