And why is it so very important?

As we are finishing up the 2022-2023 school year, and starting to think about the next school year, we can’t deny that this year was incredibly hard, for teachers and students alike. Did you feel like you were constantly putting out fires this year?

As you are trying to plan for next year, I know we want to be proactive in preparing and equipping teachers to move students out of crisis and into learning.

Being a responsive teacher is effective, crucial, and meaningful. But what does this mean?

Being a responsive teacher is all about knowing our students in a way that helps us create meaningful alliances with our students, language-rich and safe environments, and effective, targeted instruction that moves students up into success! This is not easy, but it is doable!

As teachers become more cognizant of their own deep cultural lens, and the perspective that comes with it, and learn about the deep cultural lens of the students they have the privilege of teaching, they can build the needed alliances with the students and families, and build lessons that are relevant and important to their students. We can help with this!

Teachers are working hard, and are not seeing the return for their work that they so desperately need. We have had the privilege of seeing the joy come back to teachers in their craft as they connect with students and watch learning happen!

In our summer PD, we want to inspired and encourage teachers with the knowledge and strategies needed to be responsive, and then we want to support teachers on an ongoing basis to create responsive teaching habits so that being a responsive teacher is not “one more thing to do” but the just the way they lead students into learning.

Being a responsive teacher brings results, and while test scores are not the ultimate measure, these scores were very telling with some of the teachers we worked with last year!

So, as a reminder, responsive teaching is understanding the students’ cultural background and experiences to be able to build an alliance, create a language rich and safe environment for learning, and create and facilitate targeted, student-centered, differentiated and scaffolded lessons that move students towards independence, and ultimately success.

If this is your goal for your campus, we’d love to partner with you! Click here for information or to schedule a call to talk about your goals for your campus! And if you’d like to hear a little more about creating a responsive classroom, check out our latest podcast episode: Teaching By Reaching: What is A Responsive Classroom?