What is the Social Curriculum?
In every school and classroom, there is a social curriculum that acts as a guide for student behavior throughout the school day. Though rarely as explicit as the written materials that constitute the academic curriculum, it is no less important in determining whether a student succeeds. In hundreds of interactions a day, the correspondence between expectations, rules, and consequences allows students to learn each classroom's unique social curriculum. In less well-managed classrooms and schools, inconsistency among expectations, rules, and consequences provides less opportunity for learning the implicit expectations of the social curriculum, and may even give students conflicting messages about the appropriate way to behave in a given classroom or school situation.

For students who are sufficiently good observers, the "real rules" of the classroom or school are quickly learned. For others, however, understanding and behaving within the classroom’s social curriculum is difficult. Those students need explicit instruction in the social curriculum.

The Safe and Responsive Schools Framework
The Safe and Responsive Schools (SRS) Framework assists schools in implementing a comprehensive and preventive process for addressing school violence, and for improving student behavior at school. The SRS Framework also assists schools to teach the social curriculum to all students, focusing special attention on those students who need explicit instruction and structure to learn it. The process is intended to enable schools and school districts to develop a broader perspective on school safety, stressing comprehensive planning, prevention, and parent/community involvement. It incorporates our best knowledge of school-wide behavior planning in a comprehensive model of systems change in school violence prevention, discipline reform and behavior change.

Three Levels of Action
The Safe and Responsive Schools Framework emphasizes concern for student behavior and related interventions by suggesting that schools should have different sets of actions or strategies for each of these three groups of students:

* All students in school- promoting and supporting appropriate behavior.
* Students at risk for disruption or violence.
* Students with intense or chronic behavior problems.

While some strategies cut across these levels or tiers, they are helpful in organizing the kinds of prevention and intervention strategies schools should have in place. The levels are:

* Creating a Positive Climate promotes civility and teaches all students alternatives to violence with an emphasis on building a strong school community through increased caring, attentiveness, and feelings of belonging and support.
* Early Identification and Intervention identifies specific students who are at-risk for academic or behavioral difficulties through such methods as office referral information, absences or other data. Specific assistance is then provided for those students through programs such as mentoring, tutoring anger-management training programs in order to keep students who are at-risk from developing more serious problems.
* Effective Responses to serious or persistent behavior problems address the needs of students who are chronically disruptive, inappropriate or violent through increased disciplinary alternatives, behavior intervention plans, and alternative programs, as well as adequate preparations for school-wide crisis and extreme behavioral problems.

Guiding Assumptions of the Framework
With its focus on a planning process, using available resources, determining strengths and identifying needs, the Safe and Responsive Schools Framework differs from other school safety efforts focused on simply adding a new program or function. The SRS Framework focuses on creating a comprehensive view of violence prevention and behavior improvement, and provides a structure for planning and making systems change occur in a school.

Needs and Readiness
The framework makes several assumptions about schools’ needs and readiness for violence prevention and behavior improvement:
* Schools have Some Things in Place.
* Schools are Missing Some Pieces.
* The People in Schools are Motivated.
* Coordination and Integration are Needed.
* A Comprehensive Understanding is Lacking.
Positive Outcomes

Violence prevention efforts and activities can have positive effects on many other school goals and are connected to improvements in behavior and academic performance of all students:
* Violence is Preventable.
* Reducing Violence Reduces Other Negative Behaviors.
* Violence Prevention Enhances Positive Behaviors.
* Violence Prevention Enhances Academic Performance.

The Process of Change
Change is never easy, and change within schools will require understanding, motivation and sustained effort.
* There is No Quick Fix.
* Inside Knowledge, Thinking and Planning are Needed.
* Change Takes Time, Resources, and Coordinated Effort.

Conclusion
Together these assumptions about needs, outcomes and process suggest that it will be necessary to understand both major and minor threats to safety and civility in schools, so that we can develop a comprehensive and preventive approach to school safety. At first, such changes may seem small and dependent on a few individuals, but over time, a comprehensive process has the power to reshape the climate of our school communities.

For a more detailed discussion of these topics, see the Guide.