Skip to main content

Guiding Principles

  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, and 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.

Core Classroom Practices

  • Morning Meeting
  • Establishing Rules
  • Energizers
  • Quiet Time
  • Closing Circle
  • Interactive Modeling
  • Teacher Language
  • Logical Consequences
  • Interactive Learning Structures
  • Investing Students in the Rules
  • Brain Breaks
  • Active Teaching
  • Student Practice
  • Small Group Learning

Four Key Domains of Responsive Classroom

To succeed in and out of school, students need to learn a set of social and emotional competencies and academic competencies.

  1. Engaging Academics: Learner-centered lessons that are participatory, appropriately challenging, fun, and relevant, promoting curiosity, wonder, and interest.
  2. Positive Community: A safe, predictable, joyful, and inclusive environment where all students have a sense of belonging and significance.
  3. Developmentally Responsive Teaching: Basing all decisions for teaching and discipline on research and knowledge of students’ social, emotional, physical, and cognitive development.
  4. Effective Management: A calm and orderly learning environment that promotes autonomy, responsibility, and high engagement in learning.

Social-Emotional Competencies

  • Cooperation: Ability to establish and maintain positive relationships and friendships, avoid social isolation, resolve conflicts, accept differences, contribute to the classroom and school community, and work productively and collaboratively with others.
  • Assertiveness: Ability to take initiative, stand up for ideas without hurting or negating others, seek help, succeed at challenging tasks, and recognize the self as separate from circumstances.
  • Responsibility: Ability to motivate oneself to take action and follow through on expectations; define problems, consider consequences, and choose positive solutions.
  • Empathy: Ability to recognize and understand others’ emotions and perspectives; appreciate diversity; and show concern for others’ welfare, even at personal cost.
  • Self-control: Ability to recognize and regulate thoughts and emotions and display behaviors to succeed in the moment and maintain a successful trajectory.

Academic Competencies

  • Academic Mindset: Influenced by a student's self-perceptions, including:
    • I belong in this academic community.
    • My effort improves my performance.
    • I can succeed at this work.
    • I see the value in this work.
  • Perseverance: Determination and effort to complete tasks, including:
    • Finishing assignments in a timely and thorough manner.
    • Persistence and consistency.
    • Working to the best of their ability despite:
      • Distractions.
      • Obstacles.
      • Challenging levels of difficulty.
  • Learning Strategies: Techniques and tactics used to:
    • Learn, think, remember, and recall.
    • Monitor comprehension and growth.
    • Self-correct when confused or mistaken.
    • Set and achieve goals and manage time effectively.
  • Academic Behaviors: Conduct that supports success in school, including:
    • Regular attendance.
    • Arriving ready to work.
    • Paying attention.
    • Participating in instructional activities and discussions.
    • Devoting out-of-school time to studying and completing assignments and projects.