Having a healthy community is one of the most important aspects of the classroom. There are four main components to a successful community within the classroom: Establishing a respectful tone, Establishing a bond with and among your students, Creating a community that values all students, and helping students resolve conflicts. In order to establish a respectful tone in my classroom I make sure that every single student is heard. I also make it a point to not belittle students responses nor ideas that they share within the classroom. I make it a point that all students voices are respected by myself and by their peers in order to ensure that the respectful tone is maintained throughout the classroom. In order to establish a bond with my students and among my students I participate in many extracurricular activities that involved students. I announce all of the home football games and volleyball games for my students. I DJ'd the homecoming dance for my students. I was a volunteer for our home cross country meet that was meant to help raise awareness for cancer. Not only do I participate in all of these activities so that I can acknowledge the achievements and work students put towards other activities outside my classroom, but I also take the time to ask students what they are doing outside of my class. I don't only have these conversations with students one to one, but I will take time out of class to ask students as a group what they did over the weekend or how a game went and so on. This allows students to talk as a group what they were doing and it gives them time to have conversations as a community. I use these same tactics to ensure that all students feel valued. From my rancher students that want to talk about how their cows are doing or what work they did on a vehicle to my student athletes. I take time out of the day to talk about these things with all my students so that they feel valued. I also make sure to acknowledge when students are absent, and I always have a conversation with them about why they were absent and I check in on how they are doing. To help students resolve conflicts I again employ a similar strategy. When students are having troubles in the classroom or even outside of the classroom I always walk them through a thought process. I ask them what is wrong, what are the things they can do to remedy the situation and what are the things they have no power over. I try to stress the point that the things they can't control they need to not stress and worry about. They should put energy and time into the things they can control because that will actually make the difference. I've had a hard time with some of these strategies when it came to one student who is in my AP Calculus class who has missed almost 3 weeks of instruction. When I talk to her about why she missed my class she always just tells me she wanted to sleep in. Then when she comes to class she expects me to teach her all of the material she has missed from not coming to class and gets frustrated when I only spend as much time helping her as I do with all my other students. This used to tick me off and when she would throw snide remarks at how I am biased towards the other students I would just respond with "the reason you are struggling is because you have missed x days of class, all of these other students have had that much more practice over you, you can't just expect to miss hours upon hours of class and make it up in 30 minutes. I am going to give you the same amount of help as all of these other students." That usually didn't go over well and she would just shut down in my class and not do anything. Recently I had a one on one conversation with her about how I was worried about how much class she has missed and that we will set up a time after school where she can come in and get extra help on what she has missed. It turns out that after a week of this I found out that she was really frustrated and sad because she thought I was judging her for missing my class. I explained to her that I wasn't judging her, I was just worried that she wouldn't be successful if she kept missing my class and didn't take the time to make it up. But as we've been working together this week, her mathematical skills have gotten better and I believe we are at a point where she thinks she can do the material. She still misses my classes in the morning often...but one baby step at a time I suppose.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2019
Categories |