How Can We Create Effective Learning Environments With and For Students?
In Understanding Youth: Adolescent Development for Educators (2010), Nakkula and Toshalis describe optimal development as “the high one receives from functioning at the edge of our capacities for a sustained period of time” (p. 61). From observations in my fieldwork placement, I have become interested in the effects of relationships students have with each other and teachers on learning, as well as the factors that influence the formation of these relationships. Building an environment based on teamwork, it seems, can play an important role in achieving a state of optimal development in adolescents, as is seen in the case study of “Lorena,” who discovers a flow state when she joins a rowing team, and then improves her academic performance by transferring her newfound work ethic to the classroom. This seems to coincide with theories about possibility development, which suggest interventions based on identifying and fostering students’ strengths to be more effective at improving academic achievement than deficit-focused remediation techniques.
According to possibility development theory, when a student with a history of struggling in school is made to recognize his/her assets, (s)he begins to imagine a future of possible success, rather than of prescribed failure. If, on the other hand, the student is made to focus only on his/her shortcomings, (s)he is likely to experience frustrations that may worsen, rather than improve his/her academic performance. In my field work, I have observed my classroom mentor taking a caring (and careful) stance toward students who have been identified as “at risk” of behavioral problems. I was able to determine which students fall into this category by looking at the school’s Student Information System (SIS), which is an online database that lists, among other information about students, details of their disciplinary histories. On the SIS, if a student has received detentions or other disciplinary referrals known as “pink slips,” there is either an icon of a person behind bars or a picture of a pink slip next to his/her name, as well as the number of overall detentions and/or pink slips (s)he has received. Clicking on a student’s name opens up more specific information, including the date of each referral, the teacher who assigned it and his/her reason for it, and the corresponding consequence(s).
Of the two of my classroom mentor’s 10th grade English classes that I have been focusing on for this inquiry, I was not surprised that more of the students in her second period non-magnet class have received disciplinary referrals than in her third period magnet class. Not only do second period students tend to be more outgoing than their third period counterparts, but several second period students started out the year with residual behavior contracts (which my classroom mentor has to sign every day indicating that the student showed up on time, behaved in class, and completed all assigned work). While the magnet students in third period, as a whole, seem to be used to the behavioral norms expected of them, some students in second period do sometimes act in ways that might be labeled “inappropriate” - calling out answers without raising their hands and getting up from their seats without asking for permission. Indeed, it is mostly the students who I have observed engaging in such “misbehaviors” who I found to have disciplinary records on the SIS. It could be argued that while these misbehaviors are minor in and of themselves, if left unchecked, they might lead to further behaviors that are less ambiguously bad.
However, as I spend more time with the two groups of students, I have begun to notice that these “disciplinary cases” are also among the most eager class participants. To me, this suggests that whether an “at risk” student becomes disruptive or an active contributor in class depends, to a certain extent, on the teacher’s approach. Based on my observations so far, I would argue that my classroom mentor has provided a productive, structured outlet that embraces, rather than suppresses, the very energy that gets these students into trouble with other teachers. One example of this can be seen in the recent “physicalizing the text” activity our classes did with a passage from The Taming of the Shrew. For this lesson, students were given four lines from the play in which Petruchio tries to woo Kate (or anger her, as some students suggested) by making flattering comments that he and the audience know not to be true. Divided into groups of four, students were to come up with a motion to represent each word in the passage (for example, “you” might be captured by a pointing-forward motion, and “faith” could be a gesture resembling praying). This gave students a safe and entertaining space to explore the meaning behind Shakespeare’s often intimidating language.
As I wandered around the room observing the various groups, I thought I would find some students engaging in off-topic conversations, but I didn’t. The following exchange is representative of the types of conversations I overheard:
Student A: What does bonny mean?
Student B: Like good or pretty.
Student A: Oh! So we can go like this [flipping her hair]!
At one point, the math teacher from next door came over to ask my classroom mentor to keep it down. She obliged, but communicated the need for adjustment to the students both as an option and in positive terms, saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, you are doing such a good job that the math students next door can’t hear. So keep doing what you’re doing, but try whispering.” Not only does this example serve as evidence that a noisy classroom does not automatically mean an out-of-control classroom; it also seems to suggest that if we as teachers show students that we trust them and expect them to do well, they will be more inclined to be invested in class and stay on task. If, however, we anticipate misbehaviors, it seems likely to become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Granted, when it comes to adversarial relationships between students and teachers, it can at times be hard to determine “which came first” - the student’s defiant attitude or the teacher’s disciplinarian stance. But this is exactly why it is important to set a positive tone from the beginning of one’s relationship with a given student that is independent of the relationships that student may have with other teachers.
A good place to start in in establishing cooperative relationships with students is to set clear expectations and procedures from the outset, as I have observed my classroom mentor do. On the first day of school, once students had settled into their seats, she passed out a printout (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2, below) that outlined the classroom rules, the materials students would need for the course, grading policies, format guidelines for writing assignments (accompanied by a note that plagiarism would not be tolerated), and procedures and policies for late work and absences. She went over the main points, soliciting student input and fielding questions, before discussing in detail the procedure for the daily “Do Now” activity.
She explained that, every day, as they arrive, students would retrieve their Do Now notebook from the bin in the back of the room labeled with the appropriate class period, then get started on the Do Now, which would be projected on the Smart Board along with the rest of the day’s agenda. They would have 5-7 minutes to complete this assignment, after which, she would go around the room and stamp students’ work that had been completed. If students didn’t do the Do Now, they wouldn’t get a stamp for that day. At the end of the marking period, she would tally up the total possible stamps, and the Do Now grade would be calculated by dividing a student’s number of stamps by the total possible number. Anticipating anxieties, she acknowledged that there were valid reasons why someone might not earn a stamp on a given day (the student might be absent or have an assembly to attend). To avoid unfairly punishing students for such circumstances, she would subtract a few stamps from the total possible number.
On the second day of school, some students had not completed the Do Now by the time she went around distributing stamps (they had been talking, arrived late, or merely forgot). When she passed them without giving them a stamp, a couple of them rushed to finish and then waved their hands in the air to get her attention. She did not return to students she had passed, saying it was time to move on, but also reminding them of the cushion she would be building into the grading system. She also mentioned that she would rotate where in the room she started her checking process, so that certain students would not always get more or less time than others to finish their work.
All in all, this struck me as an effective way to set a tone of both fairness and student accountability in the classroom. Consistency in following through on established norms seems to play a pivotal role in sustaining order and fostering a productive learning environment. But if the point of the Do Now is not to catch students not doing their work, but rather to get them focused and ready to work, what is to be done about students who, for various reasons might struggle with this activity? Perhaps a student has to travel from a class on the other side of the building and has trouble arriving on time (it is a big building). Or there may be a student that is a hard worker, but also a slow worker by nature. How do we differentiate in such instances without sending a message of partiality? In response to my concerns, my classroom mentor admitted she was wary of certain students who routinely failed to receive their Do Now stamp developing a defeatist attitude. For such students, she might privately let them know that she would accommodate them by checking their work last every day, conveying to them that she cared about their success, without disrupting the overall order of the classroom.
As presented by Nakkula and Toshalis, adolescence is characterized by a shift from a family-centered social world to one in which relationships with peers play a dominant role. As a teacher, it is important to keep this in mind when correcting disruptive behavior, especially when doing so has social repercussions for the student. “Like anyone else, youth want to be engaged as thinking, feeling, valued members of a community in which they are understood as stakeholders” (2010, p. 81). Furthermore, we must realize that disruptive behavior in the classroom is not random; often, it reveals information about a student’s need to be recognized or significant within the classroom community. This aligns with the need to avoid disciplinary measures that may humiliate students. Looking at the SIS, I noticed that one of the second period students had been referred for a detention because, according to the referring teacher, “When I mentioned the dirty look she was making she stated that she can make whatever face she wants.” The reason this comment jumped out at me is that the girl to whom it was referring has a condition that results in a “cross-eyed” expression. While, from my experience, her expressions can indeed be difficult to decipher, I can imagine that this might be something she is self-conscious about, and I can understand why she might react less than politely to a teacher who calls attention to it in front of her peers. It is cases like this that make me wonder to what extent teachers ought to try to understand perceived misbehaviors from students before taking disciplinary action.
My classroom mentor has not had an issue with this particular student, but one day another student got a pass to go to the bathroom at the beginning of class and did not return until class was almost over. Rather than confront her in front of the entire class, my classroom mentor asked her to take her seat and continued with the lesson. After class, she spoke to the student privately, and it was revealed that the reason for her prolonged absence was that she had gotten her period unexpectedly and had to find a new pair of pants to change into. By addressing the matter out of sight from the rest of the class, my classroom mentor avoided shaming the student for what was already a humiliating experience. In so doing, she also prevented unnecessary resentment on the part of the student that might get in the way of future learning.
At the same time that adolescents are forming deeper relationships with their peers, they are also developing a greater sense of empathy (in fact, the two processes feed each other). Instead of just considering their own perspectives, adolescents begin to forge relationships based on reciprocity and even mutuality - that is, they begin to understand the benefits of give-and-take, and can come to care about another person’s needs or interests regardless of how these might correlate with their own personal agendas. With this in mind, it seems to the benefit of creating a caring learning environment that secondary teachers do not act as unilaterally in their approach to discipline and classroom management as they might with less mature students. In Middle and Secondary Classroom Management: Lessons from Research and Practice (2011), Weinstein and Novodvorsky show that secondary students often choose to behave or misbehave according to their perceptions of their teachers’ respect for them (or lack thereof). Some of the ways that students can tell a teacher respects them include: the teacher keeps grades private, the teacher is prepared, the teacher is not dismissive of student questions, the teacher disciplines students privately, the teacher welcomes student input, and the teacher insists students respect each other.
According to Weinstein and Novodvorsky, “In order to build community, we have to create opportunities for students to learn about one another and to discover the ways in which they are both different and similar” (2011, p. 73). To be sure, the layout of a classroom affects the level of student interaction that takes place. Of the five functions of the classroom setting, as identified by Weinstein and Novodvorsky - security and shelter, social contact, symbolic identification, task instrumentality, and pleasure - social contact has been the most salient in the design of the physical space in my classroom mentor’s room. Student desks are arranged in three rows of three groups of four (see Figure 2), except when there is a test or quiz, in which instances the desks are rotated to face the front of the room in rows. The grouped seating arrangement allows for peer interaction, which is something that my classroom mentor values and frequently works into her lesson plans. One student mentioned to me in an interview that school is the only time she gets to spend with her friends, since her parents are strict and do not let her go out. For students like this, having a classroom oriented toward group work shows that you are interested in working with, rather than against, their individual needs. Even for students who do get to socialize outside of school, having peer interaction in the classroom makes it a place they are more likely to want to be, which is important given the fact that sometimes just getting students to show up for class can be a challenge.
At the same time, having students seated facing each other can sometimes be distracting. If students in a group already know each other, they will feel comfortable (which is important), but this may lead to side conversations and joking around. With adolescents, there is also the issue of flirting. Having observed “footsie” and other types of touching between students, I wonder if there is any way for a teacher to take advantage of, rather than be hindered by students’ natural urges to flirt and “have fun” (not that learning is not fun). What are the affordances and constraints of allowing students to pick their own seats, rather than assigning them?
Moving forward, I’m interested in cooperative learning and how social contact with peers influences the classroom environment, specifically how group work facilitates or impedes learning. Indeed, there seems to be a fine line between student interaction supporting learning and being disruptive. Where it becomes disruptive, rather than discouraging it altogether and isolating students, it seems beneficial to seek ways of re-channeling what seems to be an almost universal desire within adolescents to relate to each other. When it comes to student tendencies to flirt or show off, perhaps in and of themselves indicative of healthy developmental risk taking and identity formation, how do teachers keep students focused on learning without discouraging important aspects of personal growth? Is group work appropriate for certain types of activities, but not for others? What variables (skill levels, personality traits, gender) ought to be considered when assigning groups? What are the effects of heterogenous versus homogenous groupings? What impact do factors such as group size have on the effectiveness of a group? How do we assess individual performance within group settings? Finally, what role does group work play in fostering student autonomy?
According to possibility development theory, when a student with a history of struggling in school is made to recognize his/her assets, (s)he begins to imagine a future of possible success, rather than of prescribed failure. If, on the other hand, the student is made to focus only on his/her shortcomings, (s)he is likely to experience frustrations that may worsen, rather than improve his/her academic performance. In my field work, I have observed my classroom mentor taking a caring (and careful) stance toward students who have been identified as “at risk” of behavioral problems. I was able to determine which students fall into this category by looking at the school’s Student Information System (SIS), which is an online database that lists, among other information about students, details of their disciplinary histories. On the SIS, if a student has received detentions or other disciplinary referrals known as “pink slips,” there is either an icon of a person behind bars or a picture of a pink slip next to his/her name, as well as the number of overall detentions and/or pink slips (s)he has received. Clicking on a student’s name opens up more specific information, including the date of each referral, the teacher who assigned it and his/her reason for it, and the corresponding consequence(s).
Of the two of my classroom mentor’s 10th grade English classes that I have been focusing on for this inquiry, I was not surprised that more of the students in her second period non-magnet class have received disciplinary referrals than in her third period magnet class. Not only do second period students tend to be more outgoing than their third period counterparts, but several second period students started out the year with residual behavior contracts (which my classroom mentor has to sign every day indicating that the student showed up on time, behaved in class, and completed all assigned work). While the magnet students in third period, as a whole, seem to be used to the behavioral norms expected of them, some students in second period do sometimes act in ways that might be labeled “inappropriate” - calling out answers without raising their hands and getting up from their seats without asking for permission. Indeed, it is mostly the students who I have observed engaging in such “misbehaviors” who I found to have disciplinary records on the SIS. It could be argued that while these misbehaviors are minor in and of themselves, if left unchecked, they might lead to further behaviors that are less ambiguously bad.
However, as I spend more time with the two groups of students, I have begun to notice that these “disciplinary cases” are also among the most eager class participants. To me, this suggests that whether an “at risk” student becomes disruptive or an active contributor in class depends, to a certain extent, on the teacher’s approach. Based on my observations so far, I would argue that my classroom mentor has provided a productive, structured outlet that embraces, rather than suppresses, the very energy that gets these students into trouble with other teachers. One example of this can be seen in the recent “physicalizing the text” activity our classes did with a passage from The Taming of the Shrew. For this lesson, students were given four lines from the play in which Petruchio tries to woo Kate (or anger her, as some students suggested) by making flattering comments that he and the audience know not to be true. Divided into groups of four, students were to come up with a motion to represent each word in the passage (for example, “you” might be captured by a pointing-forward motion, and “faith” could be a gesture resembling praying). This gave students a safe and entertaining space to explore the meaning behind Shakespeare’s often intimidating language.
As I wandered around the room observing the various groups, I thought I would find some students engaging in off-topic conversations, but I didn’t. The following exchange is representative of the types of conversations I overheard:
Student A: What does bonny mean?
Student B: Like good or pretty.
Student A: Oh! So we can go like this [flipping her hair]!
At one point, the math teacher from next door came over to ask my classroom mentor to keep it down. She obliged, but communicated the need for adjustment to the students both as an option and in positive terms, saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, you are doing such a good job that the math students next door can’t hear. So keep doing what you’re doing, but try whispering.” Not only does this example serve as evidence that a noisy classroom does not automatically mean an out-of-control classroom; it also seems to suggest that if we as teachers show students that we trust them and expect them to do well, they will be more inclined to be invested in class and stay on task. If, however, we anticipate misbehaviors, it seems likely to become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Granted, when it comes to adversarial relationships between students and teachers, it can at times be hard to determine “which came first” - the student’s defiant attitude or the teacher’s disciplinarian stance. But this is exactly why it is important to set a positive tone from the beginning of one’s relationship with a given student that is independent of the relationships that student may have with other teachers.
A good place to start in in establishing cooperative relationships with students is to set clear expectations and procedures from the outset, as I have observed my classroom mentor do. On the first day of school, once students had settled into their seats, she passed out a printout (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2, below) that outlined the classroom rules, the materials students would need for the course, grading policies, format guidelines for writing assignments (accompanied by a note that plagiarism would not be tolerated), and procedures and policies for late work and absences. She went over the main points, soliciting student input and fielding questions, before discussing in detail the procedure for the daily “Do Now” activity.
She explained that, every day, as they arrive, students would retrieve their Do Now notebook from the bin in the back of the room labeled with the appropriate class period, then get started on the Do Now, which would be projected on the Smart Board along with the rest of the day’s agenda. They would have 5-7 minutes to complete this assignment, after which, she would go around the room and stamp students’ work that had been completed. If students didn’t do the Do Now, they wouldn’t get a stamp for that day. At the end of the marking period, she would tally up the total possible stamps, and the Do Now grade would be calculated by dividing a student’s number of stamps by the total possible number. Anticipating anxieties, she acknowledged that there were valid reasons why someone might not earn a stamp on a given day (the student might be absent or have an assembly to attend). To avoid unfairly punishing students for such circumstances, she would subtract a few stamps from the total possible number.
On the second day of school, some students had not completed the Do Now by the time she went around distributing stamps (they had been talking, arrived late, or merely forgot). When she passed them without giving them a stamp, a couple of them rushed to finish and then waved their hands in the air to get her attention. She did not return to students she had passed, saying it was time to move on, but also reminding them of the cushion she would be building into the grading system. She also mentioned that she would rotate where in the room she started her checking process, so that certain students would not always get more or less time than others to finish their work.
All in all, this struck me as an effective way to set a tone of both fairness and student accountability in the classroom. Consistency in following through on established norms seems to play a pivotal role in sustaining order and fostering a productive learning environment. But if the point of the Do Now is not to catch students not doing their work, but rather to get them focused and ready to work, what is to be done about students who, for various reasons might struggle with this activity? Perhaps a student has to travel from a class on the other side of the building and has trouble arriving on time (it is a big building). Or there may be a student that is a hard worker, but also a slow worker by nature. How do we differentiate in such instances without sending a message of partiality? In response to my concerns, my classroom mentor admitted she was wary of certain students who routinely failed to receive their Do Now stamp developing a defeatist attitude. For such students, she might privately let them know that she would accommodate them by checking their work last every day, conveying to them that she cared about their success, without disrupting the overall order of the classroom.
As presented by Nakkula and Toshalis, adolescence is characterized by a shift from a family-centered social world to one in which relationships with peers play a dominant role. As a teacher, it is important to keep this in mind when correcting disruptive behavior, especially when doing so has social repercussions for the student. “Like anyone else, youth want to be engaged as thinking, feeling, valued members of a community in which they are understood as stakeholders” (2010, p. 81). Furthermore, we must realize that disruptive behavior in the classroom is not random; often, it reveals information about a student’s need to be recognized or significant within the classroom community. This aligns with the need to avoid disciplinary measures that may humiliate students. Looking at the SIS, I noticed that one of the second period students had been referred for a detention because, according to the referring teacher, “When I mentioned the dirty look she was making she stated that she can make whatever face she wants.” The reason this comment jumped out at me is that the girl to whom it was referring has a condition that results in a “cross-eyed” expression. While, from my experience, her expressions can indeed be difficult to decipher, I can imagine that this might be something she is self-conscious about, and I can understand why she might react less than politely to a teacher who calls attention to it in front of her peers. It is cases like this that make me wonder to what extent teachers ought to try to understand perceived misbehaviors from students before taking disciplinary action.
My classroom mentor has not had an issue with this particular student, but one day another student got a pass to go to the bathroom at the beginning of class and did not return until class was almost over. Rather than confront her in front of the entire class, my classroom mentor asked her to take her seat and continued with the lesson. After class, she spoke to the student privately, and it was revealed that the reason for her prolonged absence was that she had gotten her period unexpectedly and had to find a new pair of pants to change into. By addressing the matter out of sight from the rest of the class, my classroom mentor avoided shaming the student for what was already a humiliating experience. In so doing, she also prevented unnecessary resentment on the part of the student that might get in the way of future learning.
At the same time that adolescents are forming deeper relationships with their peers, they are also developing a greater sense of empathy (in fact, the two processes feed each other). Instead of just considering their own perspectives, adolescents begin to forge relationships based on reciprocity and even mutuality - that is, they begin to understand the benefits of give-and-take, and can come to care about another person’s needs or interests regardless of how these might correlate with their own personal agendas. With this in mind, it seems to the benefit of creating a caring learning environment that secondary teachers do not act as unilaterally in their approach to discipline and classroom management as they might with less mature students. In Middle and Secondary Classroom Management: Lessons from Research and Practice (2011), Weinstein and Novodvorsky show that secondary students often choose to behave or misbehave according to their perceptions of their teachers’ respect for them (or lack thereof). Some of the ways that students can tell a teacher respects them include: the teacher keeps grades private, the teacher is prepared, the teacher is not dismissive of student questions, the teacher disciplines students privately, the teacher welcomes student input, and the teacher insists students respect each other.
According to Weinstein and Novodvorsky, “In order to build community, we have to create opportunities for students to learn about one another and to discover the ways in which they are both different and similar” (2011, p. 73). To be sure, the layout of a classroom affects the level of student interaction that takes place. Of the five functions of the classroom setting, as identified by Weinstein and Novodvorsky - security and shelter, social contact, symbolic identification, task instrumentality, and pleasure - social contact has been the most salient in the design of the physical space in my classroom mentor’s room. Student desks are arranged in three rows of three groups of four (see Figure 2), except when there is a test or quiz, in which instances the desks are rotated to face the front of the room in rows. The grouped seating arrangement allows for peer interaction, which is something that my classroom mentor values and frequently works into her lesson plans. One student mentioned to me in an interview that school is the only time she gets to spend with her friends, since her parents are strict and do not let her go out. For students like this, having a classroom oriented toward group work shows that you are interested in working with, rather than against, their individual needs. Even for students who do get to socialize outside of school, having peer interaction in the classroom makes it a place they are more likely to want to be, which is important given the fact that sometimes just getting students to show up for class can be a challenge.
At the same time, having students seated facing each other can sometimes be distracting. If students in a group already know each other, they will feel comfortable (which is important), but this may lead to side conversations and joking around. With adolescents, there is also the issue of flirting. Having observed “footsie” and other types of touching between students, I wonder if there is any way for a teacher to take advantage of, rather than be hindered by students’ natural urges to flirt and “have fun” (not that learning is not fun). What are the affordances and constraints of allowing students to pick their own seats, rather than assigning them?
Moving forward, I’m interested in cooperative learning and how social contact with peers influences the classroom environment, specifically how group work facilitates or impedes learning. Indeed, there seems to be a fine line between student interaction supporting learning and being disruptive. Where it becomes disruptive, rather than discouraging it altogether and isolating students, it seems beneficial to seek ways of re-channeling what seems to be an almost universal desire within adolescents to relate to each other. When it comes to student tendencies to flirt or show off, perhaps in and of themselves indicative of healthy developmental risk taking and identity formation, how do teachers keep students focused on learning without discouraging important aspects of personal growth? Is group work appropriate for certain types of activities, but not for others? What variables (skill levels, personality traits, gender) ought to be considered when assigning groups? What are the effects of heterogenous versus homogenous groupings? What impact do factors such as group size have on the effectiveness of a group? How do we assess individual performance within group settings? Finally, what role does group work play in fostering student autonomy?