Responsive Classroom

Our classroom will be a Responsive Classroom!

The Responsive Classroom is an approach to elementary teaching that emphasizes social, emotional, and academic growth in a strong and safe community. The goal is to enable optimal student learning. Created by classroom teachers and backed by evidence 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 school-wide practices for deliberately helping children build academic and social-emotional competencies.

Guiding Principles for Responsive Classroom:

Seven principles, informed by the work of educational theorists and the experiences of exemplary classroom teachers, guide the Responsive Classroom approach:

1. The social curriculum is as important as the academic curriculum.
2. How children learn is as important as what children learn.
3. The greatest cognitive growth occurs through social interaction.
4. There is a set of social skills that children need to be successful academically and socially. These skills form the simple acronym CARES – cooperation, assertion, responsibility, empathy, and self-control
5. Knowing the children we teach is as important as knowing the content we teach.
6. Knowing the parents of the children we teach is as important as knowing the children.
7. Teachers and administrators must model the social and academic skills they wish to teach their children.

Behavior Plan for a Responsive Classroom:

There might be times where the students lose their self-control and need to take a break. Here are the steps that we will go through when this happens in our room when a student loses their self -control.

1. Take a break and once student gains self -control they can decide to come back and join the group when they are ready.

2.Take a break and teacher decides when to invite the child back to the group

3.The child needs to gain their self -control by leaving our classroom and go to a buddy room.

We will all have a chance to model and practice taking a break and using a buddy room at the beginning of the year. Make sure to read our weekly newsletter to hear all about the Responsive Classroom games, greetings, learning, and much more we will be doing throughout the school year!