Guiding Principles
Teaching social and emotional skills is as important as teaching academic content.
How we teach is as important as what we teach.
Great cognitive growth occurs through social interaction.
How we work together as adults to create a safe, joyful, and inclusive school environment is as important as our individual contribution or competence.
What we know and believe about our students—individually, culturally, and developmentally—informs our expectations, reactions, and attitudes about those students.
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.
Engaging Academics: Learner-centered lessons that are participatory, appropriately challenging, fun, and relevant and promote curiosity, wonder, and interest.
Positive Community: A safe, predictable, joyful, and inclusive environment where all students have a sense of belonging and significance.
Developmentally Responsive Teaching: Basing all decisions for teaching and discipline upon research and knowledge of students’ social, emotional, physical, and cognitive development.
Effective Management: A calm and orderly learning environment that promotes autonomy, responsibility, and high engagement in learning.
Social-Emotional Competencies
Cooperation: Students’ ability to establish new relationships, maintain positive relationships and friendships, avoid social isolation, resolve conflicts, accept differences, be a contributing member of the classroom and school community, and work productively and collaboratively with others.
Assertiveness: Students’ ability to take initiative, stand up for their ideas without hurting or negating others, seek help, succeed at a challenging task, and recognize their individual self as separate from the circumstances or conditions they’re in.
Responsibility: Students’ ability to motivate themselves to take action and follow through on expectations; to define a problem, consider the consequences, and choose a positive solution.
Empathy: Students’ ability to recognize and understand another’s state of mind and emotions and be receptive to new ideas and perspectives; to appreciate and value differences and diversity in others; to have concern for others’ welfare, even when it doesn’t benefit or may come as a cost to one’s self.
Self-control: Students’ ability to recognize and regulate their thoughts and emotions and display behaviors to succeed in the moment and remain on a successful trajectory.