The Responsive Classroom approach to teaching is comprised of a set of well-designed practices intended to create safe, joyful, and engaging classrooms and school communities. The emphasis is on helping students develop their academic, social, and emotional skills in a learning environment that is developmentally responsive to their strengths and needs.

Core Belief
​In order to be successful in and out of school, students need to learn a set of social and emotional competencies—cooperation, assertiveness, responsibility, empathy, and self-control—and a set of academic competencies—academic mindset, perseverance, learning strategies, and academic behaviors.

Guiding Principles
​The Responsive Classroom approach is informed by the work of educational theorists and the experiences of exemplary classroom teachers. Six principles guide this approach:

1. Teaching social and emotional skills is as important as teaching academic content.
2. How we teach is as important as what we teach.
3. Great cognitive growth occurs through social interaction.
4. How we work together as adults to cre­ate a safe, joyful, and inclusive school environment is as important as our individual contribution or competence.
5. What we know and believe about our students—individually, culturally, developmentally—informs our expec­tations, reactions, and attitudes about those students.
6. Partnering with families—knowing them and valuing their contributions—is as important as knowing the children we teach.
   

Classroom Practices and Strategies
Responsive Classroom is an approach to teaching based on the belief that integrating academic and social-emotional skills creates an environment where students can do their best learning. The Responsive Classroom approach consists of a set of practices and strategies that build academic and social-emotional competencies. This approach works well with many other programs and can be introduced gradually into a teacher’s practice.

These core classroom practices are the heart of the Responsive Classroom approach:

• Morning Meeting —Everyone in the classroom gathers in a circle for twenty to thirty minutes at the beginning of each school day and proceeds through four sequential components: greeting, sharing, group activity, and morning message.
• Teacher Language —The intentional use of language to enable students to engage in their learning and develop the academic, social, and emotional skills they need to be successful in and out of school.
• Establishing Rules —Teacher and students work together to name individual goals for the year and establish rules that will help everyone reach those goals.
• Energizers —Short, playful, whole-group activities that are used as breaks in lessons.
• Quiet Time —A brief, purposeful and relaxed time of transition that takes place after lunch and recess, before the rest of the school day continues.
• Interactive Modeling —An explicit practice for teaching procedures and routines (such as those for entering and exiting the room) as well as academic and social skills (such as engaging with the text or giving and accepting feedback).
• Interactive Learning Structures —Purposeful activities that give students opportunities to engage with content in active (hands-on) and interactive (social) ways.
• Logical Consequences —A non-punitive response to misbehavior that allows teachers to set clear limits and students to fix and learn from their mistakes while maintaining their dignity.
• Closing Circle —A five- to ten-minute gathering at the end of the day that promotes reflection and celebration through participation in a brief activity or two.

Copied from The Center for Responsive Schools, © 2022 Responsive Classroom. All rights reserved.