Our Focus
Responsive Classroom is a research-based education approach associated with greater teacher effectiveness, higher student achievement, and improved school climate. Responsive Classroom practice help educators build competencies in four key domains - each of which enables and enriches the others:
- Engaging Academics - Teachers create learning tasks that are active, interactive, appropriately challenging, purposeful, and connected to students' interests.
- Positive Community - Teachers nurture a sense of belonging, significance, and emotional safety so that students feel comfortable taking risks and working with a variety of peers.
- Effective Management - Teachers create a calm, orderly environment that promotes autonomy and allows students to focus on learning.
- Developmental Awareness - Teachers use knowledge of child development, along with observations of students, to create a developmentally appropriate learning environment.
Teachers who use the Responsive Classroom approach understand that all of children's needs - academic, social, emotional, and physical - are important. The teacher creates an environment that responds to all of those needs so that your child can do his or her best learning.
- 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 during social interaction.
- There is a set of social skills that children need to learn and practice in order to be successful.
- CARES: cooperation, assertion, responsibility, empathy, self-control.
- We must know our children inpidually, 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 to teach their students.