Responsive classrooms seek to influence social, emotional and academic attainment in school students. This approach offers tools and techniques for communication with students, classroom management and learning contexts

Responsive classroom (RC) is an approach that works to teach children positive social behaviours such as treating others with respect and care, and taking responsibility for one’s own actions. This helps students acquire self-control while setting the stage for their growth in life and career. Also, it helps raise teachers’ instructional quality.

We are living in difficult times. Modern society is becoming increasingly lawless, violent and undisciplined. With the society becoming more permissive, the threat of drug use lurks everywhere. Students are increasingly using social media. Violent crimes have been on the rise. It is increasingly become difficult to teach students to be good. Therefore, there is a need of character education in school classrooms.

Creating classrooms that teach character education is equal to the hope of creating environments where negative behaviours are less likely to thrive. This is possible through RC approach.

In a responsive classroom, teacher and children create the rules together which allow the students to develop an intrinsic commitment to follow the rules once they understand their importance.

The proponents of RC approach suggest that RC offers teachers, administrators and management the opportunity to impact young lives by embracing the role of social educator. Responsive classrooms specifically acknowledge the presence of culturally diverse students and the need for these students to find relevant connections among themselves and with the subject matter and the tasks teachers ask them to perform. An important component of effective culturally responsive classrooms is the use of a wide range of instructional methods and materials.

The Northeast Foundation for Children (NEFC) had developed and promoted the principles and practices of Responsive classroom approach to learning, teaching and school renewal. As per the NEFC, the social curriculum is as important as the academic curriculum and how children learn is more important than what they learn. Its goal is to help and create learning environments where children thrive academically, socially and emotionally.

Responsive classroom seeks to influence social, emotional and academic attainment in school students. This approach offers tools and techniques for communication with students, classroom management and learning contexts. It is based on the fact that social and academic learning go hand-in-hand. This approach consists of several elements from common meeting times to cooperative learning opportunities.

RC integrates social and academic learning throughout the school day by including morning meeting, rules and logical consequences and collaborative problem solving as well as additional classroom practices. Teachers need to use instructional methods like explicit strategic instruction and interdisciplinary units that are tailored to suit the setting, the students and the subject for overall academic performance and successful life. The explicit strategic instruction shows students what to do, why, how, and when to do. The primary goal of this instruction is to help students learn to ask questions about the meaning they are constructing as they comprehend the text and the  another important strategy is reciprocal questioning where teachers and students engage themselves in shared reading, discussion and questioning.

The interdisciplinary units include and connect content area learning with language arts and culturally diverse literature. Many effective classrooms are organised around an interdisciplinary, or cross-curricular, theme with students participating in meaningful reading, writing, listening and speaking tasks as they explore the theme through a variety of activities and books.

The topic can be drawn from children’s lives and interests and sometimes from the curriculum. Teachers can help their students successfully engage in cross-curricular activities by demonstrating how to make connections across the curriculum through literature, by making explicit connections among books and by helping them recall how previous activities and experiences relate to current studies.

RC aims to prepare children for what they face as adults in society as well as teach them academically. One of the main goals is to increase student responsibility and the amount of time available for learning. It also works to reduce the amount of disciplinary problems. The development of children is not only shaped by the environment in which they exist but also by the interaction with the teachers who are well trained and guided by cognitivism. So, the influence of the teacher through RC approach is the most important factor in changing the academic and socio-culture behaviour of the students therein.

In Nepal’s context, there is a lack of good relationship between teachers and students. Use of RC can become instrumental if practised by schools in changing the behaviour of students to generate different knowledge that helps to solve real life problems. This can be done by providing trainings to teachers for the use of RC in the school for holistic development of the students and their creativity and to solve the problems that students face during and after school.

Joshi is a faculty member at Patan Multiple Campus