RESPONSIVE TEACHING

Responsive Teaching is a comprehensive developmental intervention designed to be used with children up to six years of age who have, or are at-risk for, developmental and social emotional problems.

Responsive Teaching supports and enhances parents’ role in children's development and is grounded in contemporary child development theory. It aims to help children learn and use the pivotal behaviors that child development experts believe to be the processes that children use to attain higher levels of competence:

• Cognition

• Communication

• Social-emotional functioning

• Motivation.

Responsive Teaching includes four curriculum components:

• Intervention goals and objectives

• Intervention topics to help parents understand the desired pivotal behaviors

• Responsive teaching strategies

• Family action plans.

These Responsive Teaching curriculum is designed to encourage parents to use Responsive Teaching strategies in each interaction they have with their children to help them develop cognitive, language and social-emotional skills.

What does the research say?

One study looked at Responsive Teaching for parents and 20 young children aged two to five years who had pervasive developmental disorders including Autism (Mahoney and Perales 2005). Both children and their parents had weekly 1-hour sessions over a period of 8 to 14 months. It was found that the mothers' responsiveness to their children increased, as were the children's social cognitive and communication functioning and scores on standardized measures of social-emotional functioning. The authors did note that the study did not meet all the criteria that would qualify Responsive Teaching as an evidence-based treatment, and that further rigorous research was required.

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