Thanks so much for your question!  And sorry for the slow response!  We at DSC are big fans of Responsive Classroom (RC) and find it to be one of the most philosophically aligned approaches to what we do.  We often reference RC ourselves (you’d see all the books on my shelves) and work with many schools that use both approaches.  CSC's Class Meetings are actually mentioned in the NEFC Morning Meetings book. Caring School Community holds many of the same core principles that you are familiar with in Responsive Classroom, such as:

• Creating respectful, caring places to learn
• Developing and practicing social skills
• Ensuring that schools create the foundation of social skills and safety for all students
• Meeting students basic needs for autonomy, belonging, and competence
• Helping us know our students and their families more fully

CSC and RC have common goals of attending to students’ social and academic growth simultaneously. CSC and RC compliment each other in many ways. After spending a week at the Responsive Classroom institute a few summers ago, I spent some time thinking about how these two programs can support each other.  CSC provides explicit tools and lesson plans.  RC helps extend this language throughout the school day. RC provides team builders and daily routines to build relationships and a sense of fun.  CSC structures class meetings to solve problems, reflect, and make decisions as a class. RC helps teachers think about how to organize the classroom and choices throughout the day to support students. CSC takes community building beyond the classroom to cross-age relationships and family involvement.

Why might teachers use both programs? CSC provides some explicit, concrete lessons for teachers to facilitate.  We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to build empathy and understanding, construct open-ended questions, use cooperative structures, and increase authentic student voice.  We’ve also thought about how to support this sense of connectedness and belonging outside the classroom and cross-grade and with families and the larger community. Many teachers have found this a nice compliment to what RC provides – a daily morning meeting structure, ways to think through classroom procedures and discipline that are still caring and developmentally appropriate, and ways to continue to build relationships.

One teacher I know in Florida who uses both programs shared this experience with me: “ I infuse Caring Schools Community (CSC) within the Responsive Classroom (RC) approach as they are both founded on similar guiding principals. Each supports the other, and therefore offers me, the teacher, tremendous support in fostering the academic, social, and ethical goals I have for my students.  I use Morning Meeting daily to build a safe community of learners, friends, and thinkers, which later on serves as a very supportive structure to hold our CSC class meetings. The RC approach focuses the power of teacher language and CSC offers useful prompts to help scaffold my own development in this area. The Cross-Age Buddy Activities are such a useful tool to extend the sense of belonging, significance, and fun outside the walls of our classroom and into a part of the larger school community. I often use the Homeside Activities to bridge the gap and to build that Home-School connection. Students LOVE bringing part of our school family into their own homes!”

Please let me know if you have other questions and how we can help you as you dig into CSC.   I hear your pain of trying to develop community when teachers aren’t on the same page.   We’ll soon have a new “Resources for Implementation page” that might be useful to you.  The red Teacher’s Calendar also helps provide the bigger picture of what Class Meetings are trying to accomplish and some of the facilitation techniques that can have great impact beyond the meetings when used throughout the school day.

Good luck with the rest of your year and thanks again for your question!

Ginger