Responsive Classroom

A-1 Background / Context: Elementary school classroom are inherently social. Teachers interact with students and students relate socially with their peers as a normal course of learning and social development. Despite the social nature of student learning and the classroom experience, the explicit objective of schools is to enhance academic achievement, not necessarily strengthen students' social and emotional skills. Surprisingly, most teacher education programs spend little to no time focused on teachers' relational skills, despite research on teachers' sensitive and responsive relationships with students (Roorda, Koomen, Spilt, & Oort, 2011). Most teachers leave their teacher preparation program feeling unprepared in classroom management (van Tartwijk & Hammerness, 2011). As a result, many teachers struggle in their efforts to facilitate effective communication and interactions within their classroom, resulting in behavior problems, disengagement, and reduced student achievement. Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) interventions have been developed to structure social interactions within classroom and teach students social and emotional skills designed to promote academic learning in school and beyond (Durlak, Weissberg, Dymnicki, Taylor, & Schellinger, 2011). Universal school-based efforts that teachers deliver to their students in classrooms represent the most prevalent type of SEL intervention. The purpose of SEL interventions is to boost social and emotional school competencies to help students perform well in educational settings (Zins & Elias, 2006). Despite the prevalence of SEL interventions and increased research on those interventions (e.g., Durlak, et al., 2011), surprisingly few have been subject to rigorous randomized controlled efficacy trials examining their impact on student achievement. As a result, policy-makers and school decision makers are left with too little information upon which to make decisions. On the forefront of the minds of many decision-makers is the question: Will we diminish children's academic achievement if we place increased emphasis (and allocate more time toward) children's social and emotional learning? This question is worth asking. Classroom research suggests that prioritizing nurturance at the expense of academic learning does not create the academic press necessary to produce children's achievement outcomes (Lee & Smith, 1999; Shouse, 1996). Further, recent work calls into question the assumption that improved social skills cross over to benefit academic skills (Duncan et al., 2007). As a result, we turn attention toward the Responsive Classroom® (RC) approach, an SEL intervention used by more than 90,000 teachers nationwide. The RC approach is designed to create classroom environments that are more community-oriented, productive, and academically engaging, thus emphasizing both social and academic learning. The operational logic model, depicted in Figure 1, describes how the presence of training and coaching in the RC approach may lead to teachers' use of more RC practices, enhanced teacher emotional support and classroom organization, improved student motivation and engagement, and ultimately, gains in student achievement. Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe the main findings from an IES-funded randomized controlled trial (RCT) of the RC approach, a social and emotional learning intervention designed to improve the capacity of teachers to create caring, well-organized classroom environments to support social and academic learning. Three questions were addressed using a longitudinal design. First, what is the impact of the RC approach on student achievement over three years? Second, to what degree does teachers' fidelity of implementation (in third, fourth, and fifth grade) mediate the relation between assignment to the RC condition and fifth grade achievement? Third, to what extent is the fidelity of implementation mediation

Curriculum integration often appears complex and when this happens those who are involved with providing professional development or teacher education may be inclined to promote simplistic or solution-oriented approaches to facilitate integration. Many variants of a problem-solution model exist, and programs that encourage teachers to identify a few difficulties and then strategize possible ways to remove those difficulties more than likely minimize the very benefits of an integrative program. In contrast to this, we propose a conceptualization of curriculum integration that is rhizomatic.

Supporting and extending the research that integrative arts practices lead to imaginative, flexible, and embodied pedagogical praxis, a rhizomatic integration of the arts values complicated and disruptive possibilities that enliven the imagination toward more socially just ways of living and learning. Integration, when understood as rhizomatic, will enable teachers to better respond to the everyday multiplicity of surprises that are part of their ever-changing world.

This another a/r/tography inquiry from the A/r/tography Research Group at The University of British Columbia.

Eisner, Gardner, and others have argued that the arts should be better integrated into the K-12 curriculum. In this study we examine three high school senior boys who, as part of a unit of instruction on identity, each produced a mask through which he artistically expressed his sense of self. Using a sociocultural framework based in the work of Vygotsky, we analyzed the boys' composition of their masks in terms of their goals for working on the project, the material and psychological tools they employed to produce the masks, and the settings in which they learned how to use their compositional tools for such purposes. Based on both concurrent IJEA http://www.ijea.org 2 and retrospective protocols that the boys produced in conjunction with composing their masks, we investigated their processes of composition as what Gee terms identity projects; i.e., as efforts to project themselves into their mask texts and as part of their long-term projects to explore and develop their personal and sociallysituated identities. Each participant used the mask-making composition as an occasion for inscribing his experiences, beliefs, and emotions into the text, albeit in different ways and toward different ends. The study concludes with a consideration of the use of arts in literacy education, a reconsideration of the limitations of language-based-only conceptions of literacy, and the possibilities for expanded learning opportunities when English/Language Arts classes open up students' textual tool kits to allow for broader opportunities to engage with the curriculum.

Eisner, Gardner, and others have argued that the arts should be better integrated into the K-12 curriculum. In this study we examine three high school senior boys who, as part of a unit of instruction on identity, each produced a mask through which he artistically expressed his sense of self. Using a sociocultural framework based in the work of Vygotsky, we analyzed the boys’ composition of their masks in terms of their goals for working on the project, the material and psychological tools they employed to produce the masks, and the settings in which they learned how to use their compositional tools for such purposes. Based on both concurrent

This case study examines how a teacher defined 'my kind of teaching'. We focus on a dramatic production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and frame the teacher's discussion with Dewey's significant moments of experience. Findings indicate the teacher shifted her role to a facilitator position, learned alongside her students, and connected her past experiences with acting. Implications point to expressive teaching moments as experiences in which teachers might extend state-mandated curricula, connect with their personal lives, and find delight in teaching.