The Responsive Classroom

This past week's mentoring meeting focused on The Responsive Classroom.  While the focus is on use in the classroom teaching realm, I find so many elements that can be reinforced or adopted into the music class every time I learn more about Responsive Classroom.  So much of the material is very applicable to music education.

"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:

1. The social curriculum is as important as the academic curriculum.
2. How children learn is as important as what children learn.
3. The greatest cognitive growth occurs through social interaction.
4. 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.
5. We must know our children individually, culturally, and developmentally.
6. Knowing the families of the children we teach is as important as knowing the children.
7. Teachers and administrators must model the social and academic skills that they wish to teach their students.

Anytime you get a chance to learn more about Responsive Classroom, check it out.  There is a lot of ways that you can incorporate the tenets into music class to make your teaching more effective.