What+is+Responsive+Classroom?

What is Responsive Classroom?

The Responsive Classroom website decribes the program as:

"an approach to elementary teaching that emphasizes social, emotional, and academic growth in a strong and safe school community. The goal is to enable optimal student learning. Created by classroom teachers and backed by evidence from independent research, the Responsive Classroom approach is based on the premise that children learn best when they have both academic and social-emotional skills. The approach therefore consists of classroom and schoolwide practices for deliberately helping children build academic and social-emotional competencies."

There are seven principles that guide the Responsive Classroom approach.
 *  The social curriculum is as important as the academic curriculum.
 *  How children learn is as important as what they learn: Process and content go hand in hand.
 *  The greatest cognitive growth occurs through social interaction.
 *  To be successful academically and socially, children need a set of social skills: 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 and working with them as partners is essential to children's education.
 *  How the adults at school work together is as important as their individual competence: Lasting change begins with the adult community.