What does it mean to be RESPONSIVE?

In the early years and primary grades, the term responsive has become a standard descriptor for effective educators.   At the same time, it seems rare that anyone ever attempts to define this word.  On first thought, we could say that being responsive means literally responding to children’s many communications in a present, thorough and fully-engaged way.  That is, when they serve, we return, and we return well.  But what does that look like?  And aren’t there other ways of responding that have nothing to do with active communication? 

For me, being responsive involves reading and responding effectively to myriad layered intra-personal (inside the self!), inter-personal (between or among people), and contextual factors.  Responding is complex.  As a starting point, I would suggest that effective responding interweaves the following:

• our logical thoughts about what we are observing and experiencing in real-time,
• our personal intuition and what our bodies are telling us moment-to-moment,
• our professional knowledge, professional experience, and life experience,
• longer term narrative understandings of specific children, families, and communities that we have built through relationship and collaborative exchange.

To make this more practical, allow me to unpack some standard ways to be responsive:

Getting down to a child’s level and working hard to interpret what they are communicating

• Using a child’s body language, affect, and gestures, as well as contextual information (like your knowledge of what happened earlier in the day, or what is happening at home) to help you figure out what they are trying to tell you, or what their behavior is conveying
• Effectively paraphrasing what they are telling you so they know they have made an impact
• Answering any questions they may have or supporting them in their interest or investigation (e.g. “Oh!  The baby doll’s bottle is missing?  Let’s go look for it.”)

Example This and the following example provided by Conestoga College Lab School Educator Shannon Bertin, RECE.  Names of children and families are pseudonyms.  Infant Cassie is on the brink of a language explosion.  Educator Shannon knows this, and takes every opportunity to help her learn new words.  Sitting at the table, Educator Shannon is using a marker. Cassie leans across the table, reaching for it and saying “mar! mar!”.  Shannon says clearly “Mar-Ker”, using one finger to point at her own mouth, encouraging Cassie to pay attention to the way her mouth moves when making the sounds.  Cassie mimics Shannon, pointing at her own mouth and trying again: “mar, mar, mar”.  The next day at drop off, Cassie’s mom mentions to Shannon – “A few times last night Cassie was asking for something but I wasn’t sure if it was sign language? – she would point at her mouth and say “mar”.  Shannon recounted the story of sitting at the table with Cassie and practicing the word marker.  “Oh!” said Cassie’s mom.  “She was asking for a marker. That makes sense.”

Changing your approach, the volume of your voice, or the movements of your body to suit a child’s needs or preferences

• If a child has been woken up before they are ready and seems to be in a tender mood, moving more slowly and using a gentler voice as you put their shoes back on.
• Due to temperament or sensory processing style, certain children may need more input and more intensity to stay engaged in an activity.  Once you learn this about a child, you might increase the volume of your voice and use a cheerful rhyme or chant to help them learn the steps involved with washing their hands or scraping their plate after lunch.

Mirroring a child’s affect (feeling state) back to them

• If a child is devastated about a special toy falling through a grate and landing where it is not able to be retrieved, it won’t help to immediately try to redirect them them or cheer them up.  Instead, you might enter the feeling with the child.  You might look at them face to face with an expression of concern, and use a tone of voice that conveys you understand how upset they are. 

Noticing children’s cues and responding

• Throughout the day, children will display nonverbal cues that give you clues as to what is going on in their inner world. Some cues are obvious and straightforward – if a child’s hands feel cold to the touch they may need a sweater, if they keep trying to drink from a sensory bottle they may need a drink of water. Other cues require educators to carefully attune to a child or get to know their patterns.  For examples, a child may, lean forward slightly when they want you to put them down, pull on their ear when they are tired, continually look towards the parking lot if they are missing a parent, breathe heavily and move faster when they are frustrated, hungry, or tired.
• Some cues are sent body-to-body: being close to a child may cause your body to understand the nature of their discomfort or needs at a somatic level.  When a nonspeaking child has seemed ‘off’ all morning, sometimes the first step is attuning to the child — allowing your body/using your intuition to get a sense of what the child is feeling. Next you can hypothesize on the ‘why’ behind it. 
• Especially with infants, the dance of responsivity is body-to-body.  One infant may like to be held facing in, another facing out.  And there may be subtle differences in where they prefer most of their weight to be borne (where they prefer to feel the pressure of the hand/arm holding them up.  One infant may tolerate diaper changes better if the whole thing goes by quickly, another may become dysregulated unless the caregiver moves slowly and gently.  Most of these subtleties flow as the caregiver’s body reads the subtle responses of the infant’s body, requiring presence and embodiment. 

It is not enough to notice these cues, we need to respond by:

• Communicating to the child what we notice “Kyree, are you looking for Mama?  Yes, the parking lot is where Mama parks her car and gets out to come get Kyree!  Mama is coming to pick Kyree up after work.  Mama misses you too!” 
• Helping the child get his needs met/coregulating with the child “Do you want to go look at Baba’s picture on the wall and give it a kiss?” “Is Jalil thirsty?  Let’s get you a drink of water Jalil!”
• Holding an infant the way he prefers.  Adapting supports that we ourselves need in order to do so comfortably (e.g. sitting on the floor, a rocking chair or yoga ball)

Learning about a child’s unique family profile and using this information in your daily curriculum planning and interactions with the child

• Learning the names of each child’s siblings and family members so you can talk with them about the important people in their life (Members of the 2SLGBTQ+ community may use unique parent names instead of “Mom” and “Dad”, and families may use parent names in their home language.  It is important to use the same language the family does.)
• What is unique about the family?  Do they have pets, hobbies, cultural practices that they share together?  It will be difficult to effectively respond to a child unless you continually exchange information with the family.
• Keeping up with what the family is navigating in life.  Are they moving, changing shifts at work, are there acute or chronic traumas to bear in their community or home country? 

Discovering and being responsive to a child’s unique stressors and sensory profile

• Different children find different things stressful.  Some children are sensitive to light or visual stimuli, others to texture.  Some children need a lot of personal space.  They might move through the world with caution. They still need the sensory input from activities like going down a slide or rocking in a wooden boat, but they will likely need more support from us to be able to engage in them. Other children seem to want to bang their bodies into everyone and everything.  Behind the scenes, their developing sensory processing systems are demanding more intense sensory input. Getting to know a child’s sensory needs (do they giggle when you sing loudly and bounce them on your knee?  Or would they prefer a gentle song sung in a quiet voice?) is the first step towards adapting your interactions to suit that child best. For more on sensory processing I recommend this article: Sensory Processing Issues Explained. *I don’t love the word ‘issues’. I think we all have very different sensory processing systems and I don’t think we should categorize some versions of processing as inherently atypical. However most reputable sources that really dig into developing sensory processing still use a medical/deficit model..
• Some children experience a lot of discomfort when trying new things (sliding down the slide or tasting a new food), or when routines deviate from the norm, correlating with a need for adults to create consistency and provide extra support through the unexpected, while other children dive right into brand new experiences, correlating with a need for more excitement/variety to stay content throughout the day. This point is referring to the approach/withdrawal dimension of temperament. For more on temperament, and how to navigate differences in temperament between caregiver and child, try Head Start’s Infant Toddler Temperament Tool
• When you learn about a child’s unique stressors, you can communicate them to the child “Jackson I see you turning away from the lunch table and kicking your feet.  You look a little bit worried.  But guess what, there are noodles for lunch!  Yay!  I think you love noodles, don’t you?  And Jackson — you can choose what to eat. It is your choice what to put in your body.” Or “Emma, is the music too loud for your ears?”
• Remove stressors for the child.  Turn down the music or reassure the child, change clothing to something more tolerable.  For many children not moving enough is physiologically stressful.  Provide ongoing/constant opportunities for movement. I recommend every ECE read Stuart Shanker’s Self-Reg cover to cover

Responding to childrens’ interests and what they are motivated to practice right now

• Be like a detective, searching for clues about the child’s interests, and/or what abilities the child is motivated to practice right now.  If a preschooler notices every airplane that flies overhead and stares at it until it’s out of view, perhaps they’re interested in aviation.  You could bring in some materials or plan some activities around airplanes.  If an infant spends most of the day pulling herself up to a standing position, she may be extra motivated right now to learn to stand and walk.  You could set up the play space so that the furniture is low and sturdy enough for the child to pull up.
• Finding the ‘crest of a child’s unfolding’ helps us individualize our programming and room set up.  Sometimes this is obvious and other times it requires more careful attention and attunement in order to notice what a child is working on.  For example, when lots of rapid change is happening in the gross motor arena, it is obvious.  The child goes from pulling up to walking, or walking to running and kicking a ball.  Communication is similar.  The child goes from babbling and gesturing to sounding out a word.  It is obvious.  Other changes may require us to pay more careful attention in order to track (see example below).      

Example This and the previous example provided by Conestoga College Lab School Educator Shannon Bertin, RECE.  Names of children and families are pseudonyms. Infant ECE Shannon watches 16-month-old Kyle reach up to a shelf towards a fabric bag containing a few small finger puppets.  As he grasps the corner of the bag and pulls it towards himself he seems to notice that a box of tissues sitting on top of the bag is coming down with it.  After pausing for a moment, he pushes the tissue box backwards and then successfully pulls the bag of puppets down off the shelf, avoiding a wayward tissue box hitting him in the face.  Shannon is excited by this observation and interested in what Kyle is practicing in the cognitive domain.  She thinks about executive functioning – how he was able to hold different pieces of information in his mind, whether verbal or non-verbal packets of information (can I get the puppets by pulling the bag down – the tissue box is on top of the bag – the tissue box could fall on me – that could hurt my face – first I should move the tissue box, then the bag, etc. – and move them around in his working memory as he decided what to do, and in what order.  Shannon thinks about activities and materials she can plan to meet Kyle on the crest of his unfolding.

Responding to behaviour as communication

• Hypothesizing as to what need or desire is being communicated through a child’s behavior.  If a child is continually sabotaging play episodes with peers (e.g. running away with the ball, refusing to follow the ‘storyline’ of the dramatic play), could they a) have a desire to be the centre of attention? b) be struggling with underlying frustrations that are soothed when peers (and teachers) move into a state of higher intensity?
• With the help of practices like reflective practice and collaboration with colleagues and families, we can understand how to meet underlying needs and desires.   

Example  Precious (pseudonym) was once a JK in my before-and-after kindergarten program.  During her first few weeks of settling in, she reached for me to physically pick her up countless times a day – a request that I usually cheerfully fulfilled.  Precious was much smaller and lighter than your average Junior Kindergartener.  It was nothing for me to carry her on one hip as I set up some creative supplies or sit her on my lap as I watched her peers do a floor puzzle.  Many of the other ECEs and OCTs (it was a large school) would disagree with me carrying a kindergarten-aged child.  They would claim things like: it’s unfair to the others; that she needs to learn that she’s ‘a big girl now and how to act like one’; or that she’ll get used to it and want to be picked up more and more.  For me I took her continual reaching out as communicating to me that she needed more cuddles and physical contact.  I believe that children have their own inner wisdom – in the sense that – they know what they personally need for their conditions for growth and well-being.  And, in contrast to my colleague’s worry that Precious would come to expect this ‘special treatment’ and want it more and more, she actually reached out to be picked up less and less often as the months and years went by.

This concludes my initial attempt to unpack the term responsive (LOL).  Please add anything else you can think of! Just comment on this blog post or on my social media with your ideas, edits, or additions!

The very nature of the concept of responsivity is changeable, labile, shape-shifting. Taking a deep dive into how to be responsive is perhaps less like finding a definition and more like turning a jewel. As we continually turn the jewel of responsivity, more and more nuances of responding appear.

In my next post I will more deeply consider:

• what it might look like to be intra- and inter-personally responsive and responsible in our collaborations with other adult
• being responsive to families as well as to children
• cultural responsivity as couched within responsiveness as a whole
• ways in which the term “responsive” might be thought of as a replacement for the term “best practice” and why.

References

Arky, B. (n.d.). Sensory processing issues explained. Child Mind Institute. Retrieved May 22, 2025, from https://childmind.org/article/sensory-processing-issues-explained/

Center for Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation. (n.d.). The Infant Toddler Temperament Tool (IT3): Supporting a “Goodness of Fit”. Head Start. Retrieved May 22, 2025, from https://headstart.gov/mental-health/article/infant-toddler-temperament-tool-it3-supporting-goodness-fit

Shanker, S. (2016). Self-reg: How to help your child (and you) break the stress cycle and successfully engage with life. Penguin Random House Canada.