Responsive Classroom
Responsive Classroom helps students learn good character through evidence-based practices.
Responsive Classroom develops a classroom and school community that supports, nurtures, and helps students become independent, intrinsically motivated learners. Through a positive, proactive approach, students become responsible for their own behavior and learning and develop a sense of belonging, recognizing their role in creating a positive classroom and school learning environment.
Adapted from Responsive Classroom’s website
Key tenets:
- The social curriculum is as important as the academic curriculum.
- How children learn is as important as what children learn.
- The greatest cognitive growth occurs through social interaction.
- There is a set of social skills that children need to learn and practice to be successful. They form the acronym CARES – cooperation, assertion,responsibility, empathy, and self-control.
- We must know our children individually, culturally, and developmentally.
- Knowing the families of the children we teach is as important as knowing the children.
- Teachers and administrators must model the social and academic skills that they wish their students to learn.
Methods:
- Morning Meeting – Students gather as a whole class each morning to greet one another, share news, and warm up for the day ahead.
- Rule Creation – Classrooms establish rules that support an environment where class members meet learning goals.
- Positive Teacher Language – Teachers use words and tone as a tool to promote children’s active learning, sense of community, and self- discipline.
- Interactive Modeling – Teachers model expected behaviors to teach children to notice and internalize them.
- Classroom Organization – Staff sets up the physical environment to encourage students’ autonomy, cooperation, and productivity.
- Guided Discovery – We introduce classroom materials to encourage autonomy, creativity, and responsibility.
- Academic Choice – Teachers promote student learning by allowing students structured choices in their work.
- Working with Families – Staff creates partnerships with parents and guardians to help develop positive, autonomous, and intrinsically motivated learners.
- Collaborative Problem Solving – We use conferencing, role-playing, and other strategies to resolve problems.
- Logical Consequences – Staff responds to misbehavior in a way that allows children to learn from and resolve the consequences of their mistakes while preserving their dignity.