"Responsive Classroom is a widely used, research-backed approach to elementary education that increases academic achievement, decreases problem behaviors, improves social skills, and leads to more high-quality instruction."
Here are the seven basic tenets of Responsive Classroom:
- 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 through social interaction.
- There is a set of social skills that children need to learn and practice in order to be succesful. They form the acronym CARES-cooperation, assertion, responsibility, empathy, self-control.
- We must know our children individually, 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.