EDUCATION AND URBAN SOCIETY / May 2002Horsch et al. / RESPONSIVE CLASSROO APPROACH THE RESPONSIVE CLASSROOM APPROACH A Caring, Respectful School Environment as a Context for Development

Most classrooms have students with behavioral problems, but such students tend to be more prevalent in low-income urban neighborhoods, and teachers in these schools often do not have adequate training or resources to address the children’s social-emotional needs. During the Schools Project—a partnership between the Erikson Institute and nine public schools in low-income Chicago neighborhoods—some of the partner schools addressed this dilemma by imple-menting the Responsive Classroom approach, created by the Northeast Foundation for Children to support students ’ social-emotional development. No other intervention during the project ended up looking so different from school to school. At one extreme, an entire school community was transformed. At the other extreme, a school came to see the approach as an ivory-tower pro-gram unsuited for inner-city children. This article briefly describes the Responsive Classroom approach and conveys the range of implementation experiences in the Schools Project through four case histories. The Schools Project was an 11-year partnership between the Erikson Insti-tute and nine public elementary schools in low-income Chicago neighbor-hoods. The goal of the project was to optimize learning opportunities for young inner-city children through a variety of school-based interventions, particularly the introduction of developmentally appropriate curricula and instruction. Erikson staff provided ongoing technical assistance to teachers and administrators in the partner schools, creating opportunities for profes-sional development and then working with teachers to implement the new ideas and techniques in their classrooms and evaluate their effectiveness