Patrick Dowd: My Evolving Understanding for Establishing a Positive Classroom Climate

BLOG: The importance Establishing a Positive, Caring and Concerned Classroom Climate When I think about how I situate my classroom to be a place that is positive, where students feel cared for as important members of the community and is a place where their welfare (their safety -emotional, physical and social) is paramount I think of relationships. In my own life I establish relationships with others by sharing something about myself and then inviting others to share about themselves and in so doing making connections. So in my sharing I reveal that I am a white, middle-class, male teacher with a heritage that stretches back to the country of Ireland. Part of who I am, my identity is wrapped up in this part of me and my families past. My family reinforces my identity through narratives. For example, my great grandparents and told my parents about their migrations from Ireland at the turn of the 19th century in search of more opportunities. I hear the stories about the discrimination they faced upon arriving in the city of Philadelphia, at a time when the Irish were considered unclean and less than human. I also learned about the opportunities they took advantage of along with the struggles that made life better for me now. These family historical narratives are part of what makes me who I am, playing a role in shaping my beliefs, values, goals and ideas (in essence what I think of as my identity). I am aware that my identity also comes with a set of cultural biases and I try to be meta-cognitive of this fact as an educator who works with many students from a wide range of backgrounds. For this reason, (as mentioned in Activity 1 on establishing positive relationships with students) I start my year with an in-depth PowerPoint about me, my background and interests all to let students know there is more to me than just my role as a teacher. In other words, I know that a student’s culture, race, gender and ethnicity are important parts of who they are and I try and connect students to how I see that as important by sharing as much of my own background and identity as possible. Also, by modelling this sharing it makes it easier when I ask the students to share about themselves, about their families, cultural roots and present interests. At the beginning of each school year, in order to prepare to share authentically with my students, I need to take stock of my past year and do some reflection; I practice being a reflective practitioner (RP). By RPing about my previous teaching year, I mean reflecting on all of the stuff that makes me myself as a teacher (those beliefs, values, goals and ideas) some of which are directly connected to my cultural background and some of which are not. By unpacking my teaching identity in this way (by asking myself what lens I presently see the world through) I become more ready to call myself out on beliefs that are grounded in cultural bias or false stereotypes and come out the other end a more open and empathetic educator. I become better able to hear the students’ stories of who they are and what makes them, themselves (honouring student experiences wherever they come from). By working on getting clear about who I am and asking students to be open to sharing who they are is key to establishing positive relationships in a classroom. I believe this openness in the classroom leads to an emotionally safer environment and also provides more opportunities for richer academic lessons too. To ground my ideas about a positive, caring and concerned classroom lets take the example of the bullied 9th grade student “Gina” from group 4’s case study from Activity 2 (Growing Wireless 2018). In this example, the student received hatful texts from a former friend because they both liked the same boy. The situation escalated and Gina felt paralyzed by the hate she was receiving online. In the intervention the girls were coached into talking through their differences but the friendship between the girls never healed. I would like to think that in creating a positive, caring and concerned classroom environment, this bullying example would not have happened in the first place. For instance, as mentioned in the guide Critical Practices for Anti-Bias Education (Teaching Tolerance 2016) a classroom needs to support all the diversity of students which may be a part of it. One way to do this is by “honouring students experiences”. Honouring student experiences includes being able to put oneself in another person’s shoes. If Gina and her friend had put themselves in each other’s shoes there would not have been a need to send hurtful texts about the boy. Instead, they would have been empathetic to what each was feeling and had the skill to talk it through them, face to face, and not hurtfully, virtually. Thus, for me a culturally sensitive, safe and caring classroom begins and ends with establishing strong relationships with and between students. A good metaphor to use in establishing these relationships is to think of the classroom as a tribe. It’s a tribe that happens 5 times a week for a 50-minute period, yet it’s still a tribe. My tribes are in the sciences and I have a classroom tribe of students in Biology, one in Earth Science and one in Environmental Science. To establish a place that is safe and inclusive for all the different types of students in my science classes I need to be open to ‘Dialogue’ that is respectful and in which they listen to one another (Teaching Tolerance 2016, p.10). It’s a classroom that is designed so that small groups work together to solve scientific questions (an inclusive project based learning classroom design). It’s a classroom where I teach them Accountable Talk (Michaels 1981), a strategy for speaking that teaches student social and emotional skills. Finally it’s a classroom where we appreciate our differences and biases are unpacked and examined not acted upon. Again it’s the relationships we build in my classroom through establishing a strong community of learners from the beginning of the year that can lead to a successful establishment of a learning tribe. Works Cited: Growing Wireless (2018, June). News – Case Studies on Cyberbullying, “Hateful Texting”. Retrieved from http://www.growingwireless.com/be-aware/cyberbullying/news-case-studies-on-cyberbullying Marzano, R. J. (2007). The art and science of teaching. Alexandria, VA: ASCD. Michaels, Sarah (1981). “Sharing time”: Children's narrative styles and differential access to literacy. Language in society 10 (3), 423-442. Teaching Tolerance (2016). Critical Practices for Anti-Bias Education. The Southern Poverty Law Center.