Responsive Teaching (RT) is a, comprehensive parent-mediated intervention curriculum for children from birth to 6 years of age who have, or are at-risk for, child development and social emotional problems. This curriculum addresses three areas of development: cognition, communication, and social emotional functioning.

This relationship-based intervention curriculum has been used successfully to enhance the development and social emotional functioning of children with a wide range of developmental problems or risks including:

• Autism Spectrum Disorders
• Down Syndrome
• Williams Syndrome
• Cerebral Palsy
• Developmental Delays with Unknown Etiologies
• Behavior Disorders
• Infant Mental Health Disorders
• Speech and Language Delays
• Children who are Adopted
• Children from Multi-Risk Families

RT was developed through the resources of 11 multi-year research, demonstration and outreach projects that were awarded to the authors over the past 25 years from the Office of Special Education Programs of the United States Department of Education. These projects were used to develop and revise the curriculum, evaluate its effectiveness with a variety of children and families, and disseminate and field test this model. The final design for this curriculum was based upon feedback from parents and professionals about what they needed to implement a relationship-based child development intervention.

RT has several features that make it ideally suited for contemporary early intervention, parent education, infant mental health and early childhood special education programs:

• Parent-Mediated – RT supports and enhances parents’ role in enhancing their children’s development and well-being. RT can be used as a comprehensive intervention model for program that work primarily with parents and their children or it can be used as the parent intervention component for programs that provide a wide array of services such as classroom or clinical based services.
• Contemporary Child Development Theory – RT procedures derived from research in parent child interaction with. The developmental learning model that RT is based upon is derived from Constructivist theories of cognitive development, Communication theories of language development, and Attachment Theory and other developmental theories of social emotional development.
• Transdisciplinary / Multidisciplinary Service Model - can be used by individuals or multidisciplinary teams including Teachers, Developmental Specialists, Speech Pathologists, Psychologists, Social Workers, Parent Educators, Nurses.

The Responsive Teaching Curriculum includes:

• 66 Responsive Teaching Strategies for enhancing parent-child interaction in daily routine activities
• 16 Pivotal Behaviors that can be used as intervention objectives for addressing children‘s developmental needs
• More than 130 Discussion Points that help to explain the Responsive Teaching rationale
• Informal assessment procedures for evaluating children’s progress in acquiring Pivotal Behavior Objectives
• A flexible, menu-based planning guide for addressing children’s individualized needs in three developmental domains
• A Computerized Responsive Teaching Planning and Tracking Program that reduces the time needed for planning and record keeping

Research with Responsive Teaching indicates that after one year of weekly RT sessions 50 children with developmental problems, including autism and severe behavior disorders, attained dramatic increases in development:

60% - Cognition
167% - Expressive Language
138% - Receptive language

The 20 children who were diagnosed with autism and other severe behavior disorders also made significant improvement in their social emotional functioning:

21% - Self Regulation
28% - Social Competence
37% - Atypical Behaviors

Responsive Teaching was developed by Gerald Mahoney, Ph.D. and James MacDonald, CCC-SLP, Ph.D.