What is Responsive Classroom?
Responsive Classroom
Responsive Classroom is an evidence-based approach to teaching and discipline that focuses on engaging academics, positive community, effective management, and developmental awareness.
The goal of RC is to help elementary and middle school educators to create safe, joyful, and engaging classrooms and school communities where students develop strong social and academic skills and every student can thrive.
The Four Key Domains of Responsive Classroom:
Engaging Academics - Learner-centered lessons that are participatory, appropriately challenging, fun, and relevant and promote curiosity, wonder, and interest.
Positive Community - A safe, predictable, joyful, and inclusive environment
where all students have a sense of belonging and significance.
Effective Management - A calm and orderly learning environment that
promotes autonomy, responsibility, and high engagement in learning.
Developmentally Responsive Teaching - Basing all decisions for teaching and discipline upon research and knowledge of students’ social, emotional, physical, and cognitive development.
Responsive Classroom's Seven Guiding Principles:
The social curriculum is as important as the academic curriculum.
How children learn is as important as what they learn.
The greatest cognitive growth occurs through social interaction.
There is a specific set of social skills that children need to learn and practice in order to be successful academically and socially: cooperation, assertion, responsibility, empathy, and self-control.
Knowing the children we teach individually, culturally, and developmentally is as important as knowing the content we teach.
Knowing the families of the children we teach is as important as knowing the children we teach.
How, we the adults at school, work together is as important as our individual competence.
The six teaching practices used in a Responsive Classroom are:
At a morning meeting that happens each day, students are welcomed with a written message, greeting, news and announcements, sharing, and an activity.
Rules are clear, simple, positive, and generated with children. Student hopes and dreams guide rule creation. Logical consequences are a consistent approach to discipline.
Classroom organization promotes a caring environment and maximizes learning.
Academic choice invests children in their learning.
A method known as Guided Discovery is used to introduce materials and how to care for them, and to encourage inquiry.
It is important to reach out to parents as partners in their child's learning.