Responsive Classroom
WT's Lower School embraces the Responsive Classroom® approach.
Our skilled Pittsburgh private elementary school teachers let the Responsive Classroom® philosophy guide not only their instruction of our lower school students, but also their interactions with children and their parents/guardians, and their overall approach as educators.
Responsive Classroom Principles and Techniques
The Responsive Classroom® approach is formed by seven basic principles and six teaching techniques:
- Social learning: Social learning is as important as academic learning.
- Process: How children learn is as important as what they learn.
- Social interaction: The greatest cognitive growth occurs through social interaction.
- C.A.R.E.S.: In order to achieve academic and social success, children must learn cooperation, assertion, responsibility, empathy, and self-control.
- Teacher-student relationships: Teachers' knowledge of the children they teach - individually, culturally, and developmentally - is as important as their knowledge of content.
- Teacher-family relationships: Teachers' partnerships with the parents/guardians of their students is essential to those students' education.
- Faculty and staff relationships: How a school's adults work with each other is as important as individual competence, and lasting change begins with the adult community.
Teaching Techniques
- Morning Meeting: A daily routine that builds community, creates a positive climate for learning, and reinforces academic and social skills.
- Rules and Logical Consequences: A clear and consistent approach to discipline that fosters responsibility and self-control.
- Guided Discovery: A format for introducing materials that encourages inquiry, heightens interest, and teaches care of the school environment.
- Academic Choice: An approach to giving children choices in their learning that helps them become invested, self-motivated learners.
- Classroom Organization: Strategies for arranging materials, furniture, and displays to encourage independence, promote caring, and maximize learning.
- Working with Families: Ideas for involving families as true partners in their children's education.
The Responsive Classroom® is not simply a set of behaviors and rules. It is an embodiment of WT's education philosophy and its mission since 1887 -- to actively engage each student in a challenging and inspiring learning process that develops the mind, motivates the passion to achieve, and cultivates the character to serve.