Community Building
Whole Group Instruction
Community building is an instructional strategy I use to create a welcoming and inclusive learning environment. I use the morning meeting every day to build community. I start each day with an emotion check in, where students share, either with the whole group, with a partner, or with themselves, how they are feeling and why. I display a feelings chart to help students develop their emotion-based language and connect the word to the facial expression. This develops relationships amongst the whole class as well as between individual students. I use the morning message to ask students questions and engage them in conversation that allows them an opportunity to share their own perspective and experiences.
We start each morning as a class on the carpet. Students take 15 seconds to check in with themselves and think about how they are feeling and why. Students then share full group or with a partner. When students are able to self-monitor their feelings and their needs, they will be able to do what they need to do or ask for what they need in order to be ready to learn. When students are feeling overwhelmed or dealing with strong emotions, it is harder for them to focus and participate. Giving a students a chance to share not only helps strengthen relationships between peers, it also allows me an opportunity to hear what my students need and make adjustments to help support them.
Asking questions in the morning message helps engage students with the learning task as well as develop relationships between students. When students share their ideas and hear that others in the classroom experience or think similar things, it helps them see their peers as closer to them and develop a deeper sense of of community in the classroom. When students feel a part of the community they are less likely to act in ways that disrupt the learning environment. This helps the classroom run more efficiently and effectively.
Celebrating Diversity
I am fortunate enough to work at a school with a truly diverse community of students. The majority of the students at my school speak a language other than English at home. To celebrate this diversity, I worked with three of my colleagues to create a year-long plan for integrating culturally responsive books into classrooms across the school. Our administration supported our efforts and agreed to purchase one book for every classroom for each month of the plan. The plan below outlines shows the books we suggested for each month. I work with the reading specialists at my school to create two lesson plans, one for primary grades and one for intermediate grades, to accompany the book.
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I also worked with two of my colleagues to create a culturally responsive Read Across America week that celebrates multiple aspects of our students' identities. The presentation linked below shows a week long plan for whole group lessons that celebrate diverse experiences and identities. The images below show my students' work writing about their home country. This experience allowed students to not just share their experiences in their learning, but also share their story with their classmates. The week of lessons strengthened our learning community and deeply engaged students in the activities.
Safe Space
My school requires teachers to have a color-chart clip system in their classroom. This system has the colors purple (excellent), green (good), yellow (one warning), orange (two warnings), red (time outside of the classroom), and blue (office). This system was not culturally responsive and did not teach my students any of the skills they would need to understand why the choices they made were hurtful and what the impact of their behavior truly was. I changed my color clip system to be more responsive to students emotions and needs. This has helped students develop a deeper understanding of how their actions impact the community rather than focusing on just 'doing the right thing.' This change in system included the implementation of a safe space. The safe space is a corner of the classroom students can go to to help them calm down, feel safe, and prepare to return to the learning.
One of the most poignant and helpful quotes I have heard about teaching is “they’re not giving you a hard time, they’re having a hard time.” I have learned to shift my focus from what I as the teacher am experiencing to what they as a child are experiencing and what they need. Thinking about student behaviors in the context of their life and their lived experience helps me address students with more empathy and compassion. I created my color chart to reflect this. The chart has become an emotional check in rather than punitive, providing students wil steps to take to help them calm down and get themselves ready to return to the community. We will never fully understand our students’ experiences. It is our responsibility to develop relationships with students built on mutual-respect and with the intention and practice of seeing students for the whole person they are, not just the sum of their behaviors. A quote that I find incredibly helpful when thinking about addressing problematic behaviors is, “problematic behaviors signal a student's lack of skill for responding appropriately to difficult situations” (Smith, Fisher, & Frey, 2015, p. 10). Behaviors do not define a child. It is my responsibility as a teacher to teach students how to respond to the ‘hard time’ they might be dealing with. The clip system and safe-space help in this.
References
Smith, D., Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2015). Better than carrots or sticks: Restorative practices for positive classroom management. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.