Fostering a Culture of Communication: Let’s talk about what helps us learn (3 of 4)
One of the worst schools I have ever had the chance to work in- they expected the teachers to be ticking off standards as being covered in the first week of school ( I left this school while in the probation period- see article- Know when to fold ‘em for details). The teachers were expected to keep a strict schedule and there was no wiggle room for struggle or pushing ahead when students already had a good understanding of a concept. It was the worst place I ever worked and I knew in that first week because of the lack of belief that building relationships in the classroom are as essential if not more so than the standards being taught. For me the relationships have been the most important part- and why I spend a great deal of effort on creating a nurturing environment upfront. One of the lessons (lacking a better word at the moment) I like to start off which I have adapted from Jo Boaler’s book on Mathematical Mindsets. I use the lesson for talking about Math but also for the other subjects on creating environments for how we best learn.
The idea is to have your class break into small groups and discuss first what are the things that they don’t like when learning math. “What happens sometimes in the classroom that makes it harder for you to do math?” (I’ll do this for Math and also a more general poster as well in another class time). The children brainstorm and then we all share out what our group has said. We keep a list of these things and make a poster of the things we don’t like. Then I have the students get together again and we brainstorm the things we do like and that are helpful when we are trying to learn. Again we share out and make a poster.
Discussions and negotiations.
While making these posters as a class it allows us time to share what things we maybe don’t like- for example when someone shouts out “oh this is easy!” because maybe it wasn’t easy for us and it makes us not want to try. This allows the students to start talking about some things that can make them feel insecure when learning which is good information for us the teachers, but also good information for classmates that are a part of the learning team. We want everyone on the team to feel they are in their best learning environment and so discussing what that environment looks like when we start the year is a good idea. We then keep these posters up and displayed for the year so that we can refer back to remind each other what kind of environment we have decided was good or bad for us to learn in.
Having this group poster made of our preferences is great as a reminder and also allows other students to point to it and self-advocate rather than involve the teacher. This is closely tied to the Essential Agreements that we do as well that I talked about in the previous post in this series.
