Responsive Teaching strategies do not promote children’s development exclusively by teaching them each of the developmental skills or behaviors that they are not able to do.

Rather, Responsive Teaching Strategies such as “Imitate my child” or “Take one turn and wait” focus more on teaching children some other types of very critical developmental behaviors. They teach children to develop the “habit” of becoming more actively involved in everything they do through behaviors such as Exploring, Practicing, Joint Attending and Intentional Communication. These are the very behaviors that all children must to do in order to develop their cognitive, communication and social-emotional abilities. We call these Pivotal Behaviors because these processes are absolutely essential to promoting learning that will truly make a difference in the way children think, communicate with others, and engage in more mature, reciprocal social interactions.

RT strategies such as “Translate my child’s actions, feeling or intentions into words”, “Expand to show my child the next developmental step”, or “Follow my child’s lead” are very effective “child directed strategies” that teach new skills and developmental behaviors by modeling behaviors that are directly related to what children are doing, by expanding on children’s behavior, and by helping children discover new information or skills that are directly related to the activities that interest them the most. But if children only learn new behaviors, and do not use them spontaneously in their routine activities, these behaviors have not really made a difference in enhancing their developmental functioning.

The skills and behaviors that children learn in the early childhood period are seldom mature, adult-like forms of behavior. Rather they are approximations of adult behavior that typically progress through a lengthy series of transformations. For example, children typically develop language through a process of first learning to use vocalizations to communicate, next learning to combine one word utterances with vocalizations, next combining phrases that have more than one word with fewer non verbal vocalizations, and so forth until children reach the point where they have fluent adult language forms. The developmental learning process takes years, not months or days. Learning new skills and behaviors is clearly an important part of this process, but it is only one piece of the entire developmental learning process. In addition to acquiring new skills and behaviors, at least five other activities are involved in developmental learning. These include:

• Becoming proficient with a newly learned behavior
• Understanding the uses of newly learned behaviors
• Understanding the limitations of newly learned behaviors
• Discovering other behaviors or concepts that are more effective than the newly learned behavior
• Giving up the old behavior to make room for the new behavior

That is why nearly 90% of the Responsive Teaching strategies focus more on promoting Pivotal Behaviors than on teaching discrete developmental or functional skills and behaviors. While RT strategies can be effective in promoting the initial acquisition of new discrete skills and behaviors, the impact that these strategies have on children’s development is primarily related to their impact on children’s frequency that children use pivotal behaviors that are so critical to the other five components of developmental learning.

Because pivotal behaviors are so critical to children’s developmental learning, and because this is what RT strategies do best, the intervention objectives in Responsive Teaching are those pivotal behaviors that are particularly crucial to each of the three domains of developmental functioning throughout the entire early childhood period.

The Responsive Teaching curriculum is organized around 16 pivotal behaviors which are listed below. The Pivotal Behavior wizard is included in the curriculum to help parents and professionals identify pivotal behaviors that are ideal intervention objectives for a particular child.

Responsive Teaching Pivotal Behaviors