Category: Uncategorized

Establishing a Positive Classroom Climate

This week, one of the working groups in our cohort uploaded a video which shared entertainer Demi Lovato’s experience with bullying. In the story, she shares that when she was a child being picked on for her size and appearance, there was a little boy in her world who became her ally, but doing so ended up attracting the bullies to him as an object of attack, and he was so affected that he actually – at age 7 – committed suicide.  I’ve been haunted by this since I read it — the idea that a 7-year-old would reach a point of feeling so helpless and hopeless due to the words and actions of others that he would end his own life.  It’s devastating to contemplate.  Learning this story also came in the context of reading fellow cohort members’ personal experiences with bullying.  Although the details of each experience varied, the truth that ran through them all was how lasting the impact was on the person who experienced it.  These experiences happened some 10, 20 even 30 years ago, but the scars remain deeply fixed, and stories, when brought to mind, can still evoke an emotional and even visceral physical reaction of nausea and stomach pain — even now, all these year later.  These stories and their impact serve as a powerful reminder of just how crucial our role as educators is to respond immediately when we see or learn of these things happening, to interrupt and stop them, and to build in as many preventative measures as possible to keep them from happening in the first place.  We can begin to do this by fostering an environment where all students (and adults) feel valued, and where all people take responsibility for their own actions and for the overall health of the community.

One of the first steps a teacher can take in laying the groundwork of fostering an environment like this is to create a positive classroom environment for students.  As Robert J Marzano says in his work The Art and Science of Teaching, this is founded in teacher practices that communicate both guidance & control, and those which demonstrate concern & care.

Teacher practices that convey guidance and control are things like:

  • Being clear and up front about learning expectations, for the class and for each lesson
  • Being clear about classroom expectations for behavior
    • Helping students see these expectations in action via examples (stories, scenarios, even skits)
    • Posting expectations around the room for students to see
    • And then… calmly and dispassionately carrying out pre-communicated consequences when those expectations are not met. Marzano talks about the importance of a teacher applying consequences with “emotional objectivity” – not taking student disobedience personally, not applying aggressive teacher behaviors such as staring, glaring, hovering, pointing, or raising one’s voice

Teacher practices that communicate concern and care are:

  • Taking the time to learn about students individually. This could be done by:
    • Using student inventories to learn about student interests
    • Sending home a survey for families to share stories, strengths and areas of challenge for their students
    • Talking with family members when they are at school for events and conferences to learn more about what’s happening in students’ lives and what matters to them
  • Learning about events and news in the community –issues, happenings and local figures who are important to members of the community
  • Learning about and incorporating student interests into lessons. This could include things like pop culture figures and news, current movies, songs or tv shows that matter to kids
  • Greeting students individually – by name – as they enter the school and/or the classroom, and making small statements here and there like, “Great job in last night’s track meet,” or “it’s so good to see that you’re feeling better after being out sick,” etc.
  • Taking the time to interact with students individually and, when possible, to see them shine in some way (on a school sports team, in a performance, or even just noticing when they treat someone else with kindness and care)
  • Engaging in physical actions that convey care like: smiling, making eye contact, gently touching a shoulder or elbow, looking genuinely interested in what a student has to say, and laughing (appropriately) with students

A teacher can also think about the physical environment of the classroom and how it supports the atmosphere she is trying to create.  Positioning desks in a U-shape, or in groupings of 4-5 for instance, can help promote community and group work, creating opportunities for students to engage in project-based learning together, helping them to see learning as an opportunity for shared discovery, not as competition.

Also, when the teacher takes the time to care for the visual displays of the classroom (exhibiting student work, announcing upcoming birthdays, and teaching content through bulletin boards) she communicates care for her students, showing that she wants them to enjoy the environment they find themselves in every day.  Additionally, teachers can invest students in the care and production of the classroom itself by creating classroom jobs and roles that allow students to feel that they have some ownership of the space.  Students could do so by helping to create and hang bulletin board displays, helping to make student birthday cards, and helping to clean up parts of the space after school – the chalkboard, school supply areas, bookshelves, etc.

Doing all of the above can help begin to lay the foundation for students to feel valued and safe in their classroom environment every day.  But this is just the beginning.  A teacher – and a school – must commit to valuing social/emotional learning as a “core” subject – as much as any core academic area, knowing that paying attention to students’ social/emotional development will actually end up saving instructional time: social and emotional learning has been found to show even a 10% boost in student achievement academically.  Students who are comfortable in their academic environment – without feeling a threat of being misunderstood and bullied – are able to focus more of their time and attention on academic success.

A teacher must also consider how her students will find meaning in the content they are learning in class, and if they are able to see how it reflects and can apply to their lives outside of school.   Doing so requires the thoughtful planning of teachers to engage students in discussion of why they are learning.  For instance, when I teach Spanish, I can help students make real-world connections with how they can use the language now and throughout their lives – in their careers, their friendships and in their communities.

It is also critical that the teacher think about how her students’ history and culture is reflected (or not) in her instruction, in the texts she chooses, in the visual images she utilizes, and in the stories she shares.  ensure that students see themselves in the classroom, in images utilized in learning scenarios.

Reflection and planning is especially important when the teacher’s background differs from that of her students – she must think not only about how images and stories that reflect the backgrounds of students are – or are not – being incorporated into class.  The teacher must also regularly examine the beliefs she holds – consciously or unconsciously – about her students and about people who share the background of her students.  She must continually read, engage in professional development, and connect with peers who are examining their own cultural competence on a regular basis, ensuring that ideas large and small are examined before they become beliefs which do not serve the teacher or her students.

When it comes to engaging students in anti-bullying efforts– at the classroom or the school level – I love the work I saw in the videos for this week’s review on Edutopia.  In one of them called “Change Attitudes Toward Bullying: Be an Ally,” the school created a leadership program which engages about 8 student leaders, of many backgrounds and representative of many student interests and social groups, who serve as facilitators for fellow students, presenting them with skits and engaging them in discussion of what they saw, how it compares with real-world scenarios they’ve experienced at school, and helping them actively commit to community-building choices they’d like to make then next time they see something like this play out.  These facilitations happen in concert with a variety of strategies happening throughout the school, such as school-wide announcements about bullying, an anti-bullying t-short competition, and real-life mediations with counselors for students who have been involved in experiences of bullying.

In another video called “Smart Hearts: Social and Emotional Learning” the school chose to bring in a dynamic external facilitator, in this case a motivational speaker and comedian, who could strike up a conversation with all students from a somewhat neutral perspective, and with no previous baggage for any students.  It started the conversation freshly, and gave all students a common point of entry into learning about bullying.

There is a quote that occurs to me when I think about closing out this set of activities for Module 4.  It is from the Talmud and it says, “The day is long and there is much work to be done. You are not obligated to complete the work yourself, but neither are you free to withdraw from it.”  It’s an important one to contemplate in the face of such impactful work as building culture among students within a school community.  It seems that there is so much that can and must be done, and there is at least some small relief in knowing that we do not have to be perfect, we simply have to continue to actively engage and try, and to do so in partnership with many others, because the work, even though it will never be fully completed, matters so much.

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