Classroom Community
I believe that a true classroom community is built upon positive and authentic student-teacher relationships. If students and teachers have a strong relationship that is fostered through mutual respect and genuine connection, students will want to be in the classroom and engage as learners. I devote a large amount of my time during the school day to ensuring that my students feel comfortable with me and know that I value them as learners and as individuals.
In the classroom, I foster strong student-teacher relationships by providing consistent, explicit procedures and expectations for students, and by scheduling time every day to engage with students during both academic and non-academic times. In my teaching internship, I saw how balancing consistent expectations with strong relationships created a positive and productive environment where students were excited to come to school every day.
I enforce consistent expectations by collaborating with my students to create norms for the classroom and for specific activities we engage in daily. After creating these norms, I consistently reference them and utilize positive reinforcement to encourage students to comply with our classroom norms. Throughout the school day I seek out these positive moments so that I can write positive referrals, emails home, and give classwide rewards like watching a Flocabulary video.
I also spend time building connections between students and myself so that everyone feels like a valued member in our classroom. By building relationships outside of academic times, I am able to help students feel important and noticed in our classroom community. I also utilize morning meeting and peer collaboration to encourage positive student interactions that make every student feel safe and respected in our classroom.
Collective Classroom Norms
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Throughout the school year, I create collaborative norms for activities and the classroom as a whole. In this photo, a student is pictured writing down their ideas for what a great classroom looks like at the beginning of the year. By allowing students to discuss what is important for them I feel there is a collective ownership over the expectations we create for the classroom. It also provides an agreed upon set of norms that I can reference when setting expectations for an activity or redirecting student behaviors. As this method has been successful in the past, I use it often to introduce behavior expectations for new activities and to keep expectations consistent as the school year progresses.
Beat the Teacher
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When I find that students are struggling to exhibit our classroom norms, especially during whole group instruction, I will utilize the Beat the Teacher game to encourage positive behaviors. I will explicitly state the norms that I am looking for and give students a point every time I see them exhibiting these behaviors. Whenever I saw students engaging in inappropriate behavior, I would win a point. In this example, I was going over a skill check assessment that students struggled to complete. By the end of the lesson, the students beat me and earned five minutes of Prodigy after lunch! As this classroom management has such a strong focus on positive reinforcement, I consistently employ it in my teaching practices and plan to use it often in my future classroom.
Tell it to the Book
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In my classroom, students are encouraged to not tattle on their peers. After discussing examples of tattling versus telling the teacher something important, I introduce the Tattle Book. In this book, students can draw or write a note to the teacher about something they want me to know. Using this method, their voice is heard, but they do not damage relationships with their peers by tattling.
Above the book, I put posters showing examples of tattling vs. telling the teacher so that students can evaluate if they need to tell me or the book. At the end of every day, I check the book to see if I have any notes, and I follow-up if the note discusses a serious event that must be addressed. By allowing students to have this outlet, I have found that students are able to maintain trusting and positive relationships with one another, while also having a dedicated space to get their thoughts and feelings communicated to me.
