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.

Dr. Howard Elementary School