Responsibility is one of the five key CARES skills underlying Responsive Classroom practice that help build positive proactive attributes in children both socially and academically. The other four are cooperation, assertion, empathy, and self-control.

Standing up to the bullying and other mean and hurtful behavior that children see happening in their classrooms, in the cafeteria, on the playground, in the neighborhood, or even among brothers and sisters at home requires the ability to act responsibly in the face of such behavior.

Children can only learn responsibility by being given responsibility. Children learn responsibility early in their lives by being taught certain routines: picking out clothes in the morning, getting dressed, putting the dirty clothes in the basket, washing their faces, clearing the table, getting their things ready for school, and so on.

At home, siblings engage in what is called “other-regulation” by teaching each other the rules and responsibilities (even if they are not always following them so well themselves). “That’s not where your dirty socks, go!” an older sibling says. “Put your dishes in the sink, Amanda,” commands a four-year-old to her two-year-old sister. In school, older children often tattle to their teachers about children they see breaking the rules. This, too, is a form of other regulation. Children who tattle are letting their teachers know that they know the responsible thing to do and have seen other children not being responsible. Young children constantly other-regulate each other about rules of the games they play and roles they are playing in pretend play. “That’s what the rescue worker does – not the policeman,” says one five-year-old to another at the scene of a pretend accident on the playground. “Direct traffic,” she orders.

Preschool, elementary, and middle school programs that build opportunities and expectations for practical responsibility into students’ daily lives help to increase the chances for improved social and academic skills and decrease the chances for problem behaviors, including bullying.

These opportunities and expectations include:

• Doing daily jobs in the classroom: line leaders, homework-pass-in checkers, lunch count-first count for teacher, late greeters for tardy students, classroom curators for bulletin board displays, morning meeting activity leaders, middle school advisory team leaders, etc.
• Learning, from the earliest age, what Montessori called “practical life” tasks such as putting out snacks, collecting counting cubes and putting them away, etc.
• Working substantially with diverse partners on early academic activities such as math games, puzzles, reading, writing, and listening to a story at the listening center and then talking about it together. Heavy dosages of partner activity is a foundational prerequisite to teaching responsibility in both small groups and the whole class, and is where children learn the basics of individual responsibility they will carry out on the playground and in the cafeteria.
• Completing meaningful, reasonable, differentiated homework that is used in classroom instruction, corrected, improved, and duly noted by teachers so that students truly learn to be responsible for and respected for completing and learning from their homework. Giving “busy work” homework that is not paid attention to the next day actually models irresponsibility. Imitation is the proof that children have their eyes on their teachers.
• Assuming schoolwide positions such as helping to lead all-school assemblies; reading morning announcements; serving on student councils; acting as special events helpers for field days, book fairs, parent nights, community service fund raisers, community dinners, etc.

As children develop stronger responsibility, they can take on the more advanced skills of problem-solving and conflict resolution in the classroom, and peer mediation schoolwide. Without a solid foundation built on daily practice in early grades, however, these approaches will often seem like triage and reactive crisis mode interventions. The best intervention of all, of course, is having a school- and community-wide approach to teaching social and academic responsibility from the start.