Building Classroom Community
Written By Abena Sey
December 26, 2022
An essential component to drive learning forward is prioritizing building a positive classroom community. This can be achieved through your intentions in how your classroom environment and culture will foster positive relationships between peers and help students develop an attitude that is optimal for learning. Learning happens when students’ social and emotional needs for belonging and safety are met. Here are 3 ways to build a positive classroom community to help you achieve these goals for your students.
1 - Create a warm and welcoming classroom environment through the choices you make when decorating your classroom, including the visuals you put in and around the room, how desks are arranged, and how your students’ belongings are organized. Visuals, such as posters, are helpful in achieving this goal. Your visuals can serve multiple purposes to help build your classroom culture, such as providing students reminders about classroom procedures and routines, expectations and/or the learning content. Visuals are great tools to help students achieve independence and problem solve. It also provides them a sense of calm, because they will know what is expected without you having to remind them verbally. To help students feel like the classroom is truly their own and feel like they have contributed to the beauty of your classroom post your students’ work. This is an opportunity to help students know that they are included in the classroom community, and they can feel a sense of pride in their work. Helping students manage their emotions is important, and you can do so through how you organize the space in your classroom. To foster emotional self-regulation, create a calming space in your room. This is an area in your classroom students can go to relieve anxiety or work through their emotions. You can place calming tools and resources in this space as options to help students become regulated and ready to learn.
2 - Teach students to have a growth mindset. Learning begins when students have the correct attitude towards it, and this involves having a growth mindset, i.e., understanding that learning is a process and making mistakes is a part of it. We can learn from our mistakes, and can approach challenges knowing that we can overcome them with effort and strategies to meet these challenges. Teachers can use activities that involve a little risk, such as slight academic challenges or helping students overcome personal fears within the task (e.g., public speaking, or working effectively as a team, etc.) but offer great reward to students, like a boost in their self-confidence and skills learned through the task. Keeping track of their progress is also confidence boosting. Create ways to track and celebrate personal and academic progress. Lead by example. You can share your learning journey or thought process when learning, and acknowledge when you have made mistakes. Use language that teaches them not to be overly critical and defensive, but rather reflective and determined to progress. Using visuals and storybooks / movies as examples can help with this as well.
3 - Teach students how to effectively problem-solve. In a classroom, there are bound to be conflicts, especially when students are getting to know one another or are acting on their needs without consideration of their peers’ needs. While conflict is to be expected, how students solve them will impact your classroom community. Peaceful and respectful conflict resolution is something that has to be taught. Students need to understand the expectations for how they will treat one another, and what they can do when conflict arises. There are occasions where you should expect your students to solve problems as peers and times when they will need your help. I call minor conflicts “kid problems,” because they can be solved by the children themselves and major conflicts “teacher problems,” because they require an adult’s intervention. When students approach you with conflicts that require your input, use this as an opportunity to teach them how to solve conflicts independently in the future. To start, help students take responsibility for their part in the conflict. This will help them learn accountability. Apologies are important, but they should be done with sincerity, and this is something that must be taught as well. Give your students the language to express sincerity in their apology, including sincere delivery of the apology. You can also help the recipient of the apology with the language to express their discontentment with what happened and how to forgive. You want to teach them that what happened is not okay, but that they are choosing to forgive so that they can rid themselves of resentment and anger towards the person. Help students make plans to do better for next time, and help them to salvage the friendship or choose other peers to play with. This is a process that takes practice for your students and for yourself as the facilitator of the conflict resolution. The ultimate goal is that students can solve their problems independently and respectfully in the future. On a side note, a teacher should also do their due diligence to inform parents about incidents that required your intervention and share what you did to help their child. Keep the lines of communication open so that parents know that their child was supported, and that you are doing your part to maintain a safe and equitable classroom.
There you have it - 3 ways that you can intentionally foster learning through your efforts to build a positive classroom environment. Meeting your students’ social and emotional needs can help them progress towards their learning goals, and help you have a classroom that runs on the love of learning and love and respect for one other.