Creating Safe & Responsive Climates | ECM Element 1

Session Description:  

This element looks at the overall social and emotional quality of classrooms, the relationships between teachers and children, the expression of emotions, and how teachers establish and promote a positive climate for learning through their daily interactions with children. To create a safe and responsive climate, teachers make connections with children, respond to their needs, interests, and ideas, and take every opportunity to build trust and provide reassurance, to develop the nurturing relationships that support learning.

Why does it matter?

Research indicates that relationships with caring, responsive adults, and positive experiences in the first years of life build strong brain architecture, leading to children’s joy-filled learning and healthy development. A child’s brain construction can be severely affected by adverse experiences and trauma. A loving, nurturing adult can serve as a very powerful antidote against this. Children learn and thrive in spaces where they feel safe, included, loved, and connected, where they are a part of a classroom community. In the absence of loving, supportive, and responsive interactions, there can be no effective and meaningful support of language and literacy development.