There are many aspects that need to be considered in order to ensure a positive experience for our students in the classroom. Having a positive climate in your classroom is only on of them, but certainly a crucial one for many different reasons.
As educators, this is more than a requirement or good practice, I believe it is our obligation towards our students to offer them a space where they will be set for success, a physical space and a community environment in which they can feel valued, respected, and motivated to participate and to grow.
Research demonstrates the positive impact in student learning gained from a positive environment and a positive student-teacher relationship, both extremely linked to each other. Students who are valued, and who have a voice, are students who can concentrate on what is important. Coming to school everyday, actually feeling an positive interest on being there, can certainly make the difference in a learning experience.
There is also the preventive aspect of a positive climate. Classrooms in which the relationships are healthy, positive, and in which the spaces and attitudes have been purposefully set for students to participate and have a voice, are naturally safe spaces in which bullying situations and challenging behaviours, are significantly less frequent, and more efficiently resolved when they present themselves.
The end goal is to turn our classroom into communities, in which we all should be taken care of each other. We cannot forget this is one of the most powerful ways to deal with bullying, setting the responsibility in the hands of everybody, and empowering the bystander to take action. Trust, and a feeling of being respected is fundamental in bullying prevention.
But these are not the only reasons. We spend an average of 8 hours with our students every day. We all share more time together at school that we often do with our own families. With this in mind, how would you like the space you will spend the majority of your day look like?, and what kind of environment would you like to be in day after day? Certainly, a positive one sounds much better, if only, for your own peace of mind.
This brings us to one of the aspects that we should consider when designing and planning for a positive learning space, you!. We are as well a key component of our classrooms, and evaluating and being conscious of who we are, our strengths and aspects to improve, will as well make a big different in how our classroom will be setup. Throughout my 11 years as a teacher, I have been blessed with the opportunity to teach in very interesting classrooms. I have had several classes in which I have had almost as many nationalities as students in the classroom. I myself am an expat, and the mother of what is known as a third culture kid. All of these aspects are fundamental to the definition and the actions that I need to take in order to build the positive space I want for my students.
I am currently teaching in Beijing, China, in a private international school with English as the first language of instruction. The student population is composed in its majority by ELL students. I am Colombian, which means that the language in which I teach, is also my second language. Additionally, I am currently making the effort of learning Chinese as my third language. I have found this to be an advantage in my classroom, because I feel that being an English language learner myself, I am aware and able to understand the process and the struggles my students go through.
This is just an example, but I hope it illustrates my point. Understanding your own cultural background, the unique combinations of circumstances that makes you who you are, should probably be the starting point to later be able to understand those same unique, varied circumstances that make up each one of your students. And knowing, understanding, and more importantly, embracing that uniqueness is a key component of a healthy, positive community within your classroom. There is no way your students will be respectful and open to each other, if you are not constantly modelling that behaviour yourself.
But what are those actions or those behaviours that I should be modelling to my students? How exactly do I show them respect for their cultural backgrounds, and how can I help them to build a positive environment for all of us? The following are a series of strategies that I have used or plan to use in my own classroom.
- Value student’s identity: This is normally done with the little things you do everyday, like asking them for help to pronounce their names correctly. Showing them how to pronounce yours, allowing yourself to be a learner as well and learn from them, from their languages and traditions and cultures. There’s a school in Beijing that offers Chinese lessons for foreign teachers in the afternoon. The incredible powerful part of this story, is that those lessons are taught by the same MS and HS students. It is programs like this, easily implementable, the ones that build positive school culture and positive teacher-student relationships.
- Make the physical space their own: Organising and decorating my classroom is one of my teacher nightmares. This is one of the strategies I will certainly implement in my next school year. Having students help you on the decision making process, locating resources and classroom displays in places that make sense to them. Students should have a voice in the space they will be sharing with you, that sends the immediate message that the space will be ours, not mine.
- Building a culture of dialogue: We need to be willing to listen more than we talk, and this simple statement is challenging for teachers everywhere. When we open ourselves to listen, when we accept the possibility for our students to teach us from their own knowledge and experiences, we are teaching them to do the same with others, to share and to be humble, and open to listen to others as well.
- Set behaviour issues as opportunities for learning: Behaviour management is a delicate process of finding harmony between structure, and empathy. Students should be encouraged to help since the beginning in the definition of what they want their class to be like, by helping structure what those common agreements between us as a community should be. After that, each behaviour issue that arises should be address in a way that show students companion and understanding, and that helps them see opportunities for growth from them.
- Speaking Up: Another very important behaviour we should model to students is that of a up stander, who does not stay quiet in the face of injustice, or when stereotypes or bias behaviour is observed. We are also responsible for not allowing this kind of behaviour from anyone, not even or specially from other adults.
Continued growth as professionals, keeping ourselves updated, building a community ourselves with our colleges and the society around us, are some of the other strategies we can implement and that will be example for our students.