Northwood Preschool

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.